Jennifer Beamer, Scholarly Communications Librarian
We are excited to announce that The Claremont Colleges Library, in collaboration with the Statewide California Electronic Library Consortium, has entered into an open access (OA) “Read and Publish” agreement with Cambridge University Press. This agreement allows authorized Claremont Colleges users not only to read all of the journals in the Cambridge UP subscription package, but also to publish OA articles in most Cambridge UP journals, at no cost to themselves or their institution.
This is The Claremont Colleges Library’s first Read and Publish agreement, and it is effective from 2021 to 2023. It was negotiated in an effort to maintain The Claremont Colleges subscription to Cambridge’s suite of high impact journals, while also contributing to the Library’s mission to “foster new research at the colleges and make it freely available and easily discoverable to the global community through open access.”
Why is this significant?
Over the past decade, the global adoption of OA publishing has changed the nature of the scholarly publishing ecosystem for authors, readers, publishers, and libraries. A 2019 study estimated that 31% of all journal articles are now OA, and 52% of all article views of OA articles. Many in the academic community expect the prevalence of OA publishing to increase significantly in the coming years due to a number of reasons. One way research libraries have been helping advance OA is exploring the potential of Read and Publish agreements that help cover all or part of the costs of article publishing.
How does it work?
If you’d like to publish your work OA with Cambridge UP as part of our Read and Publish agreement, the general terms of participation are as follows:
- The corresponding author must be affiliated with one of the Claremont Colleges, and they must indicate their college affiliation at the time of submission.
- All article processing charges are waived for Claremont Colleges authors and their co-authors publishing in Cambridge journals with an OA publishing option.
- Articles must be accepted for publication before December 31, 2023, when the current agreement ends (although it may be renewed).
- There’s no limit on the number of times Claremont Colleges authors may publish in the 370+ eligible Cambridge University Press journals during the contract period (2021-2023).
- Once an article has been accepted and you have signed the journal’s OA author publishing agreement, authors select a Creative Commons (CC) license for their work. The CC license is widely used and accepted in OA publishing, and it allows authors to determine how readers can re-use and share their work.
Read the full details of the agreement: Read and Publish agreement with Statewide California Electronic Library Consortium (SCELC).
If you have questions about this agreement or OA publishing more broadly, contact scholarship@claremont.edu.