How does it work? 

ORE operates on a post-publication model of peer review. The submissions undergo a number of detailed ethical and open research checks before being published on the site. This includes ensuring compliance with our Open Data policy, which aligns with the Horizon Europe Grant Agreement and the FAIR principles of data sharing. The articles are also indexed in Google Scholar straight away upon publication!

As soon as the paper is published, our in-house editorial team begins identifying and reaching out to potential peer reviewers for every paper. These reviews are also checked by our team before being published on the site alongside the article. Authors are encouraged to respond to the reviewers and revise their papers, ultimately submitting a new version of their article. This revised version is published alongside the original to show the progress of the article throughout the peer review process.

Once the reviewers are happy and the article has passed peer review, the paper will be sent to the major indexing databases and repositories connected to ORE, including OpenAIRE. Every paper is also deposited on Zenodo.

Check out the YouTube playlist for some videos on the different aspects of our model and to hear from some of our authors about their experiences.

What does the future look like for Open Research Europe? 

 In October 2023 the European Commission announced F1000 had been awarded a second contract for the ongoing technology and publishing services for ORE. This second contract included taking steps towards supporting multilingual publishing and enhancing the interoperability of the platform with OpenAIRE. Progress has already started under this new contract as authors are now able to submit their abstracts in additional languages, in addition to the English abstract. These additional language abstracts are displayed on the site alongside the English abstract. This increases the discoverability of the content by allowing research papers to be searched for and found in other languages, as well as allowing the abstract to be read in other languages.

As well as these exciting developments, the eligibility criteria of the platform have also expanded. The platform is currently now open to submissions from all European Commission Framework Programmes in the Multiannual Framework Programme regarding their original peer-reviewed publications. Additionally, peer-reviewed publications produced by Commission staff and staff at European Union agencies are also eligible for publication on ORE. This reinforces the position of the European Commission as a funder that leads by example in operationalising open science and enlarging it to a wider range of beneficiaries. Find out more about the eligibility criteria expansion here.

Thinking longer term, the European Commission is working to expand the eligibility criteria even further. The ambition is for ORE to be a top quality, trusted collective open access publishing service for the public good. It should be collectively owned and supported by research funders and research institutions and operate as a service for researchers with no author facing fees. The aim is for the infrastructure of the platform to be open source and for the publishing service to be without eligibility barriers. To achieve this, conversations are ongoing between the European Commission and other national funders to finalise the vision and principles, put together a roadmap and explore not-for-profit business models and governance structures that might work.

Read the newsletter to keep up to date with all the latest developments on Open Research Europe.