European science funders and research institutions are expanding Open Research Europe (ORE) to promote free open-access publishing and more transparent peer review. The enlarged platform, which the European Commission plans to launch by early November, will allow researchers to publish preprints, undergo openly documented peer review and have articles marked as peer-reviewed on the same site.
The Open Research Europe (ORE) Platform uses a “publish, review, curate” model. Under this approach, researchers post preprints, which are then peer-reviewed openly, with the reviewers’ identities and reports made public. Articles that complete the process are flagged as “peer-reviewed” on the same platform.
ORE includes funders from 11 countries, including the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the Swiss National Science Foundation, as well as three major research institutions, including the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). More than 2.5 million researchers will have access to the platform’s full editorial services free of charge. Since its launch in 2021, ORE has published approximately 1,500 articles.
“This is a joint effort to build a more transparent and sustainable publishing system that serves the research community and society as a whole,” said Karla Anaya-Carlsson, chair of the Stockholm-based ORE Funders Group.
A major undertaking
Mario Maricchi, a metascientist at Stanford University in California, says that the platform could simplify publishing for researchers and reduce costs for funders. But he cautions that operating a system at this scale “is a huge undertaking: who’s going to run the checks, who’s going to be in control, and who’s going to make the final decisions.”
The expansion project has a budget of €16 million (US$17.7 million) through 2030. The European Commission will provide 60% of the funding, with the remainder coming from other funders and research institutions. The participating organizations will manage the project, while CERN, the European particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, will host and operate the platform.
Broader support for open publishing
Separately from the ORE expansion, a group of 40 funders, institutions, publishers and platforms launched the Publish, Review and Curate alliance on October 28. The initiative aims to promote open publishing models of this kind.
Members include the journal eLife, the preprint organization OpenRxiv and the archive service Europe PubMed Central. Other participants include funders such as the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Gates Foundation, along with the institutional libraries of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom.
A radical approach
eLife introduced a “publish, review, curate” system in late 2022, prompting controversy. Some researchers viewed the model as a threat to the journal’s reputation, arguing that the ability to reject a manuscript during peer review was essential for maintaining integrity and consistency. Others described the approach as the future of research publishing.
Within two years of adopting the model, eLife lost its impact factor. Some bibliographic databases, including Web of Science, have changed how they index journals. It is not yet clear how indexing services will respond to ORE’s expansion. ORE does not have an impact factor and does not seek one.
Source: www.nature.com
