The world’s oldest university press, Cambridge University Press was granted letters patent by Henry VIII in 1534 and is known as the King’s Printer. As part of the University of Cambridge—an institution globally renowned for its academic excellence and innovative thinking—the press delivers trusted research and learning materials that enhance understanding and support Cambridge’s mission to advance knowledge and contribute to society through education and research.
Cambridge, which celebrated its 490th birthday in 2024, publishes the highest-quality books and journals from leading authors and partners around the world, across disciplines including science, technology and medicine, and the humanities. Its authors include more than 490 Nobel Prize winners—seven in 2024 alone—and its trade books cover topics from mental health, body image, finance, and climate change to history, literature, and math. Among the most popular are There Is No Planet B by Mike Berners-Lee; Resilience: The Science of Mastering Life’s Greatest Challenges edited by Steven M. Southwick, Dennis S. Charney, and Jonathan M. DePierro; and All the Sonnets of Shakespeare by William Shakespeare, edited by Paul Edmundson and Stanley Wells. These books, the press says, sit alongside landmark reference works such as The Cambridge Greek Lexicon and The Art of Electronics. Moreover, the press’s journals portfolio includes partnerships with leading societies such as the American Political Science Association, the Royal College of Psychiatrists, the Nutrition Society, the Classical Association, and, more recently, the European Consortium for Political Research. A commitment to building an open future has seen the launch of open-access journals, including Research Directions and Public Humanities.
The press’s publishing program addresses global challenges and supports the UN Sustainability Goals through, among other projects, the open-access journal series Cambridge Prisms and books that build knowledge for both the scientific community and general readers, including Simon Sharpe’s Five Times Faster and Dieter Helm’s Legacy. The newly launched Cambridge Forum journal series promotes cross-disciplinary conversations on issues of global importance, and David Sterling Brown’s Shakespeare’s White Others and Jen Manion’s Female Husbands are among the many works that highlight diverse voices.
Forthcoming books of note are A Climate of Truth by Mike Berners-Lee, which offers “new perspectives on the climate and ecological emergency by standing further back, digging deeper, and joining up every element of the polycrisis that we face”; The Cambridge Centennial Edition of The Great Gatsby, an edition of the great American novel that presents “the established version of the text in a collector’s volume replete with social, cultural, and historical context, and numerous illustrations”; and World Builders by Bruno Maçães, which examines geopolitics “as a struggle between global powers over competing visions of the world.” And timed for Austen’s 250th birthday is Living with Jane Austen by Janet Todd, “an intimate personal engagement that shows how living with Austen can transform the way we look at the world.”
Cambridge is committed to building an equitable open future. In 2023, 64% of the press’s research articles were published via open access, and it launched the Cambridge Open Equity Initiative, created to support the publication of open-access research for authors in more than 100 low- and middle-income countries. In April 2024, the press’s innovative approach to removing the barriers to equitable publishing was recognized by the Independent Publishers Guild, which awarded the Cambridge Open Equity Initiative its Impact Award.
