Cambridge University Press announces content sharing success

Cambridge University Press has announced that its new content sharing tool, Cambridge Core Share, is now a permanent feature of its online books and journals platform following a successful ten-month pilot.

Launched in December 2017, Cambridge Core Share helps to make research more open and accessible by enabling users to generate a link to a read-only version of a journal article which can be shared online, allowing anyone to read the final version of the article for free.

Cambridge Core Share has also recently been enhanced with new functionality that gives users the option of generating a PDF containing a link to a journal article, making it easier for users to share the links on scholarly collaboration network sites such as ResearchGate and Academia.edu.

Since its launch, over 6,000 Core Share links have been generated by people around the world, leading to almost 160,000 free-to-read views with monthly views growing to over 14,000. Over 250 journals have joined Cambridge Core Share and work is underway to make the service more widely available across the Press’s entire journals programme. More content has been added; all compatible digital content from 1997 can now be shared, whereas only articles from 2016 onwards could be shared during the pilot.

Mandy Hill, Managing Director of Academic Publishing at the Press, says: ‘We’re delighted with the success of the Cambridge Core Share pilot and its transition to a permanent feature. The service contributes to one of our Open Research goals of making research as impactful and accessible as possible and is an important part of our long-term commitment to a more open future for academic publishing.

‘As an advocate for the benefits of Open Research, we are happy to work to directly support rapid dissemination and collaboration for researchers. We will continue to invest in innovative solutions and explore models that will ensure sustainability and quality for the academic community.’

The Press’s Open Research programme builds on existing activities by increasing investment in open solutions, products, policies, processes and partnerships. The Press’s vision in Open Research is to unlock the potential of high quality research and work towards a more impactful, community-led and diverse Open future. As well as Cambridge Core Share, recent initiatives to drive forward the Press’s Open Research programme include:

  • Committing to convert four STM journals to the Open Access model, with plans to flip more in 2020
  • Investing in launching and developing new Open Access journals, collaborating closely with key research communities and societies
  • Reaching an agreement with ResearchGate to enable our authors to responsibly share their research via one of the biggest scholarly collaboration networks
  • Partnering with Code Ocean to increase the reproducibility of research by enabling authors to share the underlying code in their article and readers to easily run the same code
  • Rolling out a new APC waiver policy to ensure global access to Gold OA
  • Refreshing our double-dipping pricing policy to ensure that institutions and libraries never pay twice for our content
  • Becoming a signatory to the Centre for Open Science’s Transparency, Openness, and Promotion Framework (TOP) and endorsing the FAIR principles for the persistence and discoverability of research data
  • Partnering with Hypothesis and the Qualitative Data Repository to launch the ALPSP award-nominated “Annotation for Transparent Inquiry” for qualitative research

To find out more about Cambridge Core Share, please visit the website.