Milner Library has announced a three-year open access agreement with Cambridge University Press. The deal, known as a Read and Publish agreement, allows research published by Illinois State University corresponding authors to be made open access in Cambridge’s open access and hybrid journals, without having to pay an article processing charge (APC).
The innovative agreement also greatly expands full-text access to CUP journals for ISU faculty, staff, and students. Previous access of approximately 80 journals is now increased to include all 400 titles published through Cambridge Core.
The publish feature of the agreement allows ISU authors whose manuscript has been accepted by a Cambridge University Press journal to make their work available open access for free, without having to pay APC. Normally, the average APC for a journal published by Cambridge University Press would be approximately $3,000 per article.
As with any deal, there is some fine print to the open-access part of the agreement. Only corresponding authors at ISU are eligible for the APC waiver. Also, manuscripts must be accepted between January 2021 and December 2023 and it must be original research, so book reviews are not eligible. Works can only be made open access in Cambridge’s gold open access or hybrid journals, but fortunately, this includes about 90 percent of the journals they publish. When an author’s article is published in a Cambridge open access journal, they will be asked to assign a Creative Commons license to their work. As long as the above criteria is met, there is no limit to the number of Cambridge University Press published articles that can be made open access each year.
In addition to the increased journal access and the covered APCs, Milner Library was also drawn to the variety of disciplines represented in CUP’s suite of journals, which includes subjects across the humanities, social sciences, science, technology, and medicine. Often the ability to pay APCs to make research open access is more available in the sciences because they have more available grant funding to pay those fees. This agreement provides more opportunities for humanities and social science scholars to make their research open access without having to seek funding to pay an APC.
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