CERN to host flagship European open access publishing platform
Open Research Europe (ORE), a non-profit, open access scientific publishing platform, will be hosted at CERN as of autumn 2026. Initiated by the European Commission in 2021 and supported by a consortium of national research funders from eleven CERN Member States, ORE is designed to facilitate the rapid and transparent dissemination of publicly funded research.
Originally created as a platform exclusively for research funded by Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe, ORE will now additionally serve as a free publishing venue for any author whose national funding agency participates in the funding consortium. Following approval by the CERN Council in December 2025, CERN will provide the technical and operational infrastructure for ORE over a five-year pilot phase, while governance matters will remain with the ORE consortium.
ORE follows the publish–review–curate model, which allows research outputs to be made openly accessible after initial checks for integrity, policy compliance and eligibility, followed by transparent peer review. Reviewer reports and identities are publicly available and articles that successfully pass peer review are curated into discipline-specific collections.
CERN’s involvement builds on the Organization’s long-standing leadership in open science infrastructure. As the host, CERN will provide ORE with a neutral, reliable and sustainable operational environment, drawing on its experience in developing and operating a range of open science initiatives including Zenodo, Invenio and SCOAP³.
For the CERN community, ORE will offer an additional open access publishing option particularly suited to interdisciplinary and collaborative research that does not naturally align with established journals. Intended to be complementary to existing publishing platforms, ORE does not replace SCOAP³, which remains the primary open access route for high-energy physics publications. ORE will instead broaden the range of transparent, non-commercial publishing choices available to researchers while maintaining high standards of scientific quality and integrity.
Hosting ORE will deepen the collaboration between CERN, the European Commission and national research organisations and strengthen CERN’s strategic role in academic communication. As a trusted steward of open, community-oriented scientific infrastructure, CERN is committed to supporting open access to publicly funded research.
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