With the launch of the new ORE platform later this year, authorship eligibility will expand to include researchers affiliated with institutions in countries participating in the consortium. Publishing will remain completely free for both European Commission-funded researchers and authors from participating countries. With NWO joining ORE, this will mean that the platform will be available as a publication channel for researchers affiliated with a Dutch research organisation, regardless of whether they have an NWO grant or not. The aim of the platform is to promote equity, diversity, and transparency in scholarly communication while maintaining high standards of quality and integrity.
Marcel Levi, president of NWO and vice president of Science Europe: “For NWO, the development of the Open Research Europe platform aligns perfectly with NWO’s institutional open access strategy. This strategy focuses on stimulating and encouraging alternatives to open access beyond commercial parties and open access fees via the APC-model. What makes the new ORE stand out is its inherently collaborative nature: a broad coalition of funders and institutions from across Europe jointly building a sustainable open access publishing infrastructure. As such advancing open science practices together, like open peer review. Hosting the platform at CERN sends a powerful message to academic communities that the new ORE is firmly grounded in public values and committed to safeguarding publicly funded research.”
“Hosting the platform at CERN sends a powerful message to academic communities that the new ORE is firmly grounded in public values and committed to safeguarding publicly funded research”
Rigor and transparency
ORE follows the innovative Publish–Review–Curate model, which promotes rigor and transparency in the publishing of research. Articles are first checked for integrity and compliance, then published and peer-reviewed openly. Peer-review reports are made public, and articles that successfully pass review are curated into subject-specific collections. This approach combines quality assurance with openness, while enabling post-publication review.
Steady growth
Launched by the European Commission in 2021 to provide beneficiaries of EU research programmes with a no-fee open access publishing platform, ORE was designed to make publicly funded research more transparent, accessible and sustainable through an innovative publishing model. In the five years since its launch, the platform has seen steady growth and uptake across the research community, with more than 1,200 articles published and over 6,300 authors from more than 3,000 institutions worldwide.
CERN
CERN’s role in operating ORE builds on its long-standing experience in developing and maintaining open science infrastructures and community-governed services for the global research community. By hosting ORE, CERN will provide a neutral, reliable, and sustainable environment, drawing on expertise gained through flagship open science initiatives such as Zenodo, Invenio, and SCOAP3.
“For CERN, hosting Open Research Europe is a natural extension of our commitment to open, community-led scientific infrastructure,” according to Alex Kohls, head of the Organisational Support and Improvement department at CERN. “The platform supports the rapid sharing of research while reinforcing Europe’s ability to shape the future of scholarly communication.”
Fairer, more equitable and more diverse
The importance of supporting ORE is also underlined by the EU-Council's Conclusions on Open Scholarly Communication of May 2023. NWO has been committed to promoting diamond open access (no cost to the author or the reader) for a long time. For example, it funded the national publication platform openjournals.nl and supports diamond open access initiatives such as Open Library for the Humanities (OLH) and Scipost.