Open Arms for Open Access: Toxicological Sciences Joins "Oxford Open"
Editor in Chief, Toxicological Sciences
Executive Editor, Oxford Journals
Effective January 2008, Toxicological Sciences will join a growing group of journals that provide an optional, voluntary author-pays open access model. This means that authors will be given the option to pay an open access charge to make their article freely available immediately upon publication via the Toxicological Sciences Web site. The open access option is offered upon acceptance for publication so as to avoid any perceived conflicts of interest with the editorial process. We are pleased and excited to offer this option because we strongly believe that the open access feature provides authors with the opportunity to determine how and when they want to have their articles freely available and simplifies compliance with funding organizations that stipulate public access guidelines.
We are moving to this model as part of our ongoing efforts to make the journal as relevant and timely as possible for our authors and readers. With this new initiative, Toxicological Sciences will comprise a mix of content, where open access content is freely available to anyone visiting the Toxicological Sciences Web site, with subscription-based content residing alongside it as usual. The accessibility of articles will be readily identified.
Our publisher, Oxford University Press, has been experimenting with Open Access business models over the past few years and we are launching this new model as part of the "Oxford Open" initiative. Author charges will vary based on whether the author's institution maintains a current subscription to the journal and authors from developing countries are granted waivers or deeply discounted rates depending on where they reside. Full details will be available on the journal Web site and author instructions information. Meanwhile, details of Oxford Open are available online at: http://www.oxfordjournals.org/oxfordopen/.
We are pleased to have a publisher that continues to explore new or modified models of journal publishing, and we will use our own experience along with that from other journals to evaluate the utility of this new feature. We will gauge interest in this new option by the number of authors who opt for open access. We look forward to working with authors who opt for the open access feature and getting feedback on the importance and utility of the open access feature of the journal from both authors and readers.
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