Oxford University Press

University presses, those venerated producers of books (and journals), face pressures as never before. Digital access and changing acquisition patterns at libraries have disrupted the presses' traditional businesses, and they are meeting the challenges in different ways. Some are experimenting, some seeking shelter by joining with their academic libraries, and some maintaining impressive resilience. Others…

Volumes of printed pages will decrease significantly over the next four years, according to an IT Strategies study. VP of IT Strategies Marco Boer told attendees at yesterday’s Digital Book Printing Conference that the volume of printed pages will decline 7.4% from 2007 to 2020, totaling over 5 billion pages lost. As demand for print…

Imagine you have a sudden burning desire to read David Copperfield, Charles Dickens’s favourite of all his novels. Thanks to Project Gutenberg, you could read it for nothing online but, correctly reasoning that it would be tedious to scroll through 600 pages on a screen, you go to a bookshop. There you find that David…

In their 2011 book Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle, Dan Senor and Saul Singer explored how Israel, at the start of 2009, had more companies than any other country listed on the NASDAQ. Seven years later, the start-up scene there reportedly still is going strong. In February, Oxford University Press (OUP) teamed up with…

In thinking about the future of scholarly publishing – a topic almost as much discussed as the perennially popular ‘death of the academic monograph’ – I found a number of themes jostling for attention, some new, some all-too familiar. What are the challenges and implications of open access? How do we make our content relevant…

Oxford has partnered with the Copyright Clearance Center to begin offering chapters on a pay-per-view basis. Pay-per-view is a well-established business model in journal publishing but is only recently gaining traction for book-based content.

Beginning in October, unauthenticated users of Oxford Handbooks began seeing buy buttons on articles. Clicking the button will allow them to purchase 24-hour access or, for a premium, unlimited perpetual access. And starting in the New Year, just in time for the start of the new term, this option will be available at the chapter level in Oxford Scholarship Online.

Another look at the fascinating evolution of the library. The University of Oxford's Bodleian Library has gone through enormous renovations in recent years, and the video below explains the changes and the thought process behind them. It's particularly interesting to see the many levels on which change is occurring, from the role of the library on campus and as part of the community, to the role of the librarian and even the purpose and design of the physical building itself.

Published in October of 2013, The Content Machine explores the publishing industry in crisis, disrupted by digital innovations, yet continuing to adapt. Written by Michael Bhaskar, digital publishing director at Profile Books, The Content Machine outlines a theory of publishing that allows publishers "to focus on their core competencies in difficult times while building a broader notion of what they are capable of

Academic librarians have long decried the prices commercial publishers charge for access to serial publications, particularly electronic journals in the sciences. With journal packages taking up increasingly large chunks of library budgets, the prospect of publishers' ramping up prices on another digital format has spooked some librarians. "I think the fear here is that we got burned by locking into journal contracts that we should have never locked ourselves into," says Bryn I. Geffert, librarian of Amherst College. "Once burned, twice cautious."

It is the world's most definitive work on the most global language, but the Oxford English Dictionary may be disappearing from bookshelves forever. Publishers fear the next edition will never appear in print form because its vast size means only an online version will be feasible, and affordable, for scholars.