In a world that is currently experiencing drastic disruption, responsible sharing of new research at an early stage is ever more important. Today we are announcing the launch of our new open research site, Cambridge Open Engage, and in tandem, in this blog post, we’re sharing some information on our approach to developing the site.

The site is designed to provide researchers with the space and resources to connect and collaborate with their communities, and rapidly disseminate early research.

The site is launching with useful features to facilitate the work of researchers, allowing them to:

• submit early work like preprints, working papers, posters and presentations to a range of subject disciplines for free – excluding content with clinical implications
• discover open research via searching and browse, including full text search
• see different versions of research as authors amend their content, with linking and signposting between versions
• see content across Cambridge Open Engage and our partner spaces, such as APSA Preprints
• access metrics such as downloads, page views and Altmetric scores on individual pieces of content.

 

 

User feedback

The Cambridge Open Engage team uses a methodology called co-creation which means, working together with our community to create the most useful features possible. We have over 200 researchers who volunteer to help us guide the platform’s development.

The site also benefits from the user-tested functionality delivered for our first partner space, APSA Preprints, in August last year, which has 160 posted content items so far. Following feedback from some of the authors and researchers using APSA Preprints, we made improvements to the author submission journey and the content pages, as well as making improvements to the moderation functionality following feedback from our partner site administrators.

All of this input has been encompassed into the build of Cambridge Open Engage – and following the launch we will continue to test and actively seek feedback on existing functionality and new features from our co-creation panel and users to ensure that we are delivering value.

 

What’s next?

Now that the platform has launched, we will be focusing on building features related to conferences. Due to the fact that many meetings and events are being cancelled due to the current global health crisis, we would like to facilitate the upload, sharing and discoverability of conference outputs online.

Cambridge Open Engage has a public roadmap so that users can stay up to date with plans we have for new features on the platform.

 

Submit your work

We welcome researchers and authors to submit their preprints, posters, and presentations. We believe that by building a connected ecosystem and bringing together fragmented parts of the research lifecycle, we can benefit the entire scientific community. All content is moderated before posting – you can find out more about our policies and moderation process here.

 

 

If you’d like to submit your early research content to Cambridge Open Engage, you can do so here.