Cambridge University Press and the University of California Agree to Open Access Publishing Deal

Agreement is UC’s first with a major publisher and Cambridge’s first in the Americas

The University of California and Cambridge University Press have entered into a transformative agreement that will advance the global shift toward an open access future for research.

The agreement is designed to maintain UC’s access to Cambridge’s journals, while also supporting open access publishing for UC authors. The partnership is UC’s first open access agreement with a major publisher, and Cambridge’s first such deal in the Americas.

“This agreement reflects the strong belief among UC faculty that our research should be available not just to the scientific community, but also to the world at large,” said Dennis Ventry, UC Davis professor of law and vice chair of the Academic Senate University Committee on Library and Scholarly Communication, the UC’s faculty committee for topics related to scholarly publishing.

“We are delighted that Cambridge is enthusiastic about partnering with us to ensure that researchers around the world, the taxpayers who fund our work, and the general public will have immediate and perpetual access to the research we do here at the University of California,” Ventry added.

Under the agreement, UC will have full and permanent access to the Press’s entire collection of over 400 journals, and open access publishing in Cambridge’s journals will be available to authors across the UC’s 10 campuses. Because the subscription “reading” fee will go down as UC’s open access publishing goes up, the university will see no significant overall increase to the cost of its contract. The three-year agreement will allow UC and Cambridge to pilot this approach from 2019 through 2021… [Read the full press release on the Office of Scholarly Communications website.]