Eleven countries launch their own platform to break the power of commercial scientific journals

Put your article online first, and the expert peer review can come later, says research funder NWO. And it won’t cost you a penny. “We want to offer alternatives to commercial journals.”

Researchers at Dutch universities, universities of applied sciences and research institutes can now publish their articles free of charge on a European platform: ORE, or Open Research Europe. It is managed by CERN, the organisation behind the particle accelerator near Geneva.

The platform has existed for a few years, but was previously only open to researchers who received a European project grant. That has now changed. Eleven countries, with support from the European Commission, will explore whether they can change the culture around scientific publishing.

Recognition

Conventional scientific journals have been under fire for years: subscriptions are expensive and articles are often behind a paywall. There are now ways to make articles freely available to everyone, but authors (or their employers) can quickly end up paying thousands of euros per article.

On top of that, it can take months – and sometimes even years – for an article to appear in a journal. Journals rely on anonymous reviewers to assess quality, but the reviewers receive no recognition for their efforts and comment on submissions as unpaid volunteers in academia.

ORE does things the other way round. You submit the article at no extra cost. It is checked for things such as plagiarism, language and author information, and then the article goes online. Peer review by other scientists follows afterwards.

ORE aims to promote transparent science. Peer review is therefore public, including the reviewers’ names. Authors can revise their article in response to comments, but the old version remains available.

The chair of ORE’s executive committee is Jeroen Sondervan, who works on open science at research funder NWO. “We want to offer alternatives to commercial journals.”

Why do you want reviewers to stop being anonymous?

“Named reviews offer greater transparency and accountability. Suppose the reviewers are friends of the author – you can see that on ORE. What’s more, peer review is often invisible work. Now other people can at least see what you’ve done. That can also make reviews more thorough. It’s not entirely new; this already happens in some disciplines. Scientists in other disciplines may have to get used to it.”

How does peer review work on ORE?

“Initial versions of articles are published online. We call them preprints. The article is only actively indexed in systems such as Scopus and Google Scholar if two reviewers give it a positive assessment. That doesn’t happen if the reviews are negative. If you come across an article and want to comment on it, you can do that too. Ultimately, you can see every stage: from preprint through review to final article.”

Can you also withdraw an article if it is rejected?

“No, it stays online. We think that’s a good thing. The barrier to submitting is low, but you do think twice before sending in your preprint. More and more is being published in academia. Researchers sometimes use the salami-slicing tactic, extracting as many publications as possible from the same dataset. They see whether anyone accepts the article. That doesn’t necessarily lead to better science.”

Journals such as Nature and Science have a big reputation. Is choosing ORE really appealing?

“That question touches on the aim of taking a broader view of ‘recognition and rewards’ in academia. What do we consider important? Scientists can become fixated on a journal’s reputation, which supposedly rubs off on those who publish in it, but in doing so they are contributing to a commercial business model. They remain part of the prestige economy. Is that the best choice? Hopefully, in the near future, open science and good peer review will also receive the recognition they deserve.”

But those journals are well known. Will researchers find ORE?

“NWO is starting a campaign in the Netherlands this week. We want to tell researchers what the platform is and what they can do with it. To that end, among other things, we are working with university libraries. We need to raise awareness that you don’t have to depend on commercial parties.”

Someone has to pay for the platform. What does ‘free publishing’ cost?

“ORE has a budget of sixteen million euros for the next five years. The European Commission is currently paying 60 per cent of that. The remaining 6.4 million euros will be divided among eleven major research countries, such as the Netherlands, Spain, Germany, Italy and Switzerland. NWO will pay 370 thousand euros in total over five years.”

Is that a lot or a little?

“You should compare it with the subscription costs for scientific journals. I used to work at Utrecht University Library. The sums involved are really huge, especially in specialist fields. And if you want to publish open access, that can quickly add thousands of euros per article. Who is taking a cut of that? ORE is non-profit and fully transparent. That’s the direction things should go in.”