[HN Gopher] CERN to host a new phase of Open Research Europe
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CERN to host a new phase of Open Research Europe
Author : JohnHammersley
Score : 163 points
Date : 2026-03-26 19:30 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (home.cern)
(TXT) w3m dump (home.cern)
| dranudin wrote:
| It'd be great if this could one day be a real alternative to
| Elsevier. Today, professors and postdocs are doing the peer-
| review for Elsevier, for free. They can do that because they get
| a paycheck from the government (through university and grants).
| Then, the governments pay for Elsevier access through university
| libraries, ontop of that. It'd be much more efficient, if
| everybody could just publish and subscribe for free on a publicly
| funded platform.
| kleiba wrote:
| There are many more publishers than Elsevier for scientific
| publications, some of which are already following a strictly
| open access policy.
| arjvik wrote:
| Open access typically means authors pay a publication fee,
| which leads to the same result of the government paying twice
| and the journal profiting twice.
| jampekka wrote:
| And most of those require ridiculous "article processing
| charges". Even non-profits. Elsevier is bad, but it's not
| much worse than other publishers.
|
| Author (in practice author institution, in practice with
| public funds) pays open access is less bad than locking
| articles behind paywalls, but it's still a racket.
|
| This CERN system is about diamond open access, meaning that
| neither authors nor readers pay.
| observationist wrote:
| Arxiv and the internet do more for science than Elsevier.
| They're rent-seeking middlemen, having lost any of whatever
| their purpose might once have been.
|
| I think the worst part is, Elsevier could still serve a purpose
| and make money by curating and leveraging reputation even if
| all academic research was openly published and freely
| accessible - they could select what they consider to be the
| best research, have editorial content, produce visualizations
| and accompany content with a high quality of journalism, like
| Quanta. Papers being locked, researchers and institutions
| paying out the nose, and the other artificial scarcity /
| artificial stupidity features are entirely unnecessary.
| fakedang wrote:
| The problem - for them - is that they wouldn't be able to
| make as much money as a curator than as a grifter, a
| middleman. As a curator or a creator, they would be actually
| forced to work, as compared to the current rentier model that
| they enjoy.
|
| Those executive bonuses don't pay for themselves you know.
| azan_ wrote:
| For some disciplines unfortunately that's not true. In
| medicine the publishing cartel is much stronger than arxiv.
| d_silin wrote:
| You absolutely need to solve the gatekeeping and reputation
| part, otherwise your newly-minted open access journal would be
| filled to the brim with cranks and charlatans.
| kleiba wrote:
| _> In the five years since its launch, the platform has seen
| steady growth and uptake across the research community, with more
| than 1,200 articles published._
|
| That actually doesn't seem like a lot (240 articles per year),
| but I suppose they're still in the process of gaining traction.
| croemer wrote:
| This should have been in the article:
|
| Diamond Open Access (or Platinum OA) is a scholarly publishing
| model where journals and platforms are free for both readers and
| authors, with no Article Processing Charges (APCs).
| roflmaostc wrote:
| Good initiative!
|
| The problem is: publication is based on reputation. Reputation
| takes time and effort from the entire community.
|
| I feel like modern infrastructure (Google Scholar, AI research,
| LinkedIn, etc) helped to decrease the importance of high-impact
| journals such as Nature, etc. Researchers don't rely on highly
| curated printed journals in their physical mailbox to get
| informed what's happening. You can just use tools to scrape
| content much faster.
|
| But still: It can be career decisive if a reseachers lands a
| publication in a for-profit journal such as Nature.
|
| The CS community has a much nicer publishing pipeline where most
| top journals/proceedings are attached to non-profit conferences
| and the fee is 0 (beside a conference fee).
|
| I wish more fields would work like this: you publish with a
| conference proceeding and talk on the conference about your
| paper.
|
| Researchers are themselves responsible for typesetting,
| advertising, etc. This and removing for-profit stakeholders can
| reduce the costs a lot.
| jltsiren wrote:
| Conference papers should be abolished, because they require
| international travel, which is getting more difficult every
| year. 10-20 years ago, when travel was cheap and easy, it was
| mostly just people from developing countries who could often
| not attend. Typically because they could not afford it or get a
| visa in time. But today almost everyone is impacted by wars,
| international tensions, travel restrictions, immigration
| policies, and the overall uncertainty.
|
| I've attended three international conferences in the past year.
| In each of them, there were plenty of people missing. People
| who would usually have attended but could not, due to issues
| that did not exist in the 2010s.
| cge wrote:
| A difficulty, too, is that choice of publishing venue is based
| on visibility and readership. And in my experience, EU-
| administered projects around scholarly publishing like these
| are well-meaning, but make baffling choices about focus,
| organization, and scope that hobble them.
|
| Consider that this is a journal whose scope is defined not by
| field, but by funding initiatives. It places an astoundingly
| small emphasis on making research visible: contrasted with most
| major journals, with websites that might be split between
| research articles proper and editorial articles, but are still
| heavily focused on presenting articles, Open Research Europe
| doesn't have a single non-truncated article title on its front
| page, and devotes the vast majority of the page to journal
| administration and self-advertisement. The current lead
| highlight of PNAS is a section of rotating blurbs about
| articles, both research and editorial, for example. The current
| highlight of Open Research Europe is a description of Open
| Research Europe and logos of associated groups, including a
| second copy of the European Commission logo, in addition to the
| one on the top of the page. For that matter, the journal has a
| three-letter domain name, ore.eu, that it uses _entirely_ to
| talk about itself, with only a single, small, text link to the
| journal itself. Why publish at a journal where your research
| seems to be far down their list of priorities?
|
| With that said, I'm hopeful that CERN taking this over is a
| good sign. Zenodo is a great asset to the research community,
| and I feel like CERN is better situated to understand what will
| make a journal where researchers will want to publish. And I'd
| note, unlike Open Research Europe, Zenodo's front page is
| primarily a list of recent uploads, complete with partial
| abstracts.
|
| >Researchers are themselves responsible for typesetting,
| advertising, etc. This and removing for-profit stakeholders can
| reduce the costs a lot.
|
| That can depend on how the proceedings are published. Dagstuhl
| Publishing, for example, does do some typesetting and
| proofreading work for proceedings they publish, they just have
| it arranged in an extremely efficient way (everyone submits
| LaTeX using their class, so they're mostly fixing mistakes).
| They also do charge (an extremely small) publishing fee to the
| conference.
| ktokarev wrote:
| 1. looks like duplication. why not arxiv? could lead to multiple
| submission pipelines
|
| 2. as I understand researchers still pay to publish, no?
|
| 3. initiative could lead to centralization of publishing
| power(biased?, politics?, bureaucrats)
|
| 4. the problem is not just in access to papers (what about
| connection to business and real applications)
|
| 5. the article is published by CERN and is promotion (vague on
| details, buzzword-heavy)
| flexagoon wrote:
| _> looks like duplication. why not arxiv? could lead to
| multiple submission pipelines_
|
| Arxiv is for preprints, this is full peer-reviewed publishing.
| It replaces academic journals, not preprint repositories like
| arxiv.
|
| _> as I understand researchers still pay to publish, no?_
|
| They mention Diamond Open Access, so probably not
|
| _> initiative could lead to centralization of publishing
| power_
|
| Publishing power is already incredibly centralized in hands of
| a few oligopolistic publishers
|
| _> the problem is not just in access to papers (what about
| connection to business and real applications)_
|
| Not sure what this point means and how it's relevant to this
| initiative
|
| _> the article is published by CERN and is promotion (vague on
| details, buzzword-heavy)_
|
| Idk, seems pretty specific to me
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