Cambridge Open Engage is our new open early research platform, designed to provide researchers with the space and resources to connect and collaborate with their communities, and enable them to rapidly disseminate early research.

Built in-house, Cambridge Open Engage will use the state-of-the-art technology behind Cambridge Core, to publish early and open research outputs including preprint papers, abstracts, conference proceedings, conference posters, grey literature, and open data. The content will be open and free to the reader, as well as free to the author to upload.

Being built in-house means an agile, co-creation approach to development is being adopted. Co-creation is the process of bringing together ideas from customers and users to help shape and develop a product as it is being designed. Adopting this approach means we will be working directly with academics to learn, prototype, refine and launch new features.

The platform will go beyond content dissemination to provide services that support and encourage researcher collaboration and better connect different parts of the research lifecycle. Hosting content from partners such as learned societies, research departments, and funders, as well as directly from researchers, its features and functionality will support an integrated, community-driven service.

Partners will be able to access a range of services, including content hosting, insights into trends and growth areas within research, and analytics across early and open research outputs within their organisation.

The first major partner to sign up to the new service is the American Political Science Association (APSA). APSA Preprints will launch August 29th.

At the same time, authors will be able to easily share their research in advance of peer review and production, discuss and develop it with peers and build an audience ahead of formal publication. The platform will also benefit researchers by helping them to find and work with academics across disciplines, discover early and non-traditional Open Access research, and extend the cooperative benefits of conferences through to publication.

The platform will be developed iteratively, starting this autumn, and Cambridge is inviting researchers to take part in shaping the development of the site to ensure that the platform is as useful to researchers as possible.

Anyone interested in being a part of Cambridge Open Engage can visit the website and register for opportunities to shape its development.