You can read more about OUP’s open access initiatives, including NAR, in the following article: Claire Bird (2008) Oxford Journals' adventures in open access, Learned Publishing, 21, 200–208 (for a copy of this article please email us at Open Access.)

A growing number of funding bodies and institutions make funds available to authors specifically for the payment of open access publication charges. In many other cases, funders allow authors to include open access publication charges in their grant applications, or to use general grant funds to cover publication costs.

To our knowledge these funders and institutions have specific policies on open access publication, including the payment of publication charges. More information about funders can be found at: Sherpa and Eprints.

Under OUP's existing Developing Countries Initiative, those based in over 40 'List A' developing countries can apply for free online access to the Oxford Journals collection. Those based in over 30 further 'List B' countries can apply for deeply discounted access to the collection. To date, over 2500 institutions receive online access to the Oxford Journals collection, including NAR, by subscribing (either for free or at a deeply discounted rate) to the offer.

Under the NAR Open Access model we have introduced a publication charge policy specifically for Corresponding authors based in developing countries, as follows:

Member institution*: List A Country Author charge - $0 / £0
List B Country Author charge - $0 / £0
Non-member institution: List A Country Author charge - $0 / £0
List B Country Author charge for 2008 volume - $900 / £460

*Institutions can become NAR members either by subscribing to the Developing Countries Offer (at a deeply discounted rate) as described above, or by having a full subscription to NAR.

Please note that irrespective of whether an institution becomes an NAR member, e.g. by joining the Developing Countries Initiative, all users will automatically receive free access to NAR content under the Open Access model.

Corresponding authors from NAR institutional members receive discounted publication charges when publishing in NAR. To find out whether your institution has an active NAR membership, please click the following link from an institutional computer - NAR Membership Test. If your institution doesn’t have an active NAR institutional membership, you can recommend one to your librarian by filling out an online NAR institutional membership recommendation form. This online form will send an email to your institution’s librarian with all the necessary information for becoming a NAR institutional member.

A waiver request form is available here. Any contributor wishing to submit a waiver or partial waiver request is required to submit the form, endorsed by a senior financial administrator or head of department, directly to Oxford University Press, after his or her manuscript has been accepted for publication. As outlined above, we have a special publication charge policy for authors from developing countries included in the OUP Developing Countries Initiative; for example, all Corresponding authors based in List A countries will automatically be eligible for a full waiver.

NAR authors are asked to sign an Open Access license agreement which reflects the Open Access model outlined below.

Articles published under this NAR Open Access model are made freely available online immediately upon publication, as part of a long-term archive, without subscription barriers to access. We have chosen to implement the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial licence for articles published under the NAR Open Access model. This means that users of NAR articles published under this Open Access model are entitled to use, reproduce, disseminate or display these articles provided that:

1. the original authorship is properly and fully attributed;
2. the journal and publisher are attributed as the original place of publication with correct citation details given;
3. if an original work is subsequently reproduced or disseminated not in its entirety but only in part or as a derivative work this is clearly indicated;
4. no articles are reproduced for commercial purposes without the prior consent of OUP (see rights and permissions) and payment to OUP of any appropriate fee.

In our 2004 author survey, we asked NAR users to tell us what criteria they felt were important for an Open Access model. Of the 1052 individuals who responded, 75% felt that the unrestricted right to re-use Open Access content for educational and research purposes was important. In contrast, 8% felt that unrestricted re-use by others for commercial purposes was important.

Under NAR's Open Access model, all users have unrestricted rights to re-use Open Access content for educational and research purposes; however, those wishing to re-use content for commercial purposes must continue to obtain permission from OUP as the original publisher, and pay the appropriate fee. We believe that this provision will have several benefits - OUP can continue to act as a central point of contact for commercial re-use requests and will seek to protect the original author and the journal from misuse of published content; revenue resulting from such permission requests will be used by NAR to supplement publication charges for authors, thus helping to keep these charges as low as possible; and OUP will be able to monitor commercial re-use that could directly harm the business interests of the journal.

All new NAR content is automatically deposited in PubMed Central and UK PubMed Central, and made freely available via these resources upon publication in the journal. This means that publishing in NAR is fully compliant with e.g. the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Public Access policy and the HHMI, UK MRC and Wellcome Trust policies on open access. Authors wishing to comply with these policies need not take further action.

For more information about NAR's policy, please visit our Author Self Archiving Policy page.

We would welcome any comments or questions you may have - please email us at Open Access.