OUP becomes latest publisher to announce US Read and Publish deal

Oxford University Press has announced its first Read and Publish deal with a US institution, with Iowa State University Library. The agreement has been made in principle, with details expected to be finalised by the end of the year.

The deal is OUP’s first such outside of Europe and includes access to the full OUP journals collection including more than 60 fully Open Access journals; researchers at Iowa State will be able to publish their articles Open Access immediately on publication in an OUP journal.

Alastair Lewis, sales director for OUP’s Academic Division, said: “In working towards this agreement, our values have been closely aligned. Our focus is on finding a financially sustainable model which enables us to support our society publishing partners ,authors, and library customers across the world and those aims were clearly shared by our partners at the Iowa State University Library.”

Curtis Brundy, associate university librarian for scholarly communications and collections, added: “Iowa state is committed to sharing the knowledge it creates with Iowa and the rest of the world. Our new Open Access agreement with Oxford, our largest to date, will help us to do exactly that. We are very excited about this new direction in our relationship with OUP, and look forward to seeing its impact on the Iowa State Community.”   

Cambridge University Press announced a major transformative deal with the University of California earlier this year, also a first for the publisher.

Last month, giant Elsevier announced its first transformative agreement with a US university, Carnegie Mellon, with executive v.p. Gino Ussi saying the publisher was "committed to open access and is thrilled to have concluded our first transformative agreement in North America.” Also in November, Elsevier announced a transformative agreement with the Bibsam Consortium in Sweden; a previous agreement was terminated in 2018 after the two disagreed on pricing.  

A Publishers Association report released this week said that "transformative" or "read and publish" deals are now seen by many publishers as an effective way to achieve a widespread transition to Open Access, although the Plan S timescales for reaching these deals and achieving a full transition to OA are considered unrealistic.