During the 2023 Open Science Fair, speakers from Open Research Europe, OpenAIRE, Eurodoc, and the European Commission discussed the implementation of open science in Europe and emerging publishing models such as Open Research Europe.
Oleksandr Berezko, Eurodoc Advisory Board member, writes about the session and the wider Open Science Fair in a guest post for Open Research Europe’s blog.
Open science crossroads
“What is the word that comes to your mind when you think of emerging publishing models?”
This was the question posed to the Open Science FAIR audience on the final day of sessions in the beautiful and historic Ateneo de Madrid.
When the answers started shaping on screen in the form of a word cloud based on the audience’s feedback, one could easily track feelings of the majority of the conference participants’: “diamond”, “diamond OA”, “diamond open access”, “equity”…
As this year’s Fair was aimed at reflecting on the future of open science, which is currently at a crossroads due to many emerging trends and models, the demand for a strategic vision was high.
For a considerable number of the event participants, the “diamond” open access approach, with no fees for either readers or authors of research outputs and relying on the academic community and funders rather than commercial entities, was at the core of such a vision. Moreover, it felt like this model was perceived as nothing less than a silver bullet to tackle most deficiencies of the current publishing ecosystem.
Open Research Europe: leading by example
Similar discussions took place the previous day during a panel session and workshop, “Implementing open science for all of Europe: Open Research Europe and other emerging models”. The workshop offered valuable insights into what the open science publishing landscape may look like from mid- and long-term perspectives, as well as the related challenges.
The panel was moderated by Giulia Malaguarnera (OpenAIRE) and featured policymakers (Victoria Tsoukala, European Commission), publishers responsible for delivering Open Research Europe (Sam Hall, F1000), and early career researchers (Sebastian Dahle, Eurodoc).
September 26, 2023, Madrid. Sebastian Dahle, Eurodoc President, speaks at the panel on emerging publishing models during the Open Science Fair. Photo CC BY Oleksandr Berezko.
The workshop started with the introduction of Open Research Europe, an innovative open access publishing platform from the European Commission with no author facing publishing fees, which was designed to lead by example.
Arguably one of the most open publishing venues globally, not only in terms of open access, its publishing model includes rapid publication of papers prior to peer review and open review, which makes reviewers’ identities and the review reports publicly available.
The value of publication before peer review has been recently highlighted during the coronavirus pandemic and other societal crises, which required rapid communication of research to help accelerate discoveries and responses.
However, the lack of “gatekeepers” at this stage often raised concerns regarding the quality. Open Research Europe manages this by introducing rigorous pre-publication checks performed by the in-house editorial team, making papers somewhat “semi-reviewed” before formal, invited peer review takes place.
As the platform is synonymous with openness, it creates opportunities to build readership outside the traditional target audience in academia. Open Research Europe provides the feature of adding a “lay summary”, a short snapshot of the research presented in the article for non-researchers, which allows the broader public to better understand what’s going on behind the academic curtain and provide evidence of usage of taxpayers’ funds. Currently, around half of the platform’s authors have added such summaries to their published work.
Barriers to uptake of Open Research Europe
Barriers for the uptake of the platform were also discussed by the panelists.
Sadly, the effective quality assurance mechanism with rigorous pre-publication checks on the platform can be perceived as an obstacle by some authors, who might lean toward venues with lower editorial standards.
Similarly, uptake of the platform and relevant initiatives is still heavily restrained by the obstacles to engaging in open science for researchers more widely, among which the lack of incentives and rewards is one of the most pressing.
In particular, supporting the principles of the DORA Declaration, Leiden Manifesto, and the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA) as a European Commission initiative, Open Research Europe doesn’t plan to apply for Journal Impact Factor (JIF). Instead, the platform focuses on traditional and alternative article-level metrics rather than the venue’s “prestige”.
However, as JIF is still widely used in research assessment all over the world and some scepticism is present regarding the possibility of leaving the “prestige economy” behind, serious scaling-up of Open Research Europe is still yet to come, although hopefully future ubiquitous implementation of CoARA principles will support this.
Looking to the future: plans for Open Research Europe
Open Research Europe was launched in the spring of 2021 and has since built a tangible authorship and readership base. As of September 26 2023, the number of submitted articles has reached over 700 and over 450 of them have passed peer review.
The European Commission’s future plans for the platform aim high. Victoria Tsoukala presented some of these plans during the session, including expanding eligibility and infrastructure.
Today, the platform offers free publication of research papers for beneficiaries of Horizon Europe and Euratom, while, as of the end of this 2023, it will offer the possibility for publication of articles stemming from all EU framework programmes.
The vision of the Commission is to partner with other stakeholders in Europe, such as national funders and research performing organisations, to collectively create an open access publishing service for the public good, with no eligibility requirements. The platform will become available to all interested researchers as an optional but attractive and robust alternative to commercial publishing, without requiring fees.
The new collective Open Research Europe will be supported by an open source infrastructure by mid-2026.
Another important planned step is to bring some multilingualism to the platform, allowing authors to add abstracts in several European languages, thus boosting research visibility on the international level.
This vision is ambitious, and requires further work to become a reality, including detailed outlines of funding and governance models. The overall success will also heavily depend on the number and scale of international partners willing to support the idea and invest in it to make it free to all authors and readers.
The most important factor, though, will be the uptake of Open Research Europe among researchers, as this level of community building is no small feat and will take significant time. One of the best strategies might be to focus on engaging with junior scholars. These early career researchers will eventually become recognised and established, and will shape the core of the Open Research Europe community by serving as examples for others and agents of change in the academic community more broadly.
We’d like to thank Oleksandr for his insights in this blog, and all the panelists for an engaging session at Open Science Fair 2023.
Find out more about the benefits of Open Research Europe for eligible authors.
