Research Directions journals will publish high quality, high-impact open access research with global reach that will target interdisciplinary subject areas, with the author responding to field specific curated research questions or hypotheses.

Unlike traditional journals, which are structured around a descriptive scope, authors publishing in Research Directions will be invited to publish research that takes incremental steps to answering a set of distinct research questions, intended to be definitive to a specific field. The resulting published output is broken down into discrete parts - results, analysis, impact - each of which is indexed, receives a DOI and is considered a published and citable research item. These published research outputs will sit on the journal platform and will link through DOIs to outputs uploaded by researchers on Engage (our preprint server), outputs that are not formally part of standard journal research outputs (such as pre-prints, data sets, software descriptions, research posters, community briefs), giving visibility to the entire research journey as it progresses.