Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Wednesday, June 04, 2008

Oxford Open articles automatically deposited in PMC

From today's announcement from Oxford University Press:

Authors who have paid a fee to make their articles open access in one of our Oxford Open biomedical journals do not need to deposit their article into PMC - Oxford Journals will do so on their behalf. The final published version of their article will be freely available immediately via PMC and also directly from the journal website.

Oxford Journals is depositing into PMC all open access papers that have been or will be published in 58 journals participating in the Oxford Open initiative (a list of journals can be found here).

Regular data feeds between PMC and the journals concerned have been set up. Recently published open access content is being deposited first, followed by older content. You can refer to [this page] for the latest information on the status of PMC deposits for individual journals.

We have also prepared some information and guidelines for authors of various funding agencies....

Comment.  This is a good policy, and I'm glad to see that it applies to all OA articles in Oxford Open journals, not just those by NIH-funded authors.  All journals publishing OA articles should deposit copies of those articles in an OA repository.  Even when this doesn't lift an obligation from the author's shoulders, it increases the odds that the article will remain available, and remain OA, if the publisher should ever change its access policy or go out of business.