With the recent eligibility expansion of Open Research Europe, researchers from all European Commission-funded grant schemes can now publish their work on the platform. To help authors with the process, we’ve created a checklist with the steps you need to take to get your research ready for submission.
Step 1: Check your eligibility to submit to Open Research Europe
There are a number of criteria that authors need to meet to be eligible to publish on Open Research Europe:
- All research must have at least one author who is a recipient, or has been a recipient in the past, of a grant funded by the European Commission. Have your grant ID ready, as you will need to enter it on the submission form.
- All articles must be original and not duplications of work that has been published previously or is currently under consideration or review elsewhere for publication (excluding work posted on a pre-print server). If there is significant overlap with another paper, this must be cited in the article and mentioned on submission.
- All listed authors must have made a clear contribution to an article. Anyone who has contributed but does not meet the criteria for authorship can be listed in the ‘Acknowledgements’ section.
- All research must be scholarly work based on scientific, academic, or clinical investigation.
Step 2: Prepare your paper for pre-publication checks
Our expert team of editors undertakes thorough pre-publication checks for each article that is submitted, and there are a few things to prepare for your paper to ensure it meets these pre-publication requirements.
Article guidelines
Open Research Europe accepts a broad range of traditional and non-traditional article types for publishing, from Research Articles and Systematic Reviews to Essays, Method Articles, Data Notes and Software Tool Articles.
Each of these article types has its own requirements to meet, so it’s vital that authors check the respective article guidelines for their work.
For example, clinical trials within a Clinical Practice Article or Case Report need to be registered in an approved register.
Ethical approval and consent
All research must have been conducted according to the requirements of ethics and integrity in Article 14 of the Model Grant Agreement of Horizon Europe. Submitted articles must respect European and national laws, including the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights and the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, and have obtained relevant institutional and/or national ethics approval, as well as any additional ethical approval from Horizon Europe, which will be requested at submission.
Competing interest statement
All papers must include a competing interest statement. Where competing interests are identified, this will not inhibit publication but will help to provide full transparency for reviewers and readers.
Language quality
Articles must be written in clear language and must be coherent, such that readers can follow the information presented and arguments made without difficulty. A light copyedit will be provided by the Editorial Team. If your article fails the prepublication process due to readability or quality of language, you may be asked to have your article professionally copyedited before revising for resubmission.
Reproducibility
All articles must adhere to standards of reporting guidelines to ensure they have provided a clear and comprehensive description of research, including clear methodological details, to make it easier for others to assess and reproduce the work.
These standards of reporting can vary by article type, for example specific guidelines for Systematic Reviews and clinical trials, so it’s important to review these before submission.
Data Availability
All articles must include a Data Availability Statement, even where no data is associated with the article, and all articles reporting original results must include the raw data underlying those results.
We explore data availability requirements in further detail in the next step.
Step 3: Prepare and deposit your data
Open data is a key element of open research. Not only enabling reproducibility of research by the wider academic community, open data also enables greater transparency in the full research process, boosts research visibility, can increase citations, and improves trust in findings.
The Horizon Europe and Open Research Europe data policies require default open access to any data underpinning a publication, unless there are legitimate reasons preventing the data from being shared.
FAIR Guidelines
Open Research Europe is committed to open data and endorses the FAIR Data Principles alongside our data guidelines to achieve this.
The FAIR Principles provide a framework for data to be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable.
Learn more about making your data FAIR.
Sharing your data
To meet the Open Research Europe open data policy, there are a number of steps to take:
- Your dataset(s) must be deposited in an appropriate data repository.
- Your dataset(s) must have a license applied which allows reuse by others (CC0 or CC-BY).
- Your dataset(s) must have a persistent identifier (e.g. a DOI), allocated by a data repository.
- You must provide a data availability statement as a section at the end of your article, including elements 1-3.
- You must include a data citation and add a reference to data to your reference list.
- Your dataset(s) should not contain any sensitive information, for example in relation to human research participants.
- You should share any related software and code.
- Your dataset(s) must be useful and reusable by others, adhere to any relevant data sharing standards in your discipline and align with the FAIR Data Principles.
- Your dataset(s) should link back to your article, if possible.
One of the most common reasons why articles are rejected from publication on our platform is that the supporting data is not openly available, so we strongly encourage all authors to review these guidelines and our data policy before submissions.
However, we recognize that not all data can be made open, for example confidential, ethical or proprietary third-party data, and we have specific policies in place to account for this. Please see ORE’s data guidelines for more information.
Step 4: submission
Once you’ve prepared your paper and data, you can submit your research for publication using our simple online form.
