Cambridge Open Engage is the new early research platform from Cambridge University Press. It is designed to provide researchers with space to connect and collaborate with their communities, disseminate early research, including conference posters, data, as well as other types of open content such as grey literature and make preprints more discoverable. We’ll be opening up for direct submissions from researchers to the platform soon. You can sign up for updates here or follow us on Twitter for more announcements if you’d like to use Cambridge Open Engage to share your work.

Cambridge Open Engage content is primarily for the research community, across disciplines (though we will not be accepting content with implications for clinical practice), but it is also freely accessible to all audiences. We’ll also be offering branded spaces within the platform for organizations such as learned societies, university departments or research centres. Our first partner space was APSA Preprints, launched on behalf of the American Political Science Association in August 2019, and we are excited to work with new partners in the future.

Although content on Cambridge Open Engage will not be peer-reviewed, it will go through a moderation process before it is posted. You can find out more about the screening of early and alternative research in our upcoming blog post.

Co-creation

A co-creation approach is being used to shape the features of the platform. Currently, a global community of over 200 academics provide feedback on functionality, take part in surveys, prototype reviews and card sorting tasks on the customer insight platform Recollective to help build the best learning and research solutions. In return, those who participate actively receive access to subject-relevant content on Cambridge Core and various prizes.

Are you a researcher or librarian who wants to share insights and ideas for the development of our early research platform? We are still recruiting critical and creative minds to join our community of co-creators.

Cambridge Partners Summit

48 journal publishing partners visited the two-day Cambridge Partners Summit in January 2020. The purpose of the summit was to discuss the future of academic publishing and encourage a sustainable approach to open research. Cambridge Open Engage had a good reception with a high level of interest, notably in its potential to support commissioning of content, to host content associated with society-run events and to offer a home for useful grey literature.

We are developing Cambridge Open Engage to support the faster and more direct dissemination of research. See the infographic below for more information on how the early research space works, as well as some of the benefits of sharing your work on a platform like Cambridge Open Engage.