New agreements reached for 2026 

New read and publish deals with four major journal publishers Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley, and Taylor & Francis have been agreed.   

Sage submitted their most recent offer later, so the deadline has been extended, but we have stated we will accept their revised proposal.  

The agreements are the result of nine months of negotiations between the publishers and universities across the UK, represented by Jisc. Jisc is a not-for-profit UK digital, data and technology agency focused on tertiary education, research and innovation.  

The first proposals from each publisher in the summer were rejected.  

The recent revised proposals showed some improvement towards open access and reducing costs, and these were accepted.  

Our focus is supporting our academic community, both now and in the future. We will continue to look at the breadth of options developing for reading and publishing open access research. 
 

 
Green, Gold, Hybrid and Diamond open access explained 

• Green open access makes published works freely available to the public in an institutional or disciplinary repository (such as Apollo). 

• Gold open access is the publication of scholarly works in fully open access journals. 

• Hybrid open access is a subscription journal with a mix of paywalled articles and articles that are made open access after the author pays an Article Processing Charge.  

• Diamond open access is a scholarly publication model, community-driven, non-commercial, that doesn’t charge fees to readers or authors. 

Apollo 

For researchers publishing work, remember to deposit your articles in the University’s research repository Apollo by uploading the file to your Symplectic Elements account. This allows you to retain your rights and ensures you meet REF and other funder requirements to publish open access.  
 
Everyone can search the University’s research outputs on Apollo. 
 
 

Useful browser extensions  

• LibKey Nomad is a browser extension that links you to full text articles whenever they are available, wherever you search online. You only need to authenticate once via your Cambridge login in any new browser session.   

• Lean Library will automatically connect you to the PDF of the article if there is subscription access, if not, it will provide a link to an open access version of the article if one exists. If neither option is possible, it will link you to submit a Rapid Inter Library Loan to have the article emailed to you within 24 hours.   

 
If you have any questions, you can contact the University's Open Access team. 

Latest update: 17/12/2025