Open Research Europe expands: what does it mean for the Diamond Open Access community?

Since its launch in 2021, Open Research Europe (ORE) has demonstrated that a publicly funded publishing platform can offer researchers an alternative to commercial publishing without author-facing fees. Initially developed as the European Commission's open access publishing platform, it combines immediate publication with transparent, open peer review, while enabling compliance with funder open access requirements. This autumn, the platform broadens its eligibility beyond beneficiaries of EU research funding to include researchers affiliated with institutions in eleven participating countries. As ORE shifts from a funder-specific publishing service towards a shared European research scholarly communication platform, its expansion raises an important question for the Diamond Open Access (OA) community: where does it fit within the European Diamond OA publishing landscape?

ORE aligns with a number of principles of Diamond OA publishing and fulfils five out of the six operational criteria for Diamond OA journals in EDCH’s Diamond Discovery Hub (DDH). Although its new phase will not be open to all authors, ORE shares all the other characteristics that operationally define Diamond Open Access according to the Diamond Discovery Hub (DDH). ORE is a scholarly publication platform with persistent identification that provides open access licences for its outputs. It also conforms to the definition of ‘community-owned’ in the sense of the DDH’s criteria, as it is hosted and operated by CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, an international scientific organisation. Governance is shared by a consortium of sixteen funding and performing organisations, with plans for further expansion. Publication costs are fully covered by these participating organisations, ensuring that neither authors nor readers face financial barriers within the platform's current scope.

In addition, ORE offers valuable innovations that are highly relevant to the community-governed scholarly communication ecosystem. Its Publish, Review, Curate workflow combines preprint publication - after rigorous checks - with transparent, open peer review, making both research outputs and the evaluation process openly accessible. Open peer review is aligned with the aspirational standards and criteria set out in the Diamond OA Standard (DOAS). The goals of ORE and Diamond OA are clearly convergent in this respect. These trends contribute to ongoing discussions within the Diamond publishing community on how editorial workflows can become more transparent, accountable, and efficient while preserving rigorous quality assurance.

ORE's expansion should therefore not be viewed as competition for existing Diamond journals and platforms but as a complementary development within Europe’s evolving scholarly communication infrastructure. Its visibility can help familiarise researchers with innovative publishing models and demonstrate that high-quality publishing services can be organised outside commercial frameworks.

For the EDCH community, ORE provides an opportunity to continue important conversation: how can publicly funded publishing initiatives, institutional platforms, and community-led Diamond journals complement one another? As European funding bodies increasingly invest in open publishing infrastructures, ensuring interoperability, shared standards, and mutual visibility across these initiatives will be essential to building a coherent, sustainable, and researcher-centred Diamond ecosystem.

OPERAS, through the EDCH, works in partnership with the ORE consortium to strengthen outreach and community engagement across Europe, working towards new interactions between ORE and the Diamond journal community. In this way, we intend to foster trust in open publishing, and contribute to a more resilient, no-fee scholarly communication landscape in Europe and beyond.