Driving innovation in Open Access

This week is Open Access Week. It may be that your immediate reaction to that is to ask: what’s Open Access? If so, here’s a quick explanation.

What is Open Access?

Publishing scholarly content under an Open Access model means making it freely available online without the need for the reader to pay for a book or a subscription to a journal.

The publishing of research, along with any supporting material, as Open Access is an important part of a wider move towards open research. Alongside more rapid and transparent publication processes, the aim is to maximise the efficiency, impact, and reproducibility of that research for the benefit of all. 

That is why we, as a university press, see open research and Open Access as fundamental to our mission of advancing learning, research and knowledge worldwide.

Some of you may now be thinking: well, if I don’t need to pay to read research, who pays for it to be published? 

There are different models, but in every case people need to be sure the research is accurate, relevant and of high quality. After all, scientific and academic conclusions are built on it.  So that means we need to continue to invest in rigorous content curation and production, and in ensuring what gets published is properly presented and promoted.

If Open Access moves the cost of publishing from the reader to the author, it risks creating new obstacles and inequalities. Not all researchers, their employers or institutions have equal access to the funding needed to cover article processing charges. The theme of this year’s Open Access Week is ‘It Matters How We Open Knowledge: Building Structural Equity’, and we believe all communities around the world must be able to benefit from open research, irrespective of funding levels or other inequalities. 

One way we have tried to address this is through Transformative Agreements with university libraries, often working together in national consortia. These agreements are ‘transformative’ because they help transition the money those universities spend on subscriptions to our journals to allow their scholars to publish research Open Access in those journals. We also work with organisations like Research4Life to ensure there is no barrier to publication for researchers from lower and middle income countries.

Such agreements are not the whole, nor the only answer, but they are one way in which we can increase the availability and the amount of Open Access publishing. We now have agreements covering more than 1,000 institutions around the world.

Driving innovation in Open Access

We see Open Access, together with the incredible functionality of digital publishing tools, as an opportunity to experiment and innovate, trying different ways of publishing research that better reflect the way it is done, and which boost collaboration and knowledge sharing.

Our three most recent innovations help to demonstrate the extent of that experimentation and the kinds of opportunities it brings.

Firstly, research journals, where we are about to launch two new publishing models called Research Directions and Cambridge Prisms.

Research Directions aims to bring researchers from different fields together around the fundamental questions that cut across traditional disciplines. By focusing research on finding answers to such questions, this unique approach will speed discovery by fostering collaboration and knowledge sharing between subject communities.

Informed by feedback from hundreds of researchers, the first titles under the Research Directions banner will launch in 2022, with an initial set of questions and a publishing model that mirrors the research lifecycle. Results, analysis and impact reviews will all be published as separate, Open Access, peer-reviewed and citable outputs on the Press’s Cambridge Core platform.

And we can link that peer-reviewed research to preprints, data, conference presentations and other supporting material on our early research platform, Cambridge Open Engage.

Here you can see how the flexibility of digital publishing can support innovative, Open Access publishing. In contrast to the traditional, self-contained research paper, researchers will be able to contribute at different stages in the process, sharing and building on each other’s work. They can submit results that address the questions posed, or analysis of others’ results, offering alternative insights and interpretations and using the findings to inform their own work.

Instead of a series of static, traditional journals, we can have living communities of researchers, working together, sharing and learning from each other’s findings to answer questions that they themselves have helped to shape.

Cambridge Prisms will also target cross-cutting, multidisciplinary subject areas that address major challenges at a global level.

Each title will be built around authoritative, commissioned review content, some of which will be published at launch. The journals will then open up to research content and people will be able to learn about the subject from top researchers in the field, while also publishing their own, cutting-edge research papers in the same place.

Books are another area of publishing where new funding models are needed to ensure any move to Open Access is sustainable and equitable. Funding to publish books Open Access is scattered, complex and not always clearly understood, so here too we are experimenting to find a way forward.

Our most recent innovation is Flip it Open, a pilot scheme that turns conventional publishing models on their head by making academic monographs that sell the most copies available online for free.

Flip it Open sees selected books published and sold as normal, primarily through library collections for universities. But once a title meets a set amount of revenue, the Press has committed to make it Open Access.

This means that those titles most in demand will be made Open Access first, giving more readers free access to popular monographs and authors greater reach and impact for their research without the need to pay Open Access publishing fees. It is an attempt to see if we can offer a solution that provides revenue for publishers and a simple route to Open Access for authors across the globe and in all fields of study.

In truth, there is unlikely to be a one-size-fits-all solution to publishing academic books Open Access; what works for monographs may not be suitable for another type of book. But it’s through trials like this that change and innovation happen.

We believe that the pursuit of knowledge benefits directly from collaboration, transparency, rapid dissemination and accessibility, which is why we are committed to Open Access, to open research and to unlocking the potential of high-quality research by building an open future.

•    Learn more about our approach to open research and Open Access publishing.