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 threadDan GoodmanSep 3, 2025
@brembs is it decentralised?
Show threadderptronSep 3, 2025

@neuralreckoning @brembs Kinda maybe. DOI and/or ORCID "tables" could be hosted at any domain it looks like. They can refer to each other sort of like web links. So a document with a DOI record at doi.derp.org could have a bibliography refering to a document pointed at by a DOI record hosted at doi.herp.org.

But this isn't really "networking" so it's not "decentralized". It's kinda like an ISBN for a book or whatever.

Show threadderptronSep 3, 2025
@neuralreckoning @brembs I think to be "decentralized" something like this would need to allow you to generate you own, guaranteed unique ID. That doesn't look like the protocol here. You ask an authority for an ID and they host the record for you.
Show threadBjörn BrembsSep 4, 2025

@crazyeddie @neuralreckoning

A very useful project would be, in my mind, to try and implement a technology like COAR Notify in ORE:

https://coar-repositories.org/what-we-do/notify/

Not only would that bring a huge fraction of the scholarly literature to ORE, done intelligently, it would also bring true decentralization.

COAR Notify

The COAR Notify Initiative is developing and accelerating community adoption of a standard, interoperable, and decentralised approach to linking research outputs hosted in the distributed network o…

COAR
Show threadToma SusiSep 4, 2025
@brembs @crazyeddie @neuralreckoning Why would we want to “bring a huge fraction of the scholarly literature to ORE”..? It is not an aggregator or an archive, it is a platform for publishing original work.
Show threadBjörn BrembsSep 4, 2025

@mostlyphysics @crazyeddie @neuralreckoning

I'm not sure I follow? Is the scholarly literature not "original work"? When should an article move into an "archive" and how long should an article remain on "the platform"? Because I don't see the difference between older and brand new articles, I don't weant to see them in separated silos. It feels to me, the scholarly literature should be in one silo and this is also what we envisage here:

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.230206

Can you explain?

Show threadToma SusiSep 4, 2025
@brembs @crazyeddie @neuralreckoning I think you and others are wish-projecting things on it that it was never meant to do. The idea is for ORE to host research that has been published on ORE, nothing else.
Show threadDan GoodmanSep 4, 2025
@mostlyphysics @brembs @crazyeddie I don't think he's "wish-projecting", he's suggesting a way it could be something more than it is.
Show threadToma SusiSep 4, 2025
@neuralreckoning @brembs @crazyeddie Knowing a bit about how relatively tricky it has been to build consensus over the expansion (case in point, missing UK participation, for example), and how large the technical and governance challenges will be to implement it, I think it is not realistic to expect for it to evolve into something so much beyond it’s intended purpose for the funders who foot the bill – at least not for the near-to-mid-term future. Sorry to pour some cold water on this but I think this discussion is confusing what these changes are about and what they are not.
Show threadderptron
@mostlyphysics @neuralreckoning @brembs It looks to me like it chose a lot of the right technologies to implement on. It'll play well with others that do similar things and serve as a nice host to these 'federated' protocols. It's good to see because as far as I know the current method is to get a doi and then point it at some random url where your document will be. That's got all kinds of weaknesses for things that should stick around.
Sep 4, 2025 at 5:42pmWeb