The development of open access has placed a new spotlight on how we define ‘research’.  At Cambridge we publish peer-reviewed research journals, but in practice those journals are often much more than simply a collection of original research articles. They each serve as a meeting point for a community – an outlet through which to share, interrogate and debate research findings amongst peers – and in seeking to fulfil that larger brief editorial teams have been endlessly creative.

Across our c.400 journals we use upwards of 700 unique article descriptors, ranging through conventional article types like book reviews and commentaries, to the more esoteric ‘Musings’ or ‘The Soapbox’. These depart in various ways and to various degrees from the traditional, linear presentation of original research, but they attract both an authorship and a readership because of the contribution they make to the broader research process.

Open access, though, is asking two new questions of these article types: do they qualify, in a binary sense, as research? And if they don’t, how should they be valued?

It is research content that is the principal focus of most institutional and funder policies around OA, and it follows that it is research content that has become increasingly eligible for OA funding in recent years; whether that be through direct grants and APC payment, or agreements formed between an authors’ institution and their publisher. ‘Transformative agreements’, in particular, have led to a dramatic increase in both the scale and diversity of authors able to access OA funding for their research outputs; allowing us at Cambridge to hit the milestone, last year, of publishing more than half of these articles open access.

But that success has created a new problem for journals whose audiences also seek out content that does not fall neatly within that research category; content types that, in contrast, are rarely the focus of OA policy, rarely attract OA funding, but nevertheless command a sizeable readership. A good number of journals, especially in the humanities and social sciences, that might otherwise now be in a good position to ‘flip’ to a full open access model, are hampered in doing so by a continued commitment to this kind of content, and the lack of an established funding model that could support it in a post-subscription world.

‘Research open’ is one practical, interim solution to that problem. It simply says that a journal can flip to a full open access model for its research – – sustainably, equitably and in compliance with funder policy – – while continuing to fund the rest of its output through discounted subscriptions. We are pursuing it, starting with 10 journals in 2024 and likely substantially more in 2025, because we see it as an important enabler, together with other creative initiatives, of a swift OA transition that nevertheless respects the complexity of the research eco-system. It accelerates these journals towards the goal of full open access for research, while in the meantime allowing the subscription market to judge the ongoing value of the other material they produce. If that material continues to be valued by the academic community, this model can provide a mechanism through which it can continue to be sustainably funded, as well as setting a baseline for the development of more open models in the future.

It is not our ideal end point for this content; preserving vestiges of the paywall model and requiring us to continue to draw a line across what is in practice a continuum of different article types. It is, though, the kind of model that is needed at this moment in the OA transition; engineered to increase openness while protecting the capacity of our journals to continue to creatively fulfil the needs of their communities.