Our Academic publishing provides university-level research and teaching materials under the Cambridge University Press imprint. It publishes more than 400 peer-reviewed academic journals, thousands of books and hundreds of titles in our innovative Elements series. Academic is pivoting to increase customers’ access to resources and accelerating its digital capabilities to enhance their learning and research experience.
Impactful, award-winning publishing
Our Academic offer is underpinned by the quality and breadth of our publishing, and we are constantly building on those core strengths.
We had another successful year in awards, including prizes in both the Sara A. Whaley and Gita Chaudhuri Book Prizes. In the Professional and Scholarly Excellence (PROSE) Awards, presented by the Association of American Publishers, our titles were named as winners in five categories. These included Hegel’s Century by Jon Stewart, which won the Philosophy category. It is one of the titles from our Academic Impact programme, set up to offer the best of university press publishing, with books that make a lasting impression in their fields.
A landmark publication in 2022 was the Cambridge Centenary Ulysses, which helps readers to understand the pleasures of James Joyce’s monumental work and to grapple with its challenges.
Our innovative Elements programme continued to grow strongly. We have now published 730 individual Elements, with 36 new series and more than 1,800 commissioned in 181 series. We published 233 in 2021 and are on track to publish 300 in 2022.
We also marked the 25th anniversary of Essential Psychopharmacology, by Stephen M. Stahl, the internationally recognised authority in psychiatry and psychopharmacology. His book is now available online from Cambridge Core as part of the Stahl Collection, which gives subscribers full access to the entire current portfolio of Professor Stahl’s books.
It was also another strong year for our Bibles team, with the release of the Cambridge Family Chronicle Bible. This blended our centuries-long traditions of Bible publishing with cutting-edge publishing, digital technology and expert craftsmanship. The 18th Century Baskerville typeface was given a digital makeover, while high resolution scans and specially created digital filters breathed new life into the illustrations – evocative 19th Century engravings by French artist, Gustave Doré. This has led to a record year for sales.
As Mandy Hill, Managing Director, Academic, explains: “I think this speaks volumes about our values. You’ve got something inherently traditional, with exceptional quality at its core, but that is also really contemporary in how it’s being delivered.”
“We are not just a publisher, we’re a university press, and this materially impacts what we do and how we do it.”
Mandy Hill, Managing Director, Academic
Academic quality
All Cambridge University Press publishing is supported by a range of committees in our governance body – the Syndicate – whose role is to approve every single academic book and journal contract. This relationship means that all commissioning editors know that their work is being thoroughly checked and that academic rigour is instilled across all Cambridge University Press outputs.
Real world impact
We want to maximise the real-world impact of the high-quality research we publish. One way we do this is through our small but successful trade publishing programme, which this year published titles including 25 Million Sparks, Andrew Leon Hanna’s stirring account of refugee entrepreneurship, Everything You Need to Know About OCD by Dr Lynne Drummond and A History of Thailand, as well as titles in our Cambridge Companions range including World Crime Fiction, Literature and Climate and Environmental Humanities.
We also continue to make academic research into pressing global issues free to access. In the run up to the COP26 UN Climate Change Conference, we made nearly 300 journal articles and book chapters freely available online and announced the launch of a Cambridge Open Engage community.
Leadership on Open Access
The evidence shows that open access improves usage, citations and is good for research.
We set a bold ambition for the majority of our research publishing to be fully open access by 2025 and are on target for half of all new research articles in our journals to be open access by the end of 2022. This has been driven in part by the growth of transformative agreements with higher education institutions around the world, of which we now have 2,700.
“Our ambition to shift our research articles publishing to open access is another example of the Press being bold and focusing on what is best for research,” says Mandy Hill, Managing Director, Academic.
As well as the journals that have already flipped to full open access, our hybrid journals publish a mix of open access and subscription articles and 70 percent of these are now registered as ‘Transformative Journals’, committed to transition to full open access. New research published open access in those journals grew by almost 70 percent in 2021. We’ve also launched new open access journals such as Environmental Data Science, Programmable Materials and Memory, Mind and Media.
Higher education
We continue to publish and develop a growing programme of exceptional textbooks for higher education, including titles such as the second edition of Data-Driven Science and Engineering. Our programme is available in print and online through our own platform which has seen exceptional usage.
We believe in ensuring textbooks are affordable for most students and so this year we have confirmed significantly lower prices for our US textbooks than many commercial publishers.
We recognise that instructors increasingly want to benefit from the opportunities created by online learning tools and our acquisition of online learning technology company, CogBooks, allows us to combine the excellence of our content with CogBooks’ adaptive courseware technology. The integration
of the CogBooks platform into the organisation over the past year is enabling us to develop courseware solutions to help institutions deliver higher quality, flexible learning both in-person and remotely.
In addition to the learning products and services for those based within higher education institutes, we are also developing online learning courses for the independent learner. In the past year we successfully launched Cambridge Advance Online on behalf of the University of Cambridge. “This is a fantastic example of the University being able to capitalise on the full breadth of expertise from across the academic University as well as Cambridge University Press & Assessment,” says Mandy Hill, Managing Director, Academic.
