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Research Publishing & Impact: Cambridge University Press

Cambridge University Press: Read and Publish Agreement

Cambridge University Press currently publishes peer-reviewed academic journals covering subjects across the humanities, social sciences and science, technology and medicine.

The uncapped agreement allows authors from participating institutions to publish into 399 Cambridge University Press journals without the need of any transactional article processing charge or payment (APC). 

Article eligibility

Articles accepted from 1/1/2024 are eligible to be published open access under this agreement.

Eligible articles that have an acceptance date during the term of this agreement (1st Jan - 31st Dec 2024) are eligible to be published OA under the terms of the TA agreement.  In the case of journals departing the Cambridge Collection, the accepted article must be published by CUP in order to be eligible under this agreement. 

CUP will also contact authors of articles that are published non-OA in Cambridge OA journals during the term of the agreement to pursue retroactive conversion to OA.

Article types

The following article types are eligible for open access under this agreement:

  • Research Articles
  • Review Articles
  • Rapid Communications
  • Brief Report
  • Case Report

Article types excluded from this agreement include, but are not limited to:

  • Abstracts
  • Addendums
  • Article commentary
  • Book reviews
  • Books Received
  • Calendars
  • Collections
  • Commentaries
  • Contents
  • Correction
  • Corrigendum
  • Discussion
  • Editorial
  • Erratum
  • In Brief
  • Introduction
  • Letter
  • Meeting Report
  • News
  • Obituary
  • Oration
  • Product Review
  • Reply
  • Retractions.  

Hybrid journals that 'flip' to OA during the course of this agreement will remain available for OA publishing for the duration of the agreement.

Other charges

CUP does charge additional fees for page and/or colour fees. Authors should always check each journal’s submission guidelines to ensure that they will not be subject to any other fees or charges.

Archiving in institutional repositories

  • Preprints or submitted manuscripts under review (SMUR) can be archived at any time. Author accepted manuscripts can be archived to institutional repositories at any time. For further information, view the Green Open Access Policy for Journals.
  • Article metadata is also sent to several other repositories. For details view the "About the Journal" pages for each journal on the publisher's website.

Author eligibility

As defined by the publisher, the eligible author is:

Corresponding author
The person who handles the manuscript and correspondence during the publication process – from manuscript submission, to handling any revisions up to the acceptance and publication of the manuscript. Cambridge uses the affiliation of the corresponding author to determine eligibility for any institutional open access agreements. For full details of the corresponding author’s role and responsibilities when publishing with Cambridge, see our authorship and contributorship policies here - https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/authors/publishing-ethics/research-publishing-ethics-guidelines-for-journals/authorship-and-contributorship#corresponding-authors

Responsible corresponding authors must include a participating institution as one of their affiliations to benefit from this agreement. 

Authors will be identified as eligible for open access publishing by their:

  • institutional affiliation
  • email address
  • institutional postal address

Responsible corresponding authors must use their institutional email address when submitting an article for publication. 

Responsible corresponding authors should not use personal email addresses (e.g. Hotmail, Gmail). Doing so may result in delayed approval of the article or the article may not be approved to be published open access under the terms of the agreement. 

Author rights

Articles from authors at participating institutions may be published under the following Creative Commons licenses:

  • CC BY
  • CC BY-SA
  • CC BY-NC
  • CC BY-NC-SA
  • CC BY-ND
  • CC BY-NC-ND

Authors retain all rights as per the CC license.

Further information about licenses is available on the publisher's website.

The Creative Commons licenses allow reuse (some with conditions) while protecting the authors' rights of acknowledgment as authors. 

How to submit your article for open access publishing

The following instructions for authors have been provided by the publisher. Further details are available on the publisher’s website.

In summary, after following CUP’s usual article submission process via the journal’s homepage on Cambridge Core, CUP will ask the corresponding author to complete a publishing agreement upon the articles acceptance.  The author would select “Gold Open Access’ and confirm the licence type (i.e. CC-BY).  Rightslink work on CUP’s behalf to manage the APCs, so for the submitting author from an eligible CAUL institution, the APC will be automatically waived.  For identification, authors are to use their institutional postal address and email address and ORCID in all correspondence with CUP and Rightslink.

Example screenshot(s):

Archiving in institutional repositories

  • Preprints or submitted manuscripts under review (SMUR) can be archived at any time. Author accepted manuscripts can be archived to institutional repositories at any time. For further information, view the Green Open Access Policy for Journals.
  • Article metadata is also sent to several other repositories. For details view the "About the Journal" pages for each journal on the publisher's website.

Contact details: Cambridge University Press

Please email oaqueries@cambridge.org for questions regarding this agreement. Please include your full name, institution, article title, journal name and DOI (if available), and state the reason for your enquiry.

Archiving in institutional repositories

  • Preprints or submitted manuscripts under review (SMUR) can be archived at any time. Author accepted manuscripts can be archived to institutional repositories at any time. For further information, view the Green Open Access Policy for Journals.
  • Article metadata is also sent to several other repositories. For details view the "About the Journal" pages for each journal on the publisher's website.

Read and Publish Resources