News Release

OUP launch a new Open Access Journal on Complementary and Alternative Medicine

Business Announcement

Oxford University Press UK

This month sees publication of a brand new journal from OUP entitled eCAM (Evidence-based Complementary and Alternative Medicine). Whilst offering the academic, research, and medical communities a new journal in an area currently under-represented, the journal has also been developed to be available for free online.

The 'open access' TM (OA) publishing model for eCAM will be the third OA initiative from OUP Journals Division, all designed to gain a better understanding of how different open access models could work in different markets and academic disciplines. Nucleic Acids Research is exploring a mandatory author-pays model, whilst Journal of Experimental Botany has implemented an optional author-pays model.

"There is no doubt that eCAM will benefit enormously from free access online for readers," commented Martin Richardson, Managing Director of OUP Journals Division. "Research in this area is enjoying growing interest, not only from academics and health professionals, but also from patients. Adopting an author-pays OA funding model would be inappropriate in this market, where many potential authors are working with limited research funding, or are based at less wealthy institutions. Knowing that we wanted to adopt an open access-style publishing model for eCAM from the start meant that we could explore alternative funding methods to enable authors not to pay publication charges. We are delighted to have secured sponsorship from the Ishikawa Natural Products Research Center which is enabling us to offer the journal freely online."

eCAM is an international, peer-reviewed journal that encourages rigorous research in this new, yet ancient, world of complementary and alternative medicine, and will be of particular interest to biologists and biomedical researchers. "CAM has always been of major interest to Eastern cultures, but is now rapidly gaining interest and respect in the West," explained Edwin Cooper, Founder Editor-in-Chief of eCAM and a Professor of Neurobiology at UCLA. "eCAM will provide the perfect communication channel to help bridge the CAM gap between East and West, whilst at the same time insisting on the highest standards of scientific rigour. The combination of eCAM's TM free availability online with PubMed and Google indexing from the start will make eCAM research papers tremendously easy to access."

Issue One of eCAM is now live at http://www.ecam.oupjournals.org. Print subscriptions are also available, with pricing details at http://www3.oup.co.uk/ecam/subinfo.

Notes to Editors:
Oxford University Press (OUP) is the world's largest and most international of university presses. It publishes more than 4,500 new books a year, has a presence in over fifty countries, and employs some 3,700 people worldwide. It has become familiar to millions through a diverse publishing programme that includes scholarly works in all academic disciplines, bibles, music, school and college textbooks, children's books, materials for teaching English as a foreign language, business books, dictionaries and reference books, and journals.

OUP publishes over 180 journals covering a broad range of subject areas, two-thirds of which are published in collaboration with learned societies and other international organisations. The collection contains some of the world's most prestigious titles, including Nucleic Acids Research, JNCI (Journal of the National Cancer Institute), Brain, Human Reproduction, English Historical Review, and the Review of Financial Studies.

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