(3 Nov 2026) 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.
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 Participation is opt-in and non-exclusive: it does not disturb other licensing deals or channels, and titles can be withdrawn at any time.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.
The announcement in full is here.
