Operating Open Research Europe (ORE) as a non-profit open access scientific publishing service for the public good

Open Research Europe (ORE) is the open access publishing platform of the European Commission for research outputs stemming from EU funding programmes.[[https://open-research-europe.ec.europa.eu/]]

Expected Outcome: Project results are expected to contribute to all of the following outcomes:

• Operation of the ORE open access scientific publishing service by CERN;
• Consolidation and maintenance of the open source software infrastructure developed on behalf of the Commission to underpin the operation of ORE;[[https://ted.europa.eu/en/notice/-/detail/462312-2024]]
• Further integration of ORE with the EU Open Research Repository, particularly facilitating deposition, discovery, and referencing high quality research outputs;
• Engagement with the scientific community and other stakeholders including through advisory bodies to support the uptake of ORE;
• Best practices for operating a high-quality, transparent, open, trustworthy and equitable scholarly publishing system for the public good.

Expected Impact: The proposal should set out a credible pathway to contributing to all of the following impacts:

• Implementation of the vision and principles as put forward in the scoping report “Open Research Europe - Towards a Collective Open Access Publishing Service”¹;
• Aligned institutional and funding policies and strategies regarding non-profit open access multi-format scholarly publishing model;
• Further evolution of high quality, transparent, open, trustworthy and equitable publishing models for non-profit, scholarly open access publishing, in line with the Council Conclusions of 2023 on ‘High-quality, transparent, open, trustworthy and equitable scholarly publishing’[[https://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-9616-2023-INIT/en/pdf]] and of 2022 on ‘Research assessment and open science’[[https://www.consilium.europa.eu/media/56958/st10126-en22.pdf]];
• Enhanced open science policy implementation, notably on open access to research outputs, open peer-review, FAIR and open data, and reproducibility of research outputs;
• Embedding ORE into the European Research Area as a common service for all researchers;
• Contribution to the reform of research assessment by providing infrastructure that supports recognition of diverse research outputs, practices and activities with the overarching goal to maximise the quality and impact of research.

Scope:

Launched in March 2021, Open Research Europe¹ (ORE) is the open access publishing service offered by the European Commission (EC) as an optional service to grantees of its Framework Programmes and at no cost to them. It enables scholarly publishing of high scientific quality under a cost-efficient and transparent model. ORE is implemented until 2026 through a European Commission (EC) public procurement contract.

ORE supports innovative scholarly communication and open science practices, such as early and open sharing of research, the recognition of and rewarding for diverse research outputs, and creating visibility for peer review as a research contribution. It follows an innovative open access publishing model for articles, which is based on open peer review after publication (the so-called ‘post-publication open peer review’ model). In ORE emphasis is placed on the merit and impact (scientific, societal, economic) of individual publications and not on venue-based indicators as proxies of quality (e.g. the Journal Impact Factor).

Following up on the Council Conclusions of 2022 and 2023, the Commission and a group of national research funding and performing organisations have established a vision[[https://data.europa.eu/doi/10.2777/204155 ]] for the future of ORE as a collectively funded scholarly publishing service with a non-profit mission for the public good, with the service no longer restricted to beneficiaries of EU funding programmes.

A number of research funding and performing organisations have signed a Statement of Intent on ORE[[https://zenodo.org/records/14725287]], announcing that they, in collaboration with the European Commission, intend to support and fund ORE as a collective, non-profit open access publishing service for an initial period of five years. The Statement will be followed by a formal collaboration agreement between the Signatories, detailing the collective legal and governance structure, financial contributions, and operational framework and entity to operate ORE.

The present grant will provide the European Commission’s contribution to finance the transition and early operation of ORE as a collective open access publishing service by CERN, ensuring the continuity and sustainability of the ORE publishing service currently operating as a European Commission service for the beneficiaries of EU funding programmes, as well as its seamless embedding in CERN’s broader open-source infrastructure for open science, and in particular the Zenodo repository.

CERN is uniquely positioned to operate ORE. CERN is a non-profit intergovernmental organisation enjoying high recognition and visibility amongst researcher communities. It has robust technological infrastructures and the experience, ability and resources to manage the financial and administrative aspects of complex projects, as well as managing collective funding and participatory governance models for international partnerships (e.g. SCOAP3). CERN has long-term successful experience and expertise in open science and relevant services and infrastructures. CERN also provides support for key open-source software scholarly infrastructures (e.g. Invenio on which Zenodo is based) and for open access publishing services (e.g. SCIPost, CERN Yellow Reports), and its IT department has outstanding experience in providing robust, state-of-the-art computing and data management services.

Importantly, a long-lasting collaboration between the European Commission and CERN in the context of the Memorandum of Understanding between the two organisations[[https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:32009D0488&qid=1740390489077]] includes infrastructures that enable Open Science policy implementation, for example through the trusted repository Zenodo, which CERN operates, as well as exploring potential concrete contributions to ORE in the future by CERN. The Commission recommends Zenodo to its beneficiaries as a trusted repository to help them meet their open access obligations; it recently funded the ‘EU Open Research Repository’ within Zenodo to further enhance the capacity of this infrastructure in supporting the deposit needs of Horizon Europe beneficiaries.[[https://zenodo.org/communities/eu/]] Additionally, ORE already automatically deposits its peer-reviewed publications in Zenodo.

The operation of ORE by CERN will thus allow further integration of these services and their underpinning open-source infrastructure creating a powerful suit of complementary services. It will offer users improved paths to meeting their open access requirements and practices of open science, as well as deliver added value in better discoverability of research outputs.

The beneficiary of this grant should ensure the smooth operation of the ORE publishing activities, including editorial oversight, peer-review, publication, deposit of publications in Zenodo, indexing, and targeted marketing activities to increase uptake of the platform, thereby providing seamless continuity to the high-quality publishing services that ORE currently offers. The innovative post-publication open peer-review publishing model and high standards for pre-publication checks and the peer-review process shall be maintained as key elements that already characterise ORE.

The beneficiary of this grant shall provide researchers the open access peer-reviewed publishing and editorial services of ORE based on the Open Journal Systems, a Public Knowledge Project open-source infrastructure that the Commission has funded to be customized for the workflow and other publishing needs of ORE.[[]] It shall ensure technical support and improvements to the open source infrastructure on which ORE will be based in view of providing a seamless publishing experience, and its seamless integration with Zenodo.

The beneficiary of this grant shall also ensure that efficient marketing and communication actions support the uptake of ORE as the platform of choice for publishing by an increasing share of researchers.

The proposal shall address, as a minimum, the following: editorial management including quality control and quality assurance; production/supplier management; platform/technology management; marketing and community engagement strategy; and office management/administration, as well as a set of measurable key performance indicators for the achievement of the objective of developing and operating ORE.

Any software developed under this action shall be open source, licensed under a CC0 public domain dedication or under an open-source licence as recommended by the Free Software Foundation[[]] and the Open Source Initiative[[https://opensource.org/licenses]]

The expected duration of the action is 5 years.

This grant will be awarded without a call for proposals according to Article 198(e) of the Financial Regulation 2024/2509[[European Commission: Directorate-General for Budget, Financial regulation applicable to the general budget of the Union (recast), Publications Office of the European Union, 2024, https://data.europa.eu/doi/10.2761/686790]] and Article 24(3)(b) of the Horizon Europe Regulation to the legal entity identified below.

The general conditions, including admissibility conditions, eligibility conditions, award criteria, evaluation and award procedure, legal and financial set-up for grants, financial and operational capacity and exclusion, and procedure are set out in Annexes A to G of the General Annexes to the Horizon Europe Work Programme.

Legal and financial set-up of the Grant Agreement:

The funding rate will be 60%.

Subcontracting is not restricted to a limited part of the action.

The European Research Executive Agency (REA) will implement the action through a co-delegation.