Cambridge University Press is the academic and bibles publisher of Cambridge University Press & Assessment. As part of the University of Cambridge we are respected for our heritage and ethos of excellence.
We publish books and journals and are dedicated to serving customers in higher education through world-leading research and education products and services. Together with our academic community, we are playing a leading role in advancing open research to drive greater collaboration, transparency and accessibility.
Our OA journals agreement with CAUL offers uncapped publishing in all our Gold and Hybrid journals.
Further information on this agreement is available from Cambridge University Press.
This page was last updated on 5 February 2025.
The following institutions participate in this agreement:
Authors who do not see their institution listed above should contact library staff to enquire further.
This agreement allows authors from participating institutions to publish in most of CUP's hybrid and gold journals without the need for any transactional open access article processing charge (APC).
This is an uncapped agreement. There is no limit on the number of articles that can be published OA under this agreement.
As our OA agreement offers uncapped publishing within all our Hybrid and Gold journals, we recommend that librarians tick the auto-approve option for article approvals within the institution's Rightslink account.
Articles accepted from 1/1/2025 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 2025) 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.
The following article types are eligible for open access under this agreement:
Article types excluded from this agreement include, but are not limited to:
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.
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:
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.
No other APC discounts are offered under this agreement.
The agreement allows for publishing in most journals. The complete title list is available online. If you wish to publish open access, please check to ensure that your journal is included.
Hybrid journals that 'flip' to OA during the course of this agreement will remain available for OA publishing for the duration of the agreement.
Articles from authors at participating institutions may be published under the following Creative Commons licenses:
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.
Article approvals are managed by institutions via Rightslink.
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.
The following instructions for authors have been provided by the publisher. Further details are available on the publisher’s website.
Authors can check details of eligible article types and journals covered by the agreement via a pre-submission checker tool.
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):
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.
Please contact library staff at your institution for questions related to this agreement. They can provide advice on using the CAUL Open Access Agreements.
