This special edition of the Irish Probation Journal celebrates its excellent track record of publishing open access criminal justice research and building links among researchers, practitioners and policymakers on the island of Ireland. Both probation services have expressed strong commitments to partnership working and to using research and evidence to inform their practices and decision-making, using the Journal to facilitate these discussions. With this in mind, it is important to consider how we can build on this open, collaborative approach to research, evidence-based policy and practice and publishing into the future. This article represents the first output from a National Open Research Forum-funded project that aims to embed a culture of interdisciplinary open research in the field of criminal justice. The setting for this project is Ireland. Its authors are among the many research, criminal justice and community-sector professionals who represent their organisations on the new Criminal justice Open Research Dialogue (CORD) Partnership, launched as part of the funded project. The article was developed collaboratively during the CORD Partnership’s first event in Maynooth in January 2024, and then subsequently via an open authorship process through which partners could become named authors. It contextualises the establishment of the CORD Partnership, outlining what we mean by a ‘culture of open research’ and situating our goals in Ireland’s research and criminal justice policy frameworks. The piece then outlines the Partnership’s agreed purposes and principles and provides some opening considerations as to the criminal justice sector’s open-research needs. It concludes by describing the CORD Partnership’s next steps. The views expressed here represent those of the named authors only, not of their organisations, nor of anyone who participates in the CORD Partnership but is not a named author on the article. This project has received funding from Ireland’s National Open Research Forum (NORF) under the 2023 Open Research Fund. NORF is funded by the Higher Education Authority (HEA) on behalf of the Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science (DFHERIS.