It continues this tradition today by publishing academic journals, dictionaries, English language resources, bibliographies, books on Indology, music, classics, literature, and history, as well as Bibles and atlases.

[12][13] Fell drew up the first formal programme for the university's printing, which envisaged hundreds of works, including the Bible in Greek, editions of the Coptic Gospels and works of the Church Fathers, texts in Arabic and Syriac, comprehensive editions of classical philosophy, poetry, and mathematics, a wide range of medieval scholarship, and also "a history of insects, more perfect than any yet Extant.

Disgusted by the chaotic state of the press and antagonized by Vice-Chancellor George Huddesford, Blackstone called for sweeping reforms that would firmly set out the Delegates' powers and obligations, officially record their deliberations and accounting, and put the print shop on an efficient footing.

In 1830, it was still a joint-stock printing business in an academic backwater, offering learned works to a relatively small readership of scholars and clerics [18] At this time, Thomas Combe joined the press and became the university's Printer until he died in 1872.

Combe was a better businessman than most Delegates but still no innovator: he failed to grasp the huge commercial potential of India paper, which grew into one of Oxford's most profitable trade secrets in later years.

[22] Appointed in 1868, Price had already recommended to the university that the press needed an efficient executive officer to exercise "vigilant superintendence" of the business, including its dealings with Alexander Macmillan, who became the publisher for Oxford's printing in 1863 and 1866 helped Price to create the Clarendon Press series of cheap, elementary school books – perhaps the first time that Oxford used the Clarendon imprint.

For example, in 1875, the Delegates approved the series Sacred Books of the East under the editorship of Friedrich Max Müller, bringing a vast range of religious thought to a wider readership.

By this time, Oxford also had a London warehouse for Bible stock in Paternoster Row, and in 1880, its manager, Henry Frowde (1841–1927), was given the formal title of Publisher to the university.

"[26] Despite that, Frowde became vital to OUP's growth, adding new lines of books to the business, presiding over the massive publication of the Revised Version of the New Testament in 1881[27] and playing a key role in setting up the press's first office outside Britain, in New York City in 1896.

Its output had increased to include school books and modern scholarly texts such as James Clerk Maxwell's A Treatise on Electricity & Magnetism (1873), which proved fundamental to Einstein's thought.

"[36] By the early 20th century, OUP expanded its overseas trade, partly due to the efforts of Humphrey Milford, the publisher of the University of Oxford from 1913 to 1945.

In 1928, the press's imprint read 'London, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leipzig, Toronto, Melbourne, Cape Town, Bombay, Calcutta, Madras and Shanghai'.

In India, the Branch depots in Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta were imposing establishments with sizable stock inventories, for the Presidencies themselves were large markets, and the educational representatives there dealt mostly with upcountry trade.

[citation needed] In the 1960s, OUP Southern Africa started publishing local authors for the general reader, but also for schools and universities, under its Three Crowns Books imprint.

[61] In February 1989, Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa urging the execution of British author Salman Rushdie and of all involved in the publication of his novel The Satanic Verses.

In 1990, in the UK Court of Appeal, author Andrew Malcolm won a landmark legal judgment against Oxford University (Press) for its breach of a contract to publish his philosophical text Making Names.

I do not know whether an outsider studying the history of this transaction and of this litigation would feel that, in his self-financed struggle with the assembled Chancellor, Masters and Scholars of the University of Oxford the appellant has had a fair crack of the whip.

"[66] Lord Justice Leggatt added: "It is difficult to know what the Deputy Judge (Lightman) meant by a 'firm commitment' other than an intention to create legal relations.

"[66] The case ended in July 1992 with a Tomlin order, a damages settlement under which the servants and agents of Oxford University are permanently barred from denigrating Malcolm or Making Names, rendering it the first book in literary history to be afforded such legal protection.

It is part of a great university, which the Government supports financially and which exists to develop and transmit our intellectual culture....It is a perennial complaint by the English faculty that the barbarians are at the gate.

"[72] Oxford's professor Valentine Cunningham wrote in the Times Higher Education Supplement: "Increasingly, (OUP) has behaved largely like a commercial outfit, with pound signs in its eyes and a readiness to dumb down for the sake of popularity and sales....Sacking poets not because they lose money but because they do not make enough of it: it is an allegory of a university press missing the point, mistaking its prime purpose.

"[73] In March 1999 The Times Literary Supplement commissioned Andrew Malcolm to write an article under the strapline "Why the present constitution of the OUP cannot work".

[74] A decade later, OUP's managing director, Ivon Asquith, reflected on the public relations damage caused by the episode: "If I had foreseen the self-inflicted wound we would suffer I would not have let the proposal get as far as the Finance Committee.

"[76] Similar applications by OUP in 1944 and 1950 were also rejected by the Inland Revenue, whose officers repeatedly pointed out that the university presses were in open competition with commercial, tax-liable publishers.

The Supreme Court ruled that OUP was not tax exempt in the subcontinent "because it does not carry out any university activities there but acts simply as a commercial publisher".

[89] In July 2012, the UK's Serious Fraud Office found OUP's branches in Kenya and Tanzania guilty of bribery to obtain school bookselling contracts sponsored by the World Bank.

Oxford was fined £1.9 million "in recognition of sums it received which were generated through unlawful conduct" and barred from applying for World Bank-financed projects for three years.

[90][91] In December 2023, concerns were raised that OUP had published an academic paper based on genetic data taken from the Uyghur population of Xinjiang, a Turkic ethnic group in China.

[92] Rhys Blakely, a science correspondent for The Times, reported: "The research has been published online by Oxford University Press (OUP) in a journal that receives financial support from China's Ministry of Justice.

[94] On 17 May, The Times reported that Oxford had retracted the two studies, quoting a statement from the OUP: "Earlier this year, we were alerted to concerns regarding two papers in Forensics Sciences Research.