Oxford Scholarship Online 175

Learned Publishing (2006), 19, 175–181

Oxford Scholarship Online
Sophie Goldsworthy
LEARNED PUBLISHING VOL. 19 NO. 2 APRIL 2006

Oxford

I
ntroduction
In January 2004, following two months
of free trials, Oxford University Press
Scholarship
launched Oxford Scholarship Online
(OSO), a new website designed radically to
change and improve the way scholarly books
can be accessed and used by scholars and
Online
students, in their study and research. For the
first time, many of the most important books Sophie Goldsworthy
published by the Press – both backlist clas- Oxford University Press
sics and cutting-edge scholarship by today’s
authors – were accessible online in selected © Sophie Goldsworthy 2006
launch disciplines across the humanities and
ABSTRACT: An account is given of Oxford
social sciences. The site is a fully-indexed,
Scholarship Online (OSO), a website containing a
cross-searchable database, giving subscribers
growing collection of new and backlist titles from
unprecedented access to the highest-quality
Oxford University Press. The technical set-up, the
scholarship in an accessible full-text form. It
design of the site, and its business model are
was launched with more than 700 titles from
described. It is proposed as an important step
Oxford’s UK and US publishing programmes
towards solving the so-called ‘monograph crisis’ and
in Economics and Finance, Philosophy, Reli-
improving the availability of scholarship world-wide.
gion, and Political Science, and with a
commitment to publish up to another 200
frontlist titles a year in the four launch sub-
ject collections.

The OSO site

The site is continually developing and
expanding, with updates three times a year
containing both new and revised titles and
new functions. The vast majority of titles in
each update are new frontlist uploads, pub-
lished at the same time as – or shortly after –
their first print publication. The collection is
available for institutional and individual
subscriptions and purchase: institutional
customers can choose which module, or
combination of modules, they wish to sub-
scribe to, and whether to purchase a license
giving unlimited access or to limit the num-
ber of simultaneous users. The pricing model
is based on the number of faculty and stu-
dents in an institution, and the product is
free at the point of consumption, with users
able to access the full service in their library
or at their desks in subscribing educational

LEARNED PUBLISHING VOL. 19 NO. 2 APRIL 2006

176 Sophie Goldsworthy

institutions, and also remotely wherever ual chapters and, before long, we initiated
they need it by library card authentication the ambitious process of commissioning the
(including support for ATHENS single 13,000 abstracts and 100,000-plus keywords
sign-on in participating institutions). Ab- in use on the site today. In over 80% of
stracts, tables of contents, and keywords for cases, the abstracts and keywords were pro-
each book are freely accessible to all users vided by the authors themselves, with that
worldwide. percentage rising all the time. The benefits
The four launch disciplines were selected are clear: abstracts and keywords provide
for broadly pragmatic reasons. Oxford pub- publicly available content that can be freely
lishes more than 1,300 academic titles each distributed just as a journal abstract would,
year in many subject areas, and has an thus creating an exciting new interface
extensive backlist of many thousands of between books and journals, as the site is
titles. When launching OSO, we were keen seamlessly integrated with other resources.
to strike the delicate balance between classic Abstracts and keywords are made avail-
backlist titles and the subsequent stream of able both to online journal aggregations such
new titles going live on the site as part of our as IngentaConnect and OCLC, using a pro-
commitment to online frontlist publishing. cess called header distribution, and to search
We undertook research into those disciplines engines worldwide, such as Yahoo! and
with the most active online communities at Google. Users interrogating those services
that time, and balanced this against subject will now not only find journal matches for
areas where we could guarantee a steady their query but book matches too. Scholars
the online in subscribing institutions will also be able to
flow of new titles from the two offices.
market for Weighing in the balance were the time it access the full texts of the books. In this way,
academic books takes to digitize backlist content and the informative pointers to the content are dis-
is currently costs involved in that process, the capabili- seminated as widely as possible, driving
ties of XML and other standards at the time traffic and informing users in a single step.
treading in (e.g. MathML standards for equations were
footprints made not sufficiently mature to deploy on our
Technical set-up
by the journals maths or physics lists, though economics and
industry 5–10 finance could be supported successfully), the Oxford Scholarship Online utilizes an advan-
practicalities of rolling out new working ced OUP-authored XML DTD specification
years ago practices across our frontlist print workflows, (Extensible Markup Language Document
and the lists handled by those typesetting Type Definition – the means to accurately
suppliers who had the capability to work to describe the structure and content of a book
our XML requirements. The majority of in a machine-readable form) to digitize the
books for the 700-title launch were con- titles in the service. This is an ongoing pro-
verted to XML using rekey techniques for cess, with the majority of new titles in the
the highest accuracy possible, a process which OSO disciplines now prepared in XML as
took almost six months and cost around part of the regular production process – a
£300,000. For the ongoing additions to the single source increasingly drives both the
site, however, the preparation of XML is an print and online versions. The content is
integrated part of the typesetting process. displayed online as full-text HTML rather
The online market for academic books is than restrictive page-by-page PDF (allowing
currently treading in footprints made by the copying and pasting of content for example)
journals industry 5–10 years ago. From the and the advanced XML structure allows
earliest stages of the design consultation on complex content such as equations and
OSO, it was noted that journals had set the tables to be displayed as searchable text
standard for discovery of content online, in rather than as graphics. In fact, OSO is one
large part through the imaginative use of the of the largest implementations of MathML
abstracts and keywords routinely added to (Mathematical Markup Language) in the
journal articles. OSO’s revolutionary idea world. The site now contains over 130 mil-
was to revive the practice of abstract and lion words, over 10,000 figures, and 65,000
keyword writing for both books and individ- MathML equations.

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 Oxford Scholarship Online 177

One of the key benefits from OSO’s use worked hard to ensure that author concerns
of XML is the way in which advanced about online dissemination have been add-
content linking can be made available to the ressed as every OSO author has specifically
end-user, both internally using standard opted-in to OSO, on the understanding that
cross-referencing and – more importantly – we both protect the content and display it to
externally to other resources on the Web. best advantage.
Every bibliographic entry and footnote in
the database is link-enabled using either Accessible design
OpenURL (a system for finding a specific
citation in a user’s local library catalogue) or The site was designed with accessibility as its
via DOI (Digital Object Identifier), a code guiding principle, both in the number of
which uniquely locates available online people who could access the content and the
resources via a single click. In this way OSO way in which they do so. The decision to use
links to all the major journal and book ser- full-text XML rather than competing page-
vices on the Web ensuring that citations and based solutions ensures that OSO is one of
further reading can be located quickly and the most accessible sites of its kind online.
easily. It also further integrates the world of Content can be copied, pasted, and printed there have been
books and journals. As DOIs have also been within fair-use copyright guidelines and a number of
added to OSO content, users of other online licence terms.
Oxford has also taken particular care to changes to the
services can link back seamlessly into OSO
content, thus making OSO an ideal teaching ensure that the disability needs of users are business model
tool for online course packs and reading taken into account when accessing the site since launch
lists. All of this helps to bring scholarship and its content. The W3C (the World Wide
alive for a broader audience, by making it Web Consortium governing standards in use
easier to access, more productive, and more on the Web), has mandated 14 general prin-
relevant. ciples for Web accessibility, each split into
three levels of priority. OSO’s intuitive and
The design of the site was as forward-
accessible design (facilitating the use of
looking as possible and particularly careful
screen reader software for sight-impaired
not to be tied into proprietary technologies.
users, for example) is compliant with all
For example, although PDF and other tech-
priority 1, 2, and applicable priority 3 recom-
nologies were options for content display,
mendations. Access to all is one of the
the decision was made to go the XML
guiding principles behind OSO, and it
route, meaning higher initial cost but a
remains one of the most accessible sites of its
far higher degree of future-proofing and
kind in the world.
long-term business advantage. XML and its
sister standards (e.g. MathML) are open and
non-proprietary technologies that allow for Flexible models
complex data manipulation and storage as Oxford Scholarship Online was designed to
well as giving advantages in user flexibility be modular and expandable, and to that end
(accessible display devices, resizing, copying, there have been a number of changes to the
and pasting). In addition, OUP is looking business model since launch. The most
to the future in terms of the production recent and major of these is a perpetual
workflow – moving to an XML-based process access or ownership model based on the
has given advantages in archive security and price of the print books, where the collection
ownership as well as benefits for licensing can be purchased outright with an ongoing
partners in terms of the formats available for hosting or maintenance fee, or the option of
redistribution. self-hosting. This change was implemented
The database is protected by a sophisti- in direct response to calls from the market:
cated access control system that manages early feedback indicated that the subscrip-
both user access and usage, although the tion-based business model, although popular,
latter is as a means of policing fair-use rather was excluding an important sector – in par-
than some of the more restrictive policies ticular the wealthy North American
common in the market. We have also research libraries which have a strong prefer-

LEARNED PUBLISHING VOL. 19 NO. 2 APRIL 2006

EBSCO ad colour
 Oxford Scholarship Online 179

ence for ownership models for online 앫 Offering ‘pick and mix functionality’: we
monographs, rather than paying a subscrip- are considering extending the granularity
tion for access. There is a great deal of of the service, to enable customers to
flexibility around hosting – in fact, many select individual titles or clusters of titles
institutions prefer not to self-host – but within the subject modules. This would
these institutions prefer a perpetual access enable librarians to create tailor-made
model to facilitate the building of e-book subject collections for their individual
collections without concern about their institutions, and would facilitate the pur-
inherent permanence, or otherwise. While chase of e-books within an acquisitions
subscription access is more easily budgeted programme designed around the selection
for, and spreads the cost manageably across and processing of single titles.
the year, and subsequent years, the potential 앫 Providing flexible bundles of print and on-
discontinuity or disruption to the service is line titles for our customers. This would
sometimes seen as a threat to the stability of probably go hand-in-hand with our ‘pick
the library’s electronic archive. The business and mix’ plans, enabling customers to take
model change went live in September 2005, their selections down to the level of single
and underlines the flexibility of the model, monograph purchase, with discounts for
giving libraries the option to build their elec- purchasing both print and online. The
logistical and mechanical obstacles to giving libraries
tronic archives in perpetuity, just as they do
their print holdings. print and online book bundling are for- the option to
Over the course of the next 12 months, a midable, though extensive online publish- build their
number of smaller changes and additions to ing from a variety of sources means the
publisher’s imprint is ever more valuable electronic
OSO are planned, including: support for
ISBN-13; further linking to online content as an signal of quality and authenticity, archives in
using DOIs; integrating with popular, and we may be moving towards a era in perpetuity
industry-standard ‘federated search’ systems which Oxford is viewed as the purveyor of
such as Ex Libris’s MetaLib via the im- high-quality scholarly content and format
plementation of z39.50 ZING/SRU; further becomes a secondary consideration.
integration with widely used user citation 앫 Reviewing the way we work with different
software including ProCite and RefWorks; sales channels, mirroring effective print
further development of our MARC offering sales mechanisms such as approval plans
to librarians; updated support for OpenURL which reduce the administrative workload
1.0 for enhanced searching in local library for our key customers and streamline the
catalogues, and many others. purchasing process, perhaps by helping
our customers build new selection para-
meters into existing print approval plans
So what’s next for OSO? to accommodate e-books, and ensuring
that full information about new electronic
The publication of OSO has been a huge titles is provided in the format libraries
learning experience, and has given us a will find most useful.
direct link to the marketplace. The conver- 앫 Broadening the service to include the
sations we have had with purchasers and Press’s new academic publishing across all
users have brought us very much closer to subject areas, including the sciences. The
understanding the needs of our customers focus is likely to be on a frontlist only ser-
and consumers than we have ever been vice, since many libraries already own
before. We have consulted widely at every Oxford’s classic backlist in their print
stage, and designed a product which would holdings, and the workflows are already in
enable us to respond with flexibility to the place to enable the efficient production of
requirements of the market, as they become new material in simultaneous print and
clear. We are currently undertaking market online versions.
research on the potential for further devel- 앫 Creating smaller sites within the broader
opment in a number of directions. The OSO database, to cater for particular cus-
possibilities include: tomer groups, provide clusters of different

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180 Sophie Goldsworthy

types of publishing, offer customization Grove Music Online, Grove Art Online, the
choices to end-users, and create an author Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
site within OSO. Online, the American National Biography
Online, and a wide range of journals across
the humanities, sciences, and social sci-
ences. Together, we believe these products
These represent just a handful of the ideas confirm Oxford’s position as a world leader
being researched at present, reflecting both in online publishing, and help fulfil the
the fact that OSO is still in its infancy, Press’s mandate to further Oxford Univer-
and the ever-changing nature of the online sity’s objective of excellence in research,
environment, and customer expectations scholarship, and education. OSO has been
therein. As in the past, we are consulting widely praised in the industry press as ‘a
extensively with our core customer base, must-have online resource’ (Library Journal’s
through library suppliers, consortia, and netConnect) and ‘a great resource for aca-
other intermediary vendors, institutional demics and information professionals’
librarians, and end-users, in the form of both (Information World Review) and has received
academics and students. What all of these much recognition from industry bodies.
issues come down to is a serious and sus- The launch of OSO has thus had a
other university tained focus on developing the OSO demonstrably positive effect on the percep-
presses could business model to ensure a good fit with the tion of Oxford by its core institutional
direction in which libraries are moving, that audience, and is seen as a clear commitment
build their own, we integrate the purchase model for e-books by Oxford to supporting and disseminating
individually into their workflows, and that we continue scholarship. At a time when some university
branded, sites effectively to respond to the demands of the presses are closing, and others dropping pub-
market. Over the coming months, we will be lishing in major disciplines – a time when
on the platform prioritizing development of the business and every other conference includes a session on
purchase models over the expansion of sub- the death of the monograph – we are seen to
ject coverage because we want to ensure the be challenging the pessimistic view in the
product works well for the market, and we academic community, especially in the US
believe that the broader frontlist service will library and university press world, of the
only make a significant impact if the systems future of scholarly book publishing. Con-
are in place to enable librarians to purchase tinued investment in OSO is a clear
online with print at an appropriate discount demonstration of Oxford’s dedication to
and tailor their purchases to the individual scholarly publishing in the form of the aca-
institution. demic monograph, and determination to
The OSO site was originally designed to give new life to this much-valued though
ensure there was potential for licensing the often pessimistically viewed publishing for-
platform to other partners. While this is not mat.
an avenue we have actively explored as We have received a great deal of feedback
yet, there is every possibility that other uni- from librarians, authors, other scholars, and
versity presses could build their own, publishers which supports the view that
individually branded, sites on the platform OSO has had a significant effect on external
in future. There are a number of issues perceptions of – and reactions to – the
which would need further discussion before Oxford brand. The site has been pro-
we took this step, but the possibility is cer- nounced ‘the Holy Grail of online resources’,
tainly inbuilt. by Kate Sloss, Librarian at the London
School of Economics and Political Science,
OSO and the Oxford brand while John B. Thompson (Professor of Soci-
ology and Fellow of Jesus College, University
Oxford Scholarship Online is one of the of Cambridge) devotes an entire section of
most recent additions to Oxford’s growing his 2005 book, Books in a Digital Age (Polity),
online portfolio, a line-up that includes to OSO, commenting: ‘OSO is an exciting
OED Online, Oxford Reference Online, and imaginative project. OUP is taking a

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 Oxford Scholarship Online 181

leading role in exploring the possibilities for these markets, price is a major issue, and
the dissemination of scholarly monographs subscription rather than ownership is seen as
in an online environment.’ Many authors of a way of affording access to a range of prod-
books included in OSO have also responded ucts that could not be purchased outright
particularly positively on the presentation of because the one-off costs would be prohibi-
their work, the enhanced access and accessi- tive.
bility that OSO provides, and the excellent The project is a clear manifestation of our
functionality of the service. commitment to supporting and disseminat-
In addition, OSO has become a platform ing scholarship – the guiding principle of the
for the broadest possible dissemination of Press.
scholarship, with a wider range of scholars A full title listing, an online demonstra-
now having access to Oxford’s academic tion, and registration for a free 30-day
works than before. In particular, scholars in institutional trial can be found at www.
institutions which do not have a tradition of oxfordscholarship.com
collecting scholarly works – those in devel-
oping countries, in more recently founded Sophie Goldsworthy
universities (e.g. in Australia), or in small Editorial Director, Academic and Trade
specialist colleges – now have access to Project Sponsor, Oxford Scholarship Online
Oxford’s scholarly publishing. In many of Oxford University Press

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