Björn BrembsSep 3, 2025

This should have been big news!

Ten funding agencies from eight European countries have pledged to support a public infrastructure that is poised to replace academic journals:
FWF 🇦🇹
RCN 🇳🇴
Forte 🇸🇪
ARIS 🇸🇮
SRC 🇸🇪
FCT 🇵🇹
CSIC 🇪🇸
DFG 🇩🇪
Formas 🇸🇪
ANR 🇫🇷
Only two of them issued press releases in English:
https://www.fwf.ac.at/en/news/detail/joint-commitment-to-strengthening-open-research-europe
https://www.fccn.pt/en/atualidade/fct-assina-declaracao-fortalecimento-open-research-europe-ore/
and one more, NWO from 🇳🇱 considers joining:
https://www.nwo.nl/en/news/nwo-endorses-joining-open-access-platform-open-research-europe-ore
Why is this BIG? 1/4
#openscience #openaccess

Joint Commitment to Strengthening Open Research Europe

In December 2024, ten leading European research funding organizations, including the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), signed a Statement of Intent to jointly support and further develop the Open Research Europe (ORE) publication platform.

Austrian Science Fund (FWF)
Show threadBjörn BrembsSep 3, 2025

1. This development essentially entails that all authors in the participating countries now have a venue where they can publish #openaccess without any fees.
2. The vision is to develop Open Research Europe (ORE) "as a collective non-profit open access publishing service for the public good".
https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/3603e219-6a65-11ef-a8ba-01aa75ed71a1/language-en

2/4

Open research Europe - Publications Office of the EU

Publications Office of the EU
Show threadBjörn BrembsSep 3, 2025

3. As we outline in our article, such a decentralized public infrastructure can be highly resilient against not only natural or political disasters, but also "against corporate capture and surveillance technologies":
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.230206
4. If/when funding agencies realize that maintaining funding for legacy journals directly counteracts the goals they signed onto with their support of ORE, the legacy journals stand to suffer massive drops in revenue.

What can YOU do?

3/4

#academicchatter

Show threadBjörn BrembsSep 3, 2025

Here are two easy things YOU can do:

#1 Every academic supporting #openscience and #openaccess should consider ORE as their primary publishing venue and ask colleague/co-authors to do the same.

#2 Point your librarian, institutional leaders, funding agencies towards the documents linked above and ask them to support ORE, too.

#3 Make *everyone* and every institution aware that they now have a choice: support parasitic corporations or the public good. By their actions you shall know them!

Show threadChristopher Kyba 🇨🇦🇪🇺

@brembs This is great news, but from your thread I don't see that ORE actually exists yet... Or does it? If so, can you please include in the thread the link?

(If it doesn't exist yet, I can't make it my primary publishing venue...)

Sep 3, 2025 at 12:35pmWeb
Show threadChristopher Kyba 🇨🇦🇪🇺Sep 3, 2025

@brembs I found it: https://open-research-europe.ec.europa.eu/

But I'd suggest you edit the posts above to prominently link to it!

Show threadthomastc | frozenfractalSep 5, 2025
@skyglowberlin @brembs Oof, that needs a better URL that doesn't say "Europe" four times.
Show threadBjörn BrembsSep 5, 2025

@thomastc @skyglowberlin

This will be the new URL:

https://www.ore.eu/

Home Page

ORE 2.0
Show threadBjörn BrembsSep 3, 2025

@skyglowberlin

Oh, sorry, it's been around for a few years, so I thought everyone on here knows it already:

https://open-research-europe.ec.europa.eu/

https://www.ore.eu/

As the press releases say, the transition is scheduled to happen in January 2026.

Show threadChristopher Kyba 🇨🇦🇪🇺Sep 3, 2025

@brembs I'm not sure I had seen it.

But I'm afraid after looking at several pages, I'm still confused as to what "the transition" is. I mean, I guess from ORE to ORE 2.0, but what does that mean?

Does it mean that soon any researchers in Europe can publish there, instead of only people reporting results from Horizon (etc) grants?

Looking everything over, I don't particularly like the "you can go back and edit the paper at any time in the future" aspect. And I think there are some serious structural issues with open review (yes, anonymous review also has problems, but they are different problems). Before I knew about those two aspects, I thought "ok, in the future, I'll send nearly everything there!" Now I'm less excited, but I'm still interested to try it out.

Show threadAlbert CardonaSep 3, 2025
@skyglowberlin @brembs Like citations in wikipedia which have the access date added. Or posts here in Mastodon, which are editable, but a boost is for a specific version. Better enable live papers with incorporated but tracked erratums, than virtually invisible erratums or retractions.
#ScientificPublishing
Show threadChristopher Kyba 🇨🇦🇪🇺Sep 4, 2025

@albertcardona I understand the idea, but I think research articles are different from social media and Wikipedia and that there is some value in them becoming frozen when they are published.

I definitely don't want to be prodded to go back and edit something I wrote 5 or 10 years ago, and I see a serious trap here for the kinds of people who have trouble letting things be. I have known several people who would I can imagine would have gotten stuck constantly editing an already published article if that had been possible.

I would be fine the with the possibility of releasing a new version if a serious error comes to light. But allowing minor revisions at any time after publication? I don't see any need for that, and I see a lot of possible downside.

Show threadBjörn BrembsSep 4, 2025

@albertcardona @skyglowberlin

Yes!
As long as there is a clear record of all the versions, it is easy to see which version was cited and one can even set up alerts for when a version gets changed, e.g. for the most important publications in the field, or particularly contentious ones.
Probably like Wikipedia, the number of scholarly publications with many version will be really low?

Show threadChristopher Kyba 🇨🇦🇪🇺Sep 4, 2025
@brembs @albertcardona I am open to seeing how it goes.
Show threadDavid WeirOct 19

@skyglowberlin in addition to things like arxiv, Zenodo has versioning - you can get a DOI for the deposit in general or a specific version. If you land on an old version of the deposit, a banner appears pointing you to the new version.

In terms of research outputs that are peer reviewed, there are journals like Living Reviews in [X] which do a decent job of allowing authors to update their work when appropriate, so this doesn’t seem too terrible on the face of it. I’d be happy if there were publicly-owned gold OA alternatives to those journals.
@brembs @albertcardona

Show threadBjörn BrembsSep 4, 2025

@skyglowberlin

It is my understanding that every author in the listed countries should be able to publish in ORE without fees starting 2026. At least this bis what I'm going to assume and try out come January.

Show threadChristopher Kyba 🇨🇦🇪🇺Sep 4, 2025
@brembs Ok, that's great. Once it's clear that that's the case, I'll try to spread it through my email networks. From my side, I will have DFG funding for the next 5 years, so it should definitely be possible for me to try submitting there.