The company publishes in health science, life science, physical science and social science. In 2018 it published 729 books. The company has been criticised "as being overly reliant on contributors to perform even basic copy editing of the texts" and a reviewer said of a book that "it gets stuck in a quagmire of editorial and copy-editing issues that simply shouldn't have been allowed to occur if proper quality control was exercised by Cambridge Scholars Publishing." The firm's book publishing has been praised at No Shelf Required.
The company has received a mixed reception. It was not included on the original Beall's List of predatory publishers, it was included on an updated list on beallslist.net, not managed by Beall himself but by an unidentified source. David H. Kaye's Flaky Academic Journals notes that "the journals do not look stellar; no editorial boards are listed." Cambridge Scholars made an official statement on the site in December 2018 entitled 'In Defense of Cambridge Scholars' in which an adviser commented on the statements made on the site stating "There are no charges to publish. There is no requirement on authors for a buy-back in return for publication. Royalties are accrued to the author from the first sale of a title. Decisions to publish are not taken on likely sales or profitability. The commercial risk to publish rests entirely with CSP." Other individuals commented similarly in defence of the company. Since 2019, when the publisher ceased publishing Journals, the publisher's journal rating in the Norwegian Scientific Index. became "Scientific level 0", though the company is listed in the Clarivate Analytics Web of Science Master Book List.
History
The company was founded in 2001 by Cambridge University academics and graduates, as a hobby. It relocated to Newcastle when its founders moved to Durham University, and was subsequently sold to a group of Newcastle-based business-people when the original owner left the UK in 2010. The company is now co-owned and managed by an engineer, Graeme Nicol who bought the company from the original owner in 2011.
Premises
The firm is based in the Lady Stephenson Library, a building that was commissioned in 1908 to house one of Newcastle's early public libraries, given to the city by William Haswell Stephenson and named for his wife Eliza Mary Bond, who had died aged 67 in 1901. The building is now the location of four registered companies.
