Combining the best features of journals and books!  

Cambridge Elements are original, concise, authoritative, and peer-reviewed scholarly and scientific research, organised into focused series edited by leading scholars, and providing comprehensive coverage of the key topics in disciplines spanning the arts and sciences. 

Conceived from the start for a digital environment, they provide a dynamic reference resource for graduate students, researchers, and practitioners.

Elements are:

• Rapidly published and disseminated.
• Authoritative, written by leading scholars, and rigorously peer-reviewed.
• Structured in focused series, edited by senior figures in each discipline.
• Short: 20,000-30,000 words (40 to 75 pages).
• Available in online, onscreen, and print versions.

Elements include:

• Analytical surveys on foundational building blocks of the discipline.
• Original, cutting-edge insights into frontier topics.
• Masterclasses and advanced tutorials on emerging topics.
• Detailed descriptions of novel technologies or protocols (in Medicine and Engineering).

When writing your Element, use our range of guides to help stylise your work for a smoother submission process. These guides are designed to help our authors with issues such as punctuation, citations, final checks, and submission. We encourage all of our Element authors to familiarise themselves with these guides before writing starts.

For any other series-specific enquiries please contact your series editors.

Open access

Our Gold open access model allows authors to make their Element freely available online, without compromising any aspect of the publishing process. Under this model, the author (or a funder) pays an Element processing charge, which enables an online version of the Element to be published under a Creative Commons license. Print and other digital formats, such as Kindle, will still be available for purchase.

You can find out more about our open access policy here.

Publishing ethics

Cambridge Elements publish in accordance with Cambridge University Press’s publishing ethics guidelines, which apply to authors, peer reviewers, series editors and each Elements Series as a whole. Anyone who believes that these guidelines have not been followed should raise their concern with the series editors or email publishingethics@cambridge.org.

Cambridge Author Services

To continue to publish the best in global research, it is essential that we support researchers anywhere in the world prepare their research for submission to our journals. In order to help prospective authors to prepare for submission and to reach their publication goals, we also offer a range of high-quality manuscript preparation services – including language editing and video abstract creation – delivered in partnership with American Journal Experts. Find out more here.

What should I do if I am interested in writing an Element? 

Please contact the editor(s) of the relevant series for details on the submission process. You can find the series editor(s) details by visiting the Elements series pages on Cambridge Core. There is a list of series here.