Open Access Week is always a good chance to reflect on the progress since last year and think about what needs to happen next. At Cambridge University Press, we’ve been working to move the needle closer to openness on so many fronts and are pleased to be picking up real momentum.  

Last year we had 18 transformative agreements; we now have over 100 covering 1000 institutes in 30 countries and nearly 50% of our research authors. We are building a forward-thinking program of new OA journals, such as Flow and Research Directions.  Cambridge Open Engage has also made significant progress, with ChemRxiv now live on the platform and new functionality to support conferences and events. 

Our open research transformation is a work in progress however and we are evolving to ensure that we’re delivering on our mission for our authors, customers, partners, and users. Looking ahead, our ambitions for future developments include:  

Publishing open access content 

We are working towards publishing all research as open access. We are well on the way to achieving this for journals, while for books we must find new publishing models that can sustainably support OA at high scale. 

• We support the transformation of transformative agreements to enable all journal authors who want to publish open access find a path to Gold OA, including under-funded authors. We will offer a Gold OA route for 90%+ research articles published in journals by 2022 and remain committed to working with partners to close this gap entirely. We are working to transition the vast majority of our journals research publishing to full OA by 2025.  

• We will strive to identify new approaches for publishing research books at scale as Gold OA. We are committed to trying to find sustainable ways to quickly increase the number of OA books we publish through partnerships and pilot projects such as Flip It Open.  

• We will grow the OA Cambridge Elements list and experiment with OA publishing for individual Elements and series in 2021 and beyond. Founded in 2019, the Elements program plays a distinct role in providing access to content that doesn’t conform to traditional publishing models and there are already a number of Open Access Elements available.  

• We will facilitate the greater sharing of early research outputs, such as preprints and conference papers. We will increase openness by introducing an option for articles submitted to our journals to be deposited automatically via Cambridge Open Engage in 2022. 

Supporting transparency in research 

Open access is just a part of our transformation. Fully open research requires greater transparency about research processes and the work that underpins published findings. 

• We will continually improve the information we collect and share about the research we publish. This includes ORCID identifiers for authors and reviewers, which has been mandated for approximately 161 journals thus far, and other key metadata such as CRediT for author contributions, funder and grant identifiers, standardised institution identifiers, and machine-readable end-user licenses. 

• All journals will have an appropriate research transparency policy, to foster more sharing of research materials and outputs, such as data and code by 2022. 

• As a signatory of the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), we continue to diversify publication metrics beyond the 2-year journal Impact Factor, employing a greater range of author and article-level metrics to support the assessment of research impact. 

Improving our publishing practices and services 

The transformation to open research affects nearly every part of our research publishing activity. We have already made substantial changes and improvements and will continue to invest in more. 

• We will uphold our commitment to journal pricing transparency, showing how our revenues support our journal publishing activities and reducing journal subscription prices in line with reductions in subscription (non-OA) content. 

• We will continually improve our workflows for authors to publish OA with us, and for institutions to partner with us to support the transition to open research. 

• We will drive ever-greater impact through the more widespread dissemination of open access content and monitor that impact through new partnerships and the adoption of new approaches and standards for impact assessment. 

• We will continue to improve our support for automated content analysis, such as text and data mining (TDM). In 2020 we made our TDM policy for Cambridge Core significantly more permissive, and we will continue to make practical improvements to our services and systems to facilitate more automated content analysis. 

While these ambitions are meant to help us maintain momentum, they are also meant to extend ongoing conversations with our communities and push us in new directions. We welcome your feedback, contact us via openresearch@cambridge.org.