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COA at CUP2


Open Access (OA) is an important way to make research findings freely available for anyone to access and view. Cambridge Open Access serves authors and the wider community by publishing high-quality, peer-reviewed content that allows readers to redistribute, re-use and adapt the content in new works.

We publish Gold OA journals and books, working with publishing partners to develop OA for different communities. We also support social sharing and Green OA (also called Green archiving) across our journals and books programmes, allowing authors to deposit content in repositories and commercial social sharing sites.

Open access allows authors to comply with the Gold and Green OA requirements of major funders. 

Watch our webinar where we cover licensing, the benefits, key terminology, and the options of publishing open access with Cambridge. View our OA Q&A where we answer your questions.



A Guide to Open Access at Cambridge

Our vision is to unlock the potential of high quality research and build an open future. We see the expansion of our OA book and portfolio as an important step to delivering our vision.

Find out more here.



Gold Open Access is an alternative to subscriptions and other access payments. Content is published under a Creative Commons licence that allows free access and redistribution and, in many cases, allows re-use in new or derivative works. Typically, but not always, Gold OA content is supported by an Article Processing Charge (APC) paid by the author or their funder. We also publish Gold OA content that is supported by other financial models, particularly in humanities and social sciences.

Hybrid journals are subscription journals that offer authors the choice of paying an APC to publish their articles as Gold OA.


Green Open Access (also known as Green archiving) is the practice of making a version of a work freely accessible in an institutional or subject archive or some other document repository. Typically the author’s original (submitted) manuscript is made available, or the manuscript as it was accepted for publication after peer-review changes have been made. For some types of books, a portion of the final published version can also be made available. Click here to read our Green OA Policies.

Social sharing is similar to Green OA except that documents are typically shared in a commercial sharing site or scholarly collaboration network site, rather than an institutional repository. See our social sharing page for more information. Our Green OA policies include provisions for social sharing and Cambridge Core Share also provides a means for sharing the published versions of journal articles. 

Cambridge University Press has a set of policies to allow authors, librarians and others to meet the Green OA requirements of their institutions and funders.