The Open Research Europe platform provides 2.5 million researchers with full editorial services free of charge. Credit: Michael Szebor/Nature
European science funders and research institutions are joining forces to expand open-access publishing and make peer review more transparent. The expanded Open Research Europe platform is intended to change how research is published, reviewed and organized, and the European Commission plans to launch it by early November.
Open Research Europe (ORE) uses a “publish, review, curate” model. Under this approach, researchers post preprints, which are then reviewed openly. The reviewers’ identities and reports are made public, and papers are marked 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 Centre 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 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 institutions will manage the project, while CERN, the European particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, will host and operate it.
Separately from the ORE expansion, a group of 40 funders, institutions, publishers and platforms launched the Publish, Review and Curate alliance on October 28 to promote similar open-publishing initiatives. Its members include the journal eLife, the preprint organization OpenRxiv and the archive service Europe PubMed Central. Other members 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
The “publish, review, curate” system was adopted by eLife in late 2022, prompting controversy. Some researchers saw the model as a threat to the journal’s reputation, arguing that the ability to reject a manuscript during peer review was essential to maintaining integrity and consistency. Others welcomed 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, also 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 is not seeking one.
ORE also curates the literature by organizing papers into collections based on their themes or funding mechanisms. This differs from eLife’s approach: ORE editors can add one-word assessments such as “basic,” “useful,” “convincing” or “inappropriate” to indicate a study’s importance and the strength of its evidence.
Source: www.nature.com