Cambridge University Press Transformative Open Access Agreement

In April 2019, University of California (UC) and Cambridge University Press announced that they had entered into a transformative open access agreement that will enable UC authors who publish with Cambridge to make their research freely available to the world to read. The agreement also maintains UC’s access to Cambridge’s more than 400 journals.

In brief, the UC libraries are providing funding to help cover open access publishing fees for UC authors who publish with Cambridge journals. This agreement has two goals: (1) to support UC’s mission as a public university and advance the global shift toward sustainable open access publishing by making UC-authored publications open to the world, and (2) to maintain journal affordability.

Agreement Basics
Article Payment Process
Resources
FAQ

Agreement Basics

For more information, see the “Agreement Basics” section of our FAQs!

Cambridge’s article submission processing system now asks all UC corresponding authors whether they wish to make their journal articles available open access. Authors interested in doing so are typically asked to pay an article processing charge. Under the new UC agreement, the UC libraries will pay at least the first $1,000 toward this fee. If there’s any remaining balance due on the fee, the Cambridge payment system will ask UC authors if they have grant funding available to cover the balance. (This cost-sharing model is designed to enable the UC libraries to stretch their available funds and help as many authors as possible.) If an author does not have grant funds to cover that difference, the UC libraries will pay the entire article processing charge on their behalf, ensuring that lack of research funds does not present a barrier for UC authors who wish to publish open access in Cambridge journals.

The UC libraries have also negotiated a 30% discount on all Cambridge article processing charges, so the amount that authors who do have available grant funding are asked to contribute is even lower.

Article Payment Process

If you are a UC corresponding author and you select open access publishing through Cambridge’s article submission system after your article has been accepted, you will be asked to log into their payment processing system called CCC RightsLink.

(It is necessary to set up an account in RightsLink first; if you do not have an account, you will be prompted to create one within RightsLink during the payment process.)

Then it’s just a matter of clicking through the following steps in the RightsLink system. See the “Payment Workflow” section of our FAQs, which walks you through the RightsLink process.