Cambridge University Press has agreed to an Open Access publishing deal with the University of California. This transformative agreement will advance the global shift towards an open access future for research.

This is UC’s first open access agreement with a major publisher as well as Cambridge’s first in the Americas. It is designed to maintain UC’s access to Cambridge’s journals while simultaneously supporting open access publishing for UC authors.

The three-year agreement will allow UC to 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 10 campuses. The university will see no significant overall increase to the cost of its contract due to the subscription “reading” fee decreasing as UC’s open access publishing increases. This approach will be piloted by both UC and Cambridge from 2019-2021.

“Transformative open access agreements like this one directly support our university’s mission by making it easier for UC researchers to make their articles freely available to anyone, anywhere in the world,” said Ivy Anderson, associate executive director of UC’s California Digital Library. “We look forward to working with Cambridge and with our faculty to implement this innovative pilot, which provides a model for open access publishing that is uniquely suited to the U.S. academic environment.”

This agreement will be one of the first and largest open access publishing agreements in the United States to date. A central tenet of the UC’s mission is to make knowledge more broadly available and to facilitate new discoveries that build on the university’s research.

Chris Bennett, Cambridge’s Global Sales Director, said, “We’re very excited about the significance of this agreement for a sustainable global transition to open research and service-based publishing. It underlines our commitment to delivering on what researchers need across the diverse communities we serve. As a university press we are part of the scholarly ecosystem ourselves and are delighted to be taking this next step in strong partnership with the University of California.”

In the last two years Cambridge has reached open access deals with the JISC consortium in the UK, the Bibsam consortium in Sweden, the UKB consortium in the Netherlands and recently the Bavarian State Library in Germany.