With €16 million in funding through 2030, the planned early-November expansion would give more than 2.5 million researchers access to publishing and open peer review without author fees.
The European Commission plans to expand Open Research Europe (ORE) by early November, offering more than 2.5 million researchers publishing and editorial services without author charges. The project has a €16 million budget through 2030, Nature said in its 28 October 2026 report.
ORE launched in 2021 and had published about 1,500 articles by 28 October. The planned rollout extends access to an existing platform and its open-review services; those services have not yet been delivered to the full newly eligible group.
ORE’s posted eligibility rules require at least one author to qualify through one of four routes:
Because only one author must qualify, international co-authors do not each need a separate qualifying affiliation or project. The qualifying author must have an active, verifiable institutional email account, and the article must be original work. ORE says eligible authors pay neither article-processing charges nor other author-facing fees.
ORE’s editorial services include checks before publication, copyediting, typesetting and expert peer review after publication. Its editorial team checks author eligibility, ethics, plagiarism, image integrity, English, references, data availability and reporting standards. A submission that fails these checks is returned for correction or declined if the problems cannot be resolved.
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Under the platform’s “publish, review, curate” model, a paper that clears those checks is published before experts assess it. Reviewers are then invited, and their names and reports appear alongside the paper. Readers can also comment. Articles that pass review are marked as peer reviewed; ORE organises papers into collections by topic or funding mechanism.
ORE defines a successful review outcome as at least two “Approved” reports, or one “Approved” report plus two “Approved with Reservations” reports. Reaching that threshold makes an article eligible for inclusion in a range of research databases and indexing services.
The European Commission will provide 60% of the €16 million budget, with the remainder coming from other participating funders and research organisations. Those bodies will govern the expanded platform. CERN, the particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, will host and operate it.
Funders from 11 countries are joining, including the German Research Foundation and the Swiss National Science Foundation. Three major research organisations are also joining, including the French National Centre for Scientific Research. Karla Anaya-Carlsson, chair of the ORE Funders Group, said the aim is a more transparent, sustainable publishing system serving researchers and society.
Analysis
Mario Malički, a Stanford University metascientist who studies how research is done, said ORE simplifies publishing for researchers and reduces funders' costs. He cautioned that operating at the expanded scale creates a major undertaking: deciding who performs the checks, curates papers and makes final decisions.
ORE says it is currently indexed in more than 20 databases, which help readers find research. How indexing services will handle the expansion remains unclear. The journal eLife adopted a publish, review, curate model in late 2022; within two years it lost its impact factor, a journal citation metric, and databases including Web of Science changed how they indexed it. ORE has no impact factor and says it will not seek one.
Separately, 40 funders, institutions, publishers and platforms announced the Publish, Review, Curate Alliance on 28 October to promote open publishing initiatives. For ORE, the next planned step is the Commission’s rollout of the expanded platform by early November.
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