Discussion
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
Pleased to see NWO as considering, but somewhat surprised that they were not more forward thinking and participate immediately. It has been almost 15 years since I worked closely with NWO. I wonder if this is simply a timing issue or signals substantive opposition.
They ate now on board, I heard.
Probably not!
My guess is that they are mainly geared towards replacing the big, expensive science journals.
In my personal opinion, the money potentially to be saved from these fields by something like ORE is so huge, that we could, hypothetically, take 10% of that saved money and give it to all the minority fields like yours and more than double their budgets.
At least this bis how it roughly pans out in the library of our institution where I adviocate such an approach.
Ideally, the big, expensive sciences would focus on developments like ORE to eventually form an infrastructure as outlined here:
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.230206
In my ideal, hypothetical scenario, the minority fields can then each decide if they find such an infrastructure attractive and join, or if they'd rather receive increased financial support to keep their current operations funded.
Oh, and I also had not seen this bit:
"The Signatories expect the official launch of the collectively managed and funded ORE platform by the end of 2026."
So likely not ready by early next year, but late next year!
The FCT will be shut down by the Portuguese government in a couple of months...
That sounds dramatic - any sources for the claim? My search turned up nothing.
Maybe I was too specific about the date, but the Right Wing government is going to shut down the foundation, link in Portuguese: https://www.publico.pt/2025/07/31/sociedade/noticia/governo-extingue-fct-dez-organismos-area-educacao-2142463
OK, thanks for the link!
That does not look good, but one can still hope that the successor organization will continue the program - if all that comes to pass.
Yes, I'm not sure what would happen if the reviewers reject the article and you refuse to change it, it would still be available with the review comments. I can understand why one may want to then publish it elsewhere. There should be a resolution option in place for such cases.
Maybe withdraw the article?
I think further decentralization is being planned or at least considered.
#NFDI
@NFDI4Memory @nfdi4objects @nfdixcs @nfdi4culture @NFDI4DS @Textplus …
Good question!
I don't know. It would be nice to get some reaction from them!
It looks to me like most of the infrastructure behind this is going to be in ORCID (Open Research Contributor ID) and DOI (Digital Object Identifier).
DOI I've been aware of for a while. Not sure how long ORCID has existed.
ORE looks like it is adding peer review and maybe some community stuff? Hosting of the resource pointed to by the DOI?
Close. The main infrastructure right now is run by F1000 (now owned by Taylor & Francis):
https://www.f1000.com/about/
They are working on migrating it to OJS:
https://openjournalsystems.com/
Yes, Crossref is currently providing DOIs for the articles, IIUC, but any such provider could do that.
Yes, ORCID is used to provide IDs for authors. Some see this as problematic, but, as of now, I don't necessarily fully endorse this view.
Big news indeed...
Yes, exactly, same here! It was the consequential move after the latest conclusions by the Council of the EU:
and the path they outline is very promising, I think.
But moving beyond "encourage" will be important, ideally funders should move, not the EU (too top heavy).
Exactly!
That's precisely why I felt the move by these funders should receive more attention.
I'm happy to see that it seems obvious to more people than just me 😇
Oh, that would be such a logical next step, wouldn't it? This should be so obvious!
But I don't see how this will help researchers to move to another publication system together -- I worry that they'll continue paying APCs to publish in established venues (and do non-open reviews for these venues)
Ah, good question!
One of several short answers is that, e.g., if these funders/countries stop fduning legacy journals, these journals will eventually go bankrupt and then ORE is their replacement.
An attempt at a longer answer is in our paper:
I'm also wondering why this is such a low-level launch. I know the ORE people themselves are very concerned with too few submissions, but something about the way they go about it smells funny.
I could only speculate where the hesitation may come from, I don't know.
In my understanding, this is journal articles only.
I agree that an infrastructure for monographs would be more than just desirable, of course!
Probably representatives of your funding agencies? There may be different ways to get this goinbg, though.
I agree about the "below radar announcement" 🤣
It bothers me too - hence my thread.
The EU believes it can tackle the hiring/promotion problem with CoARA:
I'm skeptical.
2/4
My understanding is that the agreement covers any author in the country of the funder, grant or not,
Although for me it has some sense: as they state, the ORE platform is there to make “ it easy for European Commission beneficiaries to comply with the open access terms of their funding”. So as infraestructure is not infinite, it might be understandable to prioritize those that fulfill the initial aim of the platform.
This should be compatible with the appearence of other public platforms with a more general scope.
What can YOU do?
3/4
But this isn't really "networking" so it's not "decentralized". It's kinda like an ISBN for a book or whatever.
Not yet, I think, but from what I hear and read, it is on their mind - and if it isn't, everybody talking about it will bring it to their attention 😇 😆
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!
Another thing we can and should do is create decentralized infrastructure to mirror and distribute all content from ORE, to ensure availability and redundancy when confronted with curation and censorship attempts. Let's get a network of Raspberry Pis running IPFS around the world!
I'm in! Anyone else?
This sounds exactly the type of project and cultural shift we need!
The real blocker: ourselves.
Will be, as members of a grant panel or search committee, or grant reviewers, and as authors:
1. stop judging a paper by its publication venue;
2. stop providing subsidised labour to for-profit journals;
3. review only for non-profit journals;
4. send our manuscripts to journals aligned with our values of openness, data sharing, democratised access, diamond open access.
It’s really on us to stop this game of chicken.
I think their blurb on their new URL gives it away:
"ORE 2.0 is the vision to expand ORE to a European Diamond Open Access platform with open peer-review and operated by the academic community."
If the academic community operates it, we decide it:
(If it doesn't exist yet, I can't make it my primary publishing venue...)
But I'd suggest you edit the posts above to prominently link to it!
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