How to Read Cambridge University Press Articles for Free, Legally

Cambridge University Press publishes around 400 journals, hosted on its Cambridge Core platform, with particular strength in the humanities, social sciences, law and mathematics. Many of the articles need a subscription, but Cambridge has one of the more generous sharing policies among the big publishers, so a free copy is more likely than usual. Here are the legal routes.

1. Check for a free copy in a repository

Cambridge's green open-access policy lets authors put the accepted manuscript of their article, the peer-reviewed text before Cambridge's typesetting, in their university's repository or on their own web page. For humanities and social science journals this is allowed from the moment the article is accepted, with no embargo at all. For science, technology and medicine journals the usual embargo is six months from the date the article was published online. Individual journals can be more permissive, and Cambridge keeps a list of the exceptions.

In practice this means a Cambridge article in history, politics, linguistics or law may have had a free copy available before the journal even published it. Paste the cambridge.org link, the DOI or the title into the finder on our home page and it checks the open-access indexes. Our guide to the kinds of open access explains what an accepted manuscript is and how it differs from the published version.

2. Check whether the article is already open access

A large and growing share of Cambridge's journal articles are free on Cambridge Core itself:

• Cambridge has read-and-publish agreements with library consortia in many countries. In the UK, every university is covered by an agreement with Jisc that runs through 2029, so articles by UK authors are normally published open access at no cost to them. Similar deals exist in the United States, Europe, Australia and elsewhere.
• Many of its journals are fully open access, so every article in them is free.
• The subscription journals are hybrid, so any individual article may be open access if the authors chose that option.

Open-access articles show a green "Open access" label on the article page and a PDF button that works without logging in. If the article was written by authors at a university in a country with a Cambridge agreement, it is worth checking the page first before looking anywhere else.

3. Look for a preprint

Cambridge runs its own preprint platform, Cambridge Open Engage, and a number of its journals encourage or accept submissions from it. Mathematics and physics papers in Cambridge journals usually have an arXiv version, and social science papers increasingly appear on SocArXiv or SSRN. A preprint is the authors' own version from before peer review, so preprints and published papers explains what may differ. The finder lists preprints alongside other copies, and for arXiv specifically see what arXiv is and how to use it.

4. Ask the author

Authors may send a copy of their own article to anyone who asks, and because Cambridge lets humanities and social science authors share the accepted manuscript immediately, they can do so without waiting. A short, polite email usually gets a reply within a few days. Our guide has a template for emailing an author, and every paper page on this site includes a ready-written request when no free copy is found.

5. Use a library

University libraries subscribe to Cambridge journals in large bundles. Use the institutional login on the article page, which Cambridge Core supports for most universities, or go through your library's website. If you are not at a university, a public library may be able to get the article by inter-library loan, and many universities give alumni access to part of their collection. See getting papers through a library.

6. Check for free access programmes

Cambridge takes part in Research4Life and similar schemes that give institutions in lower-income countries free or low-cost access to its journals. If you are at an eligible university, hospital or government body, ask your librarian whether access has been set up.

Books and book chapters

Cambridge Core also hosts books, which follow a different policy. Chapters from edited books and monographs can be deposited in a repository, but the embargo runs from the date the book was published online and is longer than for journals, so a free chapter is less likely. Open-access books do exist and are clearly labelled.

If nothing turns up

For a recent science or medicine article with no preprint and no open-access label, the six-month embargo may still be running. Journal embargo periods covers the timing. For a humanities or social science article, there is no embargo to wait for, so if the finder shows nothing the author simply has not deposited a copy yet, and asking them is the fastest route.