The organization that gave us the World Wide Web is now taking on another challenge: hosting Open Research Europe (ORE), a Diamond Open Access publishing platform backed by the European Commission and research funders from 11 countries.
What is it? A scholarly publishing platform where research articles are free to read AND free to publish – no APCs, no paywalls. It’s been running since 2021 (1,200+ articles, 6,300+ authors from 3,000+ institutions) and is now expanding with collective funding from 11 European countries plus the European Commission (~€17M through 2031).
How does it work? ORE uses a publish-review-curate model: articles are checked for integrity, published, then openly peer-reviewed (with public review reports!). Successfully reviewed articles get curated into subject collections. Transparency all the way through.
Why CERN? They already run Zenodo (4M+ research outputs), SCOAP3 (70,000+ open access articles in particle physics), and the Invenio framework. The platform is built on Open Journal Systems (OJS) – open source, of course! The ORE consortium retains governance and editorial oversight, while CERN handles the technical infrastructure.
Congratulations. From Latin America, we would like to raise a question: Although there are no APCs, how will bias toward European research agendas be avoided if we aim to build a truly global model for sharing knowledge?
Here’s the irony – Latin America has been doing Diamond OA for decades. Redalyc, SciELO, AmeliCA,… 95% of Latin American OA journals are Diamond, led and owned by universities. Europe is catching up to what you’ve been building all along.
ORE itself isn’t trying to be a global model – it’s explicitly European (currently EU-funded researchers, expanding to the 11 consortium countries). The broader Diamond OA Action Plan vision is federated: regional hubs collaborating globally while staying rooted in their own communities. The Global Summit on Diamond OA had AmeliCA and Redalyc at the table for exactly this – interoperability without imposing one region’s agenda on another.
So the risk you’re pointing to is real, but I’d say the answer isn’t necessarily making ORE global – it’s making sure ORE and AmeliCA can talk to each other.
Great thread, Jan. The irony you point out is one I live daily as a researcher in Lima. Thanks for this framing — it resonates strongly. From Peru, the Diamond OA infrastructure (SciELO Perú, Redalyc participation, institutional repositories under CONCYTEC) is genuinely present at the institutional level. But there’s a persistent tension: researchers are simultaneously encouraged to publish in open national journals and evaluated by metrics (Scopus quartiles, WoS indexing) that still privilege subscription or hybrid journals. So the values are Diamond, but the incentive system is not.
On the interoperability question: I’d add an AI-readiness dimension. As generative AI reshapes literature discovery and synthesis, the question isn’t only whether ORE and AmeliCA can share metadata standards — it’s whether both can be meaningfully integrated into the environments where researchers now actually search and synthesize knowledge. If Diamond OA journals aren’t surfacing in AI-assisted workflows, the visibility gap widens regardless of technical federation.
The federated model sounds right in principle. The risk from here is that “interoperability” becomes a technical agreement between platforms while the researcher on the ground still defaults to Google Scholar and Semantic Scholar — both of which have their own indexing biases.
Italy’s ANVUR denied scientific recognition to ORE itself in 2023 – for career purposes, publishing on the European Commission’s own platform was treated as worthless. ANVUR is, ironically, a CoARA signatory (700+ orgs committed to reforming research assessment). Same contradiction as Peru, playing out in Europe.
Brazil is worth watching too – CAPES dropped their journal ranking system in October 2024, shifting to article-level evaluation for 2025-2028.
@rjhangiani@Glencox – if either of you has a moment, this thread could use your input. Rajiv on institutional recognition of open practices, Glenda on these structural barriers and perspective from both Global South and recent hands-on experience from Europe.
