To celebrate the official launch of Open Research Europe (ORE), we spoke with Toma Susi and Phoebe Koundouri, two of ORE’s Scientific Advisory Board members, who gave us an insight into their motivations behind, and experience of, publishing on this new platform.
Toma’s research describes a new flexible and modern research code developed in Vienna for the simulation of electron scattering in materials, with a particular focus on a first principles description of the scattering potential.
Phoebe’s research focuses on how people make decisions under deep uncertainty, that is when the probabilities of uncertain events are not known, which has profound implications for economic analysis and policy.
Choosing to publish with Open Research Europe
We are strong supporters of open science because it provides many benefits to the scientific community and beyond. There are no author facing fees at ORE, and its open peer review model allows for greater transparency in the research and review process. This helps improve research integrity, inspires a more collective research culture, provides greater confidence and trust in published findings, and creates a higher visibility of research. There is also the possibility of submitting new versions of our research.
We are members of the Scientific Advisory Board for a reason, but we would have submitted this research to ORE regardless of our involvement with the board – it just makes sense!
From submission to publication
A few days after submitting the research via the online interface on Open Research Europe, minor changes were suggested by ORE’s dedicated Editorial team.
Once these changes were made and re-sent, the formal approval of the article arrived the next day, including a notice that the article would move on to typesetting and open peer review.
Following this, we were asked to provide suggestions for possible reviewers. These suggested reviewers are scrutinized with regards to their relevance to the research topic, and with regards to their geographical distribution.
Today, our articles are live on Open Research Europe and are available for everyone to view.
Overall publishing experience
The entire experience overall has been very positive. The submission system and the editorial pre-check stage were highly efficient, and the platform itself is user-friendly and intuitive.
We’re now eagerly looking forward to the open peer review stage as open scrutiny by experts will undoubtedly help to evaluate and improve our work.
Benefits of publishing on an open science and open peer review platform
With years of experience in our respective fields we can clearly see the benefits of open science and open peer review.
To put it simply, open science is better science. Opening the article, the underlying data (including code) and the peer review process itself help make the findings more robust, transparent, and reproducible. Having an open model enables:
- Increased citations and usage
- Greater public engagement
- Increased interdisciplinary conversations
- Wider collaboration
The use of a permissive copyright license fulfills funder open access mandates and enables the widest possible reuse of the results by not only members of the scientific community but also the wider public – who, after all, have funded our work.
In our opinion, ORE can crucially enable the kind of transformative change that the scientific community needs to better serve the interface between scientific excellence and social resilience.
Would we recommend ORE to colleagues?
Phoebe Koundouri – “I want to encourage all European research leaders to submit their work on ORE in order to showcase one of the transformation pathways towards a more transparent, collaborative and inclusive research community.”
Toma Susi – “Absolutely, I already have!”
