Cambridge University Press Open Access Policy

Cambridge University Press (CUP), the publishing arm of the University of Cambridge, runs one of the larger transformative-agreement programmes in scholarly publishing. Rather than charging authors an article processing charge (APC) for open access on a case-by-case basis, CUP negotiates Read & Publish (R&P) agreements directly with individual institutions and with library consortia. These are a specific form of the broader transformative agreement (TA) model that the scholarly-communication sector has used since roughly 2018-2019 to shift publisher revenue gradually from subscriptions toward open-access publishing.

How the Read & Publish model works

An R&P deal combines two things the institution would otherwise negotiate and pay for separately: (1) continued reading/subscription access to Cambridge’s journal collection, and (2) an allowance of open-access articles that the institution’s corresponding authors can publish without paying a separate APC, up to a negotiated cap or on an uncapped basis for the life of the agreement. Where an institution’s own agreement is uncapped or the author’s article falls within the negotiated quota, the author sees no invoice at all — the cost is already covered by the single fee the library or consortium pays Cambridge. Eligibility is checked automatically during manuscript submission on Cambridge’s publishing platform: the corresponding author’s institutional affiliation and email domain are matched against the list of participating institutions, and if they qualify, the system offers an open-access route (typically CC BY) in the acceptance workflow.

Where an institution has no full R&P coverage — for example, a partial-discount or capped agreement, or an author whose institution is not party to any Cambridge agreement — some deals still apply a percentage discount to the standard APC, or split the cost between the library and the author’s grant funds, rather than covering it in full. The exact split, cap, and discount level vary by institution and are set out in each individual agreement, which is why the same journal can be free-to-publish-OA for one author and subject to a full list-price APC for another, depending solely on institutional affiliation.

Scope: which journals and article types are covered

CUP’s R&P agreements generally apply across its hybrid and fully open-access journals, covering standard article types such as original research, review, and rapid-communication articles; some agreement terms exclude certain article types (e.g., commissioned pieces) or specific journals published on Cambridge’s behalf for external societies where the society, not Cambridge, sets the OA terms. Institutions and consortia typically publish their own eligibility pages listing exactly which Cambridge journals and article types are in scope for their specific deal, since coverage is agreement-specific rather than uniform across every Cambridge title.

Who negotiates these agreements

CUP’s R&P partners include individual universities negotiating directly, national and regional consortia (such as Jisc in the UK), and US library groupings such as the Big Ten Academic Alliance and the University of California system, each of which negotiates its own multi-year term, article cap or uncapped status, and cost-sharing formula. Because each deal is bilateral, the specific APC treatment an author experiences depends entirely on which institution’s agreement (if any) they fall under at the time of acceptance — there is no single universal "Cambridge Open" price list that applies to every author everywhere.

Cambridge Open Engage: a separate, related initiative

Distinct from the journal R&P programme, Cambridge also operates Cambridge Open Engage, an open early-research platform (built on the Cambridge Core publishing infrastructure) where researchers can post preprints, working papers, conference posters, and other early or grey-literature outputs ahead of or instead of formal peer review, free to both post and read. Cambridge Open Engage is not itself an APC-funded or R&P-covered journal-publishing route; it sits alongside CUP’s peer-reviewed journal OA agreements as a separate open-research service, and several external preprint servers (for example ChemRxiv) have used Open Engage as underlying hosting infrastructure.

Why this matters for research administrators

Research offices and library scholarly-communications teams need to track which Cambridge agreement (if any) covers their institution, because it determines whether a researcher’s Cambridge article is free to publish OA, subject to a discounted APC, or requires the author to source APC funding from a grant. This is the same operational question that applies to any transformative or publish-and-read deal: eligibility is tied to corresponding-author affiliation, not to funder or manuscript subject matter, so a change in an author’s institutional email or affiliation status between submission and acceptance can change which pricing route applies.

References

• Cambridge University Press, Open access agreements overview (cambridge.org/core/open-access-policies).
• University of Cambridge Office of Scholarly Communication, Read & Publish agreements (openaccess.cam.ac.uk).
• ESAC Initiative transformative-agreement registry (esac-initiative.org), Cambridge entries.
• Cambridge Open Engage help center, "What is Cambridge Open Engage?" (openengagehelp.cambridge.org).