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)

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

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

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!

@brembs That’s all nice and sweet, but how can we make sure this abomination of “typesetting” employed on the platform does not become the new norm for how we publish and read all our scholarship? (I know that there are bigger concerns and that his should probably not be the decisive factor. But I also honestly believe that there is an aesthetic aspect driving scholar’s decisions about where to publish.)

@felwert @brembs

The platform is the one developed for/by F1000, where features, layout and PDF files look similar. But I am sure the PDF and HTML templates can be tweaked and improved.

(I agree that this is definitely a factor for acceptance of a journal... silly as it might seem.)

@christof @felwert

The back-end itself is in the process of being migrated from F1000 to OJS...

@brembs @felwert

Oh, that's good news. I feel more comfortable with #OJS than with #F1000.