To mark the upcoming International Open Access Week we reflect on the current landscape of Open Access publishing and Elgar’s approach to this important development in academic publishing.

Open Access (OA) publishing has evolved over the last two decades to become an established part of the scholarly publishing ecosystem. OA refers to scholarly publications that are freely accessible online and typically published under a Creative Commons licence.

We have seen growing demand from our authors in the social sciences and law to publish their work OA. This has been accelerated by research funder and institutional mandates as well as by a broader awareness of OA within the research community.

Maximising Impact and Visibility

• Maximising discoverability, impact and citations
• Wider engagement globally and beyond academia
• Unrestricted reach and access
• Compliance with institutional, research funder or national research assessment mandates

There is much to consider in developing OA models that balance accessibility with sustainability. The needs of different disciplinary cultures, the challenges currently facing academia, and the question of who has access to OA funding, with implications for equity, author choice and publishing diversity, are some of the important issues that continue to be hotly debated.

With the clear benefits of and increasing demand for OA publishing, we put considerable thought into how best to support our authors, their funders and the research communities we work with through our OA offer and programme.

Open Access at Edward Elgar Publishing

Our OA programme is built upon the same strong principles laid down 40 years ago by our Founder Edward Elgar, of offering authors an unrivalled level of service and care and our readers and library partners high-quality content delivered to industry-leading standards.

Quality, editorial excellence, and reputation matter just as much for OA publications. Our OA content is published with exactly the same professionalism and attention to detail, from the review process and careful assessment of each project, through to our high-quality editorial service managed in-house and international marketing.

Choosing Open Access means a work will be:

• Made freely available to download or view on Elgaronline
• Included in the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB), on Google Play and Google Scholar for online discovery as well as in the Crossref DOI repository, allowing citation linking
• Shared with our industry discovery partners with detailed metadata enabling full text search through library platforms
• Provided as a PDF to upload to the author’s institutional repository and personal websites
• Archived with Portico to ensure future preservation and access

Our expertise in social sciences, business and management and law, alongside our established reputation in these fields, means our OA publications are widely promoted and disseminated for maximum impact with no compromise on quality.

We offer transparent pricing and a flexible service including:

• OA book processing charges (BPCs) calculated to reflect the length of the book
• The choice of publishing a single chapter OA
• The option to publish OA retrospectively 24 months or more after publication for a 50% reduction in the BPC

We are open to discussing research funder or institution’s OA requirements to ensure compliance with OA mandates.

Open Access Journal publishing

In addition to our OA book program, we are proud to publish two diamond OA journals, where the article processing charge (APC) is covered by the sponsoring society or institution, and offer the option of publishing articles OA in our other journals.

We also work with national library consortia and university libraries to provide Read and Publish subscriptions to our journal collections covering the cost of APCs for members. 

Find out more about our OA journal publishing here. If you would like to discuss a Read and Publish Agreement for your consortia or institution, please contact journals@e-elgar.co.uk

Interested in Exploring Open Access Further?

Learn more about our Open Access programme

Browse our Open Access content

If you have any questions about our OA programme or would like to discuss an OA book proposal or new diamond journal opportunity, please contact our commissioning team, they would be delighted to hear from you.