Sustainable Open Access and Impact: Celebrating OA Week

Julia Mortimer

We are delighted to be a part of the Open Access Week celebrations and to be able to showcase OA content and initiatives at Bristol University Press and Policy Press. Journals and OA Director, Julia Mortimer, explains why.

Our OA books and recent articles are all brought together to view and access here.

Why OA is important for us

Our vision is to create and disseminate critically acclaimed, evidence-based work that has the potential to make a difference in the world. Over the past two decades we have built a reputation dedicated to that vision.

We have set our sights on publishing great scholarship that addresses the global social challenges and broader social science issues that face the world community today. A commitment to OA is crucial to this vision for the following reasons:

Visibility & impact: OA makes research more widely and easily visible to researchers, practitioners and policy makers if the content is discoverable and efficiently marketed.

Collaboration: OA publication fosters greater dialogue across disciplinary and geographical boundaries.

Social Justice: OA reduces inequalities in access to knowledge due to lack of institutional funding.

As a publisher committed to making an impact in the real world, sustainable open access has obvious benefits for us and our authors in reaching our goals. Authors can make their work accessible, safe in the knowledge that our rigorous quality standards, excellent marketing services and strong reputation will still apply.

What we offer

We offer a range of flexible open access options for both journals and book publishing which continue to evolve, and we are always interested in working with our authors to explore new ideas.

Both Green and Gold options are available for all our journal and book content and we are flexible to allow for funder compliance. See our open access options for books and open access options for journals for more information.

For journals our OA content is available to access on our IngentaConnect platform where it is clearly signposted.

For books we make our OA content available via OAPEN and JSTOR and we are delighted to be a part of the Knowledge Unlatched collections which are funded by libraries.

We offer discounts on our standard APCs to researchers in developing countries and to those in institutions who subscribe to our journal collections.

We are also working with a range of partners to improve OA metadata distribution and discoverability of our OA content, an important issue in current OA debates.

A sustainable model of OA publishing in the social sciences

At Bristol University Press and Policy Press we work hard to make as much content open as possible, whilst ensuring that we can cover the necessary costs involved in a high-quality publishing operation and the all-important marketing, promotion and discoverability activities needed to ensure OA content can be found. This is a crucial balancing act and a question of ensuring publishing OA is sustainable in an uncertain funding environment. Most importantly, it also gives authors a choice and equitable opportunity to publication when OA funds and routes may not be easily accessible, and they need to publish in publications and with publishers of high repute.

The OA agenda has been led by STM disciplines but, in our view, initiatives like Plan S are not easily applicable to the social sciences where funding models are currently much less clear. This is why we are committed to a mixed model of OA/non-OA publishing at this point in time.

OA and free content initiatives

We have experimented with innovative approaches to OA and free content to ensure our content reaches its intended audiences. Much of our journal content is free, either on a permanent basis for sections like Debates and Issues or Voices from the Frontline, or via Most read and Editor’s Choice collections which are free for regular periods during the year.

Many of our Shorts, designed to meet the needs of busy policy makers and practitioners, are OA, they are brief, and free to share to influence policy and practice.

For our book Being a scholar in the digital era, chapters were free to access on a monthly basis for the first year and the whole book available OA thereafter. As no OA funding was available, this allowed us to simultaneously cover the publishing costs whilst also making content open.

We provide Executive Summaries for many of our books which are freely available and especially useful for policy makers and practitioners to make use of research findings.

In addition to these and many other impact-focused activities we have just launched a brand-new blog on the Futures of Work to stimulate debate, ideas and interaction.

Bristol University Press and Policy Press are also a main sponsor of the highly successful social research blog Discover Society. Our authors are actively encouraged to share their work through writing blogs, magazine features and newspaper articles, to disseminate their work widely but often more accessibly than straightforward OA can.

 

Please explore all the OA and freely available content that Bristol University Press has to offer and contact Julia Mortimer (email julia.mortimer@bristol.ac.uk) to discuss OA options for your work.