Fifty per cent of Cambridge papers now open access

Cambridge University Press – which is aiming for the vast majority of its research papers to be published fully open access (OA) each year by 2025 – recently passed the 50 per cent threshold, representing around 10,000 papers.

Cambridge (CUP), the world's oldest academic press, has signed transformative agreements covering more than 2,000 institutions worldwide; enabling researchers at those universities and research institutes to publish open research at no additional cost. 

The figure is particularly impressive as some 60 per cent of CUP’s research publications are in the humanities and social sciences – fields where research funding constraints have historically held back open research adoption, compared to STEM subjects. Currently, more than 400 Cambridge journals offer OA options to publishers; 66 are fully open access and 340 are hybrid. 

Mandy Hill, managing director, academic, at Cambridge University Press & Assessment, said: ‘Two years ago, we set a bold ambition to transition our research publishing to open access by 2025 and this is a major milestone towards that goal. As an academic publisher, we are committed to maximising the dissemination and impact of high-quality research and gold open access is a sustainable route to support that mission. That's why we will not stop at half of our journal papers being open access; we are working to make the vast majority of such research fully open by 2025.

‘Transformative agreements have provided an important route towards open access for all authors, irrespective of their funding. We are building on this momentum to exploring a range of business models to take us beyond the transformative agreement and establish innovations to ensure the world's academics, students and citizens can enjoy open access in a sustainable manner.’

It has long been recognised that OA research has a significantly higher readership and impact; such articles published by Cambridge alone – and freely available online via Cambridge Core – receive about 3.5 times more full text views and on average 1.6 times more citations.