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Here’s the Full Text of Today’s Joint Announcement:

Cambridge University Press, Johns Hopkins University Press and Princeton University Press today announced they are Founding Publishers of Meridian, a new University Press community initiative convened by Cashmere, its initial operator and platform provider. Meridian is a mission-driven, market-informed Model Context Protocol (MCP) gateway for scholarly content, authorized by the University Presses themselves, bridging library collections of peer-reviewed scholarship and the AI tools researchers use. It provides streamlined, authorized access with clear provenance, full attribution, citation and usage reporting through a single integration platform.

Researchers increasingly turn to AI assistants to explain, summarize and connect scholarly ideas. Meridian ensures those answers are grounded in trusted, properly licensed scholarship. Scholarly publishers have always cooperated on infrastructure; Meridian applies that model to AI, with governance in publishers’ hands from the start.

Supporting Research and Discovery
For researchers, AI-assisted research can stay within the authorized scholarly ecosystem: every answer is grounded in authoritative, peer-reviewed content, carries a full citation and directs readers, through their library’s access, to the publisher’s version of record. For libraries, Meridian provides COUNTER-aligned reporting on how licensed collections are used in AI-assisted research, supporting collection decisions and demonstrating value. Content reached through Meridian is never used to train or fine-tune AI models, or sublicensed or redistributed.

What It Means for Publishers
For University Presses, Meridian is one integration rather than one per AI platform, and the opportunity to use shared AI infrastructure. Participation is opt-in and non-exclusive: it does not disturb other licensing deals or channels, and titles can be withdrawn at any time. Meridian also gives publishers statistics showing the questions that their catalog answered, where it ranks in content search, and how often it is cited across AI tools, to help better quantify the impact of their publications in the AI research environment.

Governed by and for the Scholarly Community
Meridian is both a program and a product, that allows participating presses to opt in for distribution, control access and rights, and collaborate on new models for content discovery and engagement in an increasingly AI-first world. As operator, Cashmere handles onboarding, client success and support, metering and reporting on behalf of the community, and as platform provider supplies the infrastructure Meridian runs on. The Founding Presses join Cashmere on Meridian’s Advisory Council, with institutional library representation forthcoming. The Council shapes Meridian’s mission, principles, membership criteria and quality standards, and becomes the board of directors when Meridian incorporates as an independent not-for-profit entity.

Statements From the Founding Community
“The terms for how AI uses scholarship are being set right now, and university and other mission-aligned presses have an opportunity to take part in setting them. Johns Hopkins University Press has spent decades building trust with our partner publishers, scholars and readers, and Meridian lets us extend that trust into the AI systems that researchers and scholars are using on the terms so highly valued by our community.”
— Barbara Kline Pope, Executive Director, Johns Hopkins University Press

“The opportunity to collaborate with peer presses, and to expand our partnership with Cashmere, aligns fully with the mission of Princeton University Press to bring the best scholarly content to the most generative global environments for knowledge making and exchange. Meridian is designed to help us adapt the discoverability and accessibility of PUP content to new research methods and methodologies while maintaining every integrity of the underlying intellectual property and copyrights, the valuation of that content, and our ability and agency to steward its engagement and impact.”
— Christie Henry, Director, Princeton University Press

“As a university press, we are committed to protecting our authors’ rights while ensuring that high-quality trusted research is discoverable by those who need it, including through AI tools. This new partnership with Meridian will help libraries connect students and researchers with trusted scholarship from a strong and diverse group of participating university presses”
— Mandy Hill, Managing Director, Cambridge University Press

“We believe in the power of human knowledge to improve the world. Meridian is shared infrastructure that belongs to the scholarly community, and our role is to build and operate it in service of that community, to bring trusted scholarship into AI together.”
— Jonathan Munk, CEO, Cashmere

Direct to Meridian Alliance Website

The post Company News: Cambridge University Press, Johns Hopkins University Press, Princeton University Press and Cashmere are Launching Meridian, an MCP Gateway to Scholarly Content appeared first on Library Journal infoDOCKET.