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
they need it by library card authentication
(including support for ATHENS single
sign-on in participating institutions). Ab-
stracts, tables of contents, and keywords for
each book are freely accessible to all users
worldwide.
The four launch disciplines were selected
for broadly pragmatic reasons. Oxford pub-
lishes more than 1,300 academic titles each
year in many subject areas, and has an
extensive backlist of many thousands of
titles. When launching OSO, we were keen
to strike the delicate balance between classic
backlist titles and the subsequent stream of
new titles going live on the site as part of our
commitment to online frontlist publishing.
We undertook research into those disciplines
with the most active online communities at
that time, and balanced this against subject
areas where we could guarantee a steady
the online
flow of new titles from the two offices.
market for Weighing in the balance were the time it
academic books takes to digitize backlist content and the
is currently costs involved in that process, the capabili-
ties of XML and other standards at the time
treading in (e.g. MathML standards for equations were
footprints made not sufficiently mature to deploy on our
by the journals maths or physics lists, though economics and
industry 5–10 finance could be supported successfully), the
practicalities of rolling out new working
years ago practices across our frontlist print workflows,
and the lists handled by those typesetting
suppliers who had the capability to work to
our XML requirements. The majority of
books for the 700-title launch were con-
verted to XML using rekey techniques for
the highest accuracy possible, a process which
took almost six months and cost around
£300,000. For the ongoing additions to the
site, however, the preparation of XML is an
integrated part of the typesetting process.
The online market for academic books is
currently treading in footprints made by the
journals industry 5–10 years ago. From the
earliest stages of the design consultation on
OSO, it was noted that journals had set the
standard for discovery of content online, in
large part through the imaginative use of the
abstracts and keywords routinely added to
journal articles. OSO’s revolutionary idea
was to revive the practice of abstract and
keyword writing for both books and individ-
LEARNED PUBLISHING VOL. 19
ual chapters and, before long, we initiated
the ambitious process of commissioning the
13,000 abstracts and 100,000-plus keywords
in use on the site today. In over 80% of
cases, the abstracts and keywords were pro-
vided by the authors themselves, with that
percentage rising all the time. The benefits
are clear: abstracts and keywords provide
publicly available content that can be freely
distributed just as a journal abstract would,
thus creating an exciting new interface
between books and journals, as the site is
seamlessly integrated with other resources.
Abstracts and keywords are made avail-
able both to online journal aggregations such
as IngentaConnect and OCLC, using a pro-
cess called header distribution, and to search
engines worldwide, such as Yahoo! and
Google. Users interrogating those services
will now not only find journal matches for
their query but book matches too. Scholars
in subscribing institutions will also be able to
access the full texts of the books. In this way,
informative pointers to the content are dis-
seminated as widely as possible, driving
traffic and informing users in a single step.
Technical set-up
Oxford Scholarship Online utilizes an advan-
ced OUP-authored XML DTD specification
(Extensible Markup Language Document
Type Definition – the means to accurately
describe the structure and content of a book
in a machine-readable form) to digitize the
titles in the service. This is an ongoing pro-
cess, with the majority of new titles in the
OSO disciplines now prepared in XML as
part of the regular production process – a
single source increasingly drives both the
print and online versions. The content is
displayed online as full-text HTML rather
than restrictive page-by-page PDF (allowing
copying and pasting of content for example)
and the advanced XML structure allows
complex content such as equations and
tables to be displayed as searchable text
rather than as graphics. In fact, OSO is one
of the largest implementations of MathML
(Mathematical Markup Language) in the
world. The site now contains over 130 mil-
lion words, over 10,000 figures, and 65,000
MathML equations.
NO. 2 APRIL 2006

One of the key benefits from OSO’s use
of XML is the way in which advanced
content linking can be made available to the
end-user, both internally using standard
cross-referencing and – more importantly –
externally to other resources on the Web.
Every bibliographic entry and footnote in
the database is link-enabled using either
OpenURL (a system for finding a specific
citation in a user’s local library catalogue) or
via DOI (Digital Object Identifier), a code
which uniquely locates available online
resources via a single click. In this way OSO
links to all the major journal and book ser-
vices on the Web ensuring that citations and
further reading can be located quickly and
easily. It also further integrates the world of
books and journals. As DOIs have also been
added to OSO content, users of other online
services can link back seamlessly into OSO
content, thus making OSO an ideal teaching
tool for online course packs and reading
lists. All of this helps to bring scholarship
alive for a broader audience, by making it
easier to access, more productive, and more
relevant.
The design of the site was as forward-
looking as possible and particularly careful
not to be tied into proprietary technologies.
For example, although PDF and other tech-
nologies were options for content display,
the decision was made to go the XML
route, meaning higher initial cost but a
far higher degree of future-proofing and
long-term business advantage. XML and its
sister standards (e.g. MathML) are open and
non-proprietary technologies that allow for
complex data manipulation and storage as
well as giving advantages in user flexibility
(accessible display devices, resizing, copying,
and pasting). In addition, OUP is looking
to the future in terms of the production
workflow – moving to an XML-based process
has given advantages in archive security and
ownership as well as benefits for licensing
partners in terms of the formats available for
redistribution.
The database is protected by a sophisti-
cated access control system that manages
both user access and usage, although the
latter is as a means of policing fair-use rather
than some of the more restrictive policies
common in the market. We have also
LEARNED PUBLISHING
Oxford Scholarship Online 177
worked hard to ensure that author concerns
about online dissemination have been add-
ressed as every OSO author has specifically
opted-in to OSO, on the understanding that
we both protect the content and display it to
best advantage.
Accessible design
The site was designed with accessibility as its
guiding principle, both in the number of
people who could access the content and the
way in which they do so. The decision to use
full-text XML rather than competing page-
based solutions ensures that OSO is one of
the most accessible sites of its kind online.
Content can be copied, pasted, and printed there have been
within fair-use copyright guidelines and a number of
licence terms.
Oxford has also taken particular care to changes to the
ensure that the disability needs of users are business model
taken into account when accessing the site since launch
and its content. The W3C (the World Wide
Web Consortium governing standards in use
on the Web), has mandated 14 general prin-
ciples for Web accessibility, each split into
three levels of priority. OSO’s intuitive and
accessible design (facilitating the use of
screen reader software for sight-impaired
users, for example) is compliant with all
priority 1, 2, and applicable priority 3 recom-
mendations. Access to all is one of the
guiding principles behind OSO, and it
remains one of the most accessible sites of its
kind in the world.
Flexible models
Oxford Scholarship Online was designed to
be modular and expandable, and to that end
there have been a number of changes to the
business model since launch. The most
recent and major of these is a perpetual
access or ownership model based on the
price of the print books, where the collection
can be purchased outright with an ongoing
hosting or maintenance fee, or the option of
self-hosting. This change was implemented
in direct response to calls from the market:
early feedback indicated that the subscrip-
tion-based business model, although popular,
was excluding an important sector – in par-
ticular the wealthy North American
research libraries which have a strong prefer-
VOL. 19 NO. 2 APRIL 2006
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ence for ownership models for online
monographs, rather than paying a subscrip-
tion for access. There is a great deal of
flexibility around hosting – in fact, many
institutions prefer not to self-host – but
these institutions prefer a perpetual access
model to facilitate the building of e-book
collections without concern about their
inherent permanence, or otherwise. While
subscription access is more easily budgeted
for, and spreads the cost manageably across
the year, and subsequent years, the potential
discontinuity or disruption to the service is
sometimes seen as a threat to the stability of
the library’s electronic archive. The business
model change went live in September 2005,
and underlines the flexibility of the model,
giving libraries the option to build their elec-
tronic archives in perpetuity, just as they do
their print holdings.
Over the course of the next 12 months, a
number of smaller changes and additions to
OSO are planned, including: support for
ISBN-13; further linking to online content
using DOIs; integrating with popular,
industry-standard ‘federated search’ systems
such as Ex Libris’s MetaLib via the im-
plementation of z39.50 ZING/SRU; further
integration with widely used user citation
software including ProCite and RefWorks;
further development of our MARC offering
to librarians; updated support for OpenURL
1.0 for enhanced searching in local library
catalogues, and many others.
So what’s next for OSO?
The publication of OSO has been a huge
learning experience, and has given us a
direct link to the marketplace. The conver-
sations we have had with purchasers and
users have brought us very much closer to
understanding the needs of our customers
and consumers than we have ever been
before. We have consulted widely at every
stage, and designed a product which would
enable us to respond with flexibility to the
requirements of the market, as they become
clear. We are currently undertaking market
research on the potential for further devel-
opment in a number of directions. The
possibilities include:
LEARNED PUBLISHING
Oxford Scholarship Online 179
앫 Offering ‘pick and mix functionality’: we
are considering extending the granularity
of the service, to enable customers to
select individual titles or clusters of titles
within the subject modules. This would
enable librarians to create tailor-made
subject collections for their individual
institutions, and would facilitate the pur-
chase of e-books within an acquisitions
programme designed around the selection
and processing of single titles.
앫 Providing flexible bundles of print and on-
line titles for our customers. This would
probably go hand-in-hand with our ‘pick
and mix’ plans, enabling customers to take
their selections down to the level of single
monograph purchase, with discounts for
purchasing both print and online. The
logistical and mechanical obstacles to giving libraries
print and online book bundling are for- the option to
midable, though extensive online publish- build their
ing from a variety of sources means the
publisher’s imprint is ever more valuable electronic
as an signal of quality and authenticity, archives in
and we may be moving towards a era in perpetuity
which Oxford is viewed as the purveyor of
high-quality scholarly content and format
becomes a secondary consideration.
앫 Reviewing the way we work with different
sales channels, mirroring effective print
sales mechanisms such as approval plans
which reduce the administrative workload
for our key customers and streamline the
purchasing process, perhaps by helping
our customers build new selection para-
meters into existing print approval plans
to accommodate e-books, and ensuring
that full information about new electronic
titles is provided in the format libraries
will find most useful.
앫 Broadening the service to include the
Press’s new academic publishing across all
subject areas, including the sciences. The
focus is likely to be on a frontlist only ser-
vice, since many libraries already own
Oxford’s classic backlist in their print
holdings, and the workflows are already in
place to enable the efficient production of
new material in simultaneous print and
online versions.
앫 Creating smaller sites within the broader
OSO database, to cater for particular cus-
tomer groups, provide clusters of different
VOL. 19 NO. 2 APRIL 2006
180 Sophie Goldsworthy
types of publishing, offer customization
choices to end-users, and create an author
site within OSO.
These represent just a handful of the ideas
being researched at present, reflecting both
the fact that OSO is still in its infancy,
and the ever-changing nature of the online
environment, and customer expectations
therein. As in the past, we are consulting
extensively with our core customer base,
through library suppliers, consortia, and
other intermediary vendors, institutional
librarians, and end-users, in the form of both
academics and students. What all of these
issues come down to is a serious and sus-
other university tained focus on developing the OSO
presses could business model to ensure a good fit with the
direction in which libraries are moving, that
build their own, we integrate the purchase model for e-books
individually into their workflows, and that we continue
branded, sites effectively to respond to the demands of the
market. Over the coming months, we will be
on the platform prioritizing development of the business and
purchase models over the expansion of sub-
ject coverage because we want to ensure the
product works well for the market, and we
believe that the broader frontlist service will
only make a significant impact if the systems
are in place to enable librarians to purchase
online with print at an appropriate discount
and tailor their purchases to the individual
institution.
The OSO site was originally designed to
ensure there was potential for licensing the
platform to other partners. While this is not
an avenue we have actively explored as
yet, there is every possibility that other uni-
versity presses could build their own,
individually branded, sites on the platform
in future. There are a number of issues
which would need further discussion before
we took this step, but the possibility is cer-
tainly inbuilt.
OSO and the Oxford brand
Oxford Scholarship Online is one of the
most recent additions to Oxford’s growing
online portfolio, a line-up that includes
OED Online, Oxford Reference Online,
LEARNED PUBLISHING VOL. 19
Grove Music Online, Grove Art Online, the
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
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
confirm Oxford’s position as a world leader
in online publishing, and help fulfil the
Press’s mandate to further Oxford Univer-
sity’s objective of excellence in research,
scholarship, and education. OSO has been
widely praised in the industry press as ‘a
must-have online resource’ (Library Journal’s
netConnect) and ‘a great resource for aca-
demics and information professionals’
(Information World Review) and has received
much recognition from industry bodies.
The launch of OSO has thus had a
demonstrably positive effect on the percep-
tion of Oxford by its core institutional
audience, and is seen as a clear commitment
by Oxford to supporting and disseminating
scholarship. At a time when some university
presses are closing, and others dropping pub-
lishing in major disciplines – a time when
every other conference includes a session on
the death of the monograph – we are seen to
be challenging the pessimistic view in the
academic community, especially in the US
library and university press world, of the
future of scholarly book publishing. Con-
tinued investment in OSO is a clear
demonstration of Oxford’s dedication to
scholarly publishing in the form of the aca-
demic monograph, and determination to
give new life to this much-valued though
often pessimistically viewed publishing for-
mat.
We have received a great deal of feedback
from librarians, authors, other scholars, and
publishers which supports the view that
OSO has had a significant effect on external
perceptions of – and reactions to – the
Oxford brand. The site has been pro-
nounced ‘the Holy Grail of online resources’,
by Kate Sloss, Librarian at the London
School of Economics and Political Science,
while John B. Thompson (Professor of Soci-
ology and Fellow of Jesus College, University
of Cambridge) devotes an entire section of
his 2005 book, Books in a Digital Age (Polity),
to OSO, commenting: ‘OSO is an exciting
and imaginative project. OUP is taking a
NO. 2 APRIL 2006

leading role in exploring the possibilities for
the dissemination of scholarly monographs
in an online environment.’ Many authors of
books included in OSO have also responded
particularly positively on the presentation of
their work, the enhanced access and accessi-
bility that OSO provides, and the excellent
functionality of the service.
In addition, OSO has become a platform
for the broadest possible dissemination of
scholarship, with a wider range of scholars
now having access to Oxford’s academic
works than before. In particular, scholars in
institutions which do not have a tradition of
collecting scholarly works – those in devel-
oping countries, in more recently founded
universities (e.g. in Australia), or in small
specialist colleges – now have access to
Oxford’s scholarly publishing. In many of
Charlesworth adwards ad
Oxford Scholarship Online 181
these markets, price is a major issue, and
subscription rather than ownership is seen as
a way of affording access to a range of prod-
ucts that could not be purchased outright
because the one-off costs would be prohibi-
tive.
The project is a clear manifestation of our
commitment to supporting and disseminat-
ing scholarship – the guiding principle of the
Press.
A full title listing, an online demonstra-
tion, and registration for a free 30-day
institutional trial can be found at www.
oxfordscholarship.com
Sophie Goldsworthy
Editorial Director, Academic and Trade
Project Sponsor, Oxford Scholarship Online
Oxford University Press
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