10 April 2019
The University of California and Cambridge University Press have entered into an agreement designed to maintain UC’s access to Cambridge’s journals, while also supporting open access publishing for UC authors. The partnership is UC’s first open access agreement with a major publisher, and Cambridge’s first such deal in the Americas.
Under the agreement, UC will 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 UC’s ten campuses. Because the subscription ‘reading’ fee will go down as UC’s open access publishing goes up, the university will see no significant overall increase to the cost of its contract. The three-year agreement will allow UC and Cambridge to pilot this approach from 2019 until 2021.
In the last two years Cambridge has also reached open access deals with the JISC consortium in the UK, the Bibsam consortium in Sweden, the UKB consortium in the Netherlands and, most recently, with the Bavarian State Library (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, BSB) on behalf of higher education and research institutions across Germany.