Creative Commons licenses play an important role in facilitating Gold Open Access publishing. They provide a legal framework for giving users the ability to freely view, download and distribute content. For more information, please visit our Creative Commons licences information page.

Journal authors can use our eligibility tool to check their eligibility for support for Gold OA via:

• Institutional open access agreements with Cambridge (over 2,000 institutions are currently covered)
• The Cambridge Open Equity Initiative, covering authors from over 100 low- and middle-income countries, areas and territories, including over 5,000 institutions
• Research4Life, for authors from low- and middle-income countries, areas and territories who are not covered by an institutional open access agreement or the Cambridge Open Equity Initiative

This tool will provide full details of which journals and article types are eligible for funding support. Eligibility is based on the affiliation of the corresponding author.

If you article is eligible to be made Gold OA under an institutional open access agreement your institution will not be charged for this transaction as it is covered by the agreement.

Eligibility is based on the corresponding author’s affiliation which should reflect where the research was conducted. If you are in doubt, we recommend that you first check with your library. For further details on affiliations, please see our author affiliation FAQs.

Yes. Eligibility for a institutional open access agreement support is based solely on the affiliation of the corresponding cuthor and the co-authors of a paper do not have to be based at the same institution. For further information, please see our corresponding author FAQs.

If your article has not yet been published, do not submit this form. Please get in touch with your Cambridge production contact for instructions on how to publish your article OA.

For most agreements, the deadline to convert your article to OA is the 31st March of the year after your articles acceptance date. So, for articles accepted for publication in 2025, the eligibility window lasts until the 31st March 2026.

Final approval of your funding support request is at the discretion of your institutional library and may be subject to their own funding checks if they hold a capped or token-limited agreement with us. Discover more about your institution’s agreement.

We advise authors to check funder or institutional policies to ensure choices made during the publication process comply with relevant guidelines.

Your completed creative commons licence selection will be sent to your Content Manager who will process your request. You will then receive an email from our third party provider, Rightslink-CCC, who process OA transactions on our behalf.

You will receive one of two emails, depending on the terms of your institution's agreement:

• Confirmation that your article will be publishing open access, and funding support will be covered by your institutions open access agreement
• An email asking you to 'coordinate payment'. Please log into Rightslink and 'seek funding' from your institution, following the instructions provided. Your request for funding will then be sent to your institution for approval.

Once your transaction has been processed, your article will then be converted to Gold OA. If your article has already published on Cambridge Core, you will receive an email confirming that your article is now available Gold OA.

This will depend on the details of the permissions that you have been granted. If you choose to convert your publication to Gold OA post-submission, or post-publication, you will need to review the permissions the copyright holder granted you, and determine whether or not they permit you to include their material in a Gold OA publication. If not, then you will need to request further permissions from the copyright holder.