Built in-house, Cambridge Open Engage will use the technology behind Cambridge Core, the online home for the Press’s books and journals, 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.
The first major partner to sign up to the new service is the American Political Science Association (APSA). APSA Preprints will launch on 29 August, with new partner sites and submission to the wider platform available in early 2020.
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 organization.
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, says Cambridge University Press.
Brigitte Shull, Director of Scholarly Communications Research and Development, said: “Put simply, Cambridge Open Engage is a collaborative platform to upload, share and advance your research. It will offer functionality to support collaboration that often happens informally now and extend the interaction of conferences to the online space and connect all of this rich, early interaction through to the final publishing process.”
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.
Vicky Drummond, Director of Online Customer Experience at the Press, said: “Co-creation will be a major part of the Cambridge Open Engage platform and we will be working with researchers to actively help us shape the functionality.
“We created a new user panel of political science researchers to help co-create the APSA Preprints site. This was a huge help during the development process in understanding which features and functionality are most important to researchers when reading and submitting early research in political science. Since then the panel have been providing feedback on the submission process, helping us to fine tune it ahead of the broader roll out.”
Brigitte added: “Cambridge Open Engage is another important step towards our vision to unlock the potential of high-quality research and build a more open future. Support for rapid dissemination and connections among researchers is key to that and we will continue to invest in innovative solutions that ensure sustainability and quality for the academic community.”
