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.
Those executive bonuses don't pay for themselves you know.
However I don't think that it supports open review which this new cern initiative seems to promote. Great if followed and promoted by big national labs
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.
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).
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.
As a European working in a university on EU funded projects, I'm not sure how I've not heard of this before :/.
"When the new ORE platform is launched later this year, authorship eligibility will be expanded to include researchers affiliated with institutions in the countries that participate in the consortium."
That actually doesn't seem like a lot (240 articles per year), but I suppose they're still in the process of gaining traction.
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)
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
not exactly, they publish first, reviews happen afterwards, often not approved
> They mention Diamond Open Access, so probably not
not exactly, Diamond Open Access - is still an action plan, access is free only for EU-funded researchers (EU commission actually pays)
> few oligopolistic publishers
sounds interesting, who do you mean?
> Not sure what this point means and how it's relevant to this initiative
the initiative is about "sharing knowledge". wonder what is the real purpose
> Idk, seems pretty specific to me
"open science", "equitable access", "flagship initiative" etc.
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.
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.