The Criminal justice Open Research Dialogue (CORD) Partnership aims to embed a culture of interdisciplinary open research in criminal justice in Ireland. It achieves this by bringing together criminal justice researchers, policymakers and practitioners to decide collectively how we should engage, what our priorities should be, and which actions would make the most of our knowledge and expertise to achieve shared goals. As of January 2025, CORD has 135 partners representing 59 organisations, including researchers, criminal justice policymakers, practitioners and oversight professionals, non-state justice practitioners, civil society advocates and research development professionals.
     
    The CORD Partnership launched in 2024, funded by Ireland’s National Open Research Forum (NORF) under the 2023 Open Research Fund. In 2024, CORD partners came together for three workshops to co-create a set of principles and priorities, learn from research partnerships in other countries, and develop an action plan. At the first event, attendees discussed CORD’s purpose, principles and priorities. This led to an article, co-authored by 58 partners across 32 organisations, which states that CORD should aim to ‘support positive social change by embedding a culture of interdisciplinary open research’ and contribute to ‘an Ireland in which everyone is safer from harm and can access inclusive justice services which meet their needs’ (Marder et al., 2024: 173). The second event explored translational criminology and the experiences of research-policy-practice partnerships (R3Ps) in other countries. A working paper was published by the Maynooth University Social Sciences Institute (MUSSI) based on the learning from this event (Kenny, 2024).
     
    The third event of 2024 was hosted by the Department of Justice. Partners discussed the findings of a scoping review on criminal justice research partnerships and used design exercises to develop problem statements and identify and vote on actions to include in the action plan. This action plan was published by NORF in January 2025 as An Agenda for the CORD Partnership, 2025-2026. It has five action areas relating to sharing research findings, understanding each other, collaborating on events, piloting Areas of Research Interest and building infrastructure for partnership research.
     
    In January 2025, CORD launched an Implementation Group which aims to ensure that the CORD Partnership’s Agenda is delivered to the greatest extent possible, in a manner that meets partners’ and society’s needs. It will also provide direction on CORD’s development more broadly. Details about the Implementation Group, which has 21 members from 16 organisations, are here.
     
    A summary of the scoping review of criminal justice research partnerships, with a response from the Department of Justice, was published by Irish Legal News. This can be read here. An article detailing the findings from this scoping review is under review. A summary of the process we used to build the CORD Partnership was published by the European Network for Open Criminology and can be read here.
     
    Also in 2024, Project Chair Dr. Ian Marder (Maynooth University, School of Law and Criminology) conducted a study visit to four criminal justice research centres and partnerships in the UK to learn about their administration, governance and funding, research co-production, small grants schemes, and practitioner fellowships. A report on this visit was published by MUSSI and can be read here.