Science funders and research organizations in Europe are joining forces to expand open-access publishing and make the peer-review process more transparent, with the aim of spurring change in scholarly communication.

By early November, the European Commission will roll out an expanded version of its Open Research Europe (ORE) platform, which uses a ‘publish, review, curate’ model. In this approach, preprints are posted, reviewed openly — with the identity of the reviewers and their reports made public — then flagged as ‘peer reviewed’ on the same platform.

Joining the ORE are funders from 11 countries, including the German Research Foundation DFG and the Swiss National Science Foundation, as well as three major research organizations, including the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). More than 2.5 million researchers will now receive full editorial services on the platform at no charge. Since its launch in 2021, ORE has published some 1,500 articles.

“This is a collective effort to build a more transparent, sustainable publishing system that serves the research community and society as a whole,” says Karla Anaya-Carlsson, who chairs the ORE Funders Group and is based in Stockholm.

A big burden?

Mario Malički, a metascientist at Stanford University in California, says that the platform simplifies publishing for researchers and reduces funders’ costs. But, he cautions, running something at that scale “becomes a major undertaking of who runs the checks, who curates it and makes the final decisions”.

The expanded project has a budget of €16 million (US$17.7 million) between now and 2030, 60% of which will be provided by the European Commission and the remainder coming from the other funders and research organizations. It will be governed by these bodies, and hosted and operated by CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland.

Independently of the expansion of ORE, a group of 40 funders, institutions, publishers and platforms announced on 28 October the creation of the Publish, Review, Curate Alliance to promote such open publishing initiatives. Members include the journal eLife, the preprint organization OpenRxiv and the archiving service Europe PubMed Central. Other members include funders such as the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Gates Foundation, and institutional libraries at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the University of Cambridge, UK.

Radical approach

The ‘publish, review, curate’ system was implemented by eLife in late 2022 and caused controversy. Some saw the system as a threat to the reputation of the journal, saying that the possibility of rejecting manuscripts during the peer-review process is key to integrity and consistency. Others lauded the model as the future of research publishing.

Within two years of adopting this model, eLife lost its impact factor. Some bibliographic databases, including Web of Science, changed the way the journal was indexed. The finer details of how indexing services will respond to the expansion of ORE are not yet clear; ORE also has no impact factor, nor will it seek one.

ORE curates the literature by putting papers into collections based on topic or funding mechanism. This differs fromat eLife, for example, where editors add one-word assessments, such as ‘fundamental’, ‘useful’, ‘compelling’ or ‘inadequate’, to signal to readers the significance of a study and the strength of evidence.