Open Research Europe (ORE), the European Commission’s diamond open-access publishing platform, is entering a new operational phase in autumn 2026. CERN will take over as the platform’s technical operator, and authorship eligibility will expand beyond European Commission-funded researchers to include researchers affiliated with institutions in eleven participating European countries. For research administrators tracking open-access infrastructure and funder mandates, the relaunch is a concrete case of a single-funder publishing platform converting into a multi-country, collectively financed one — a model worth watching as other funders weigh similar diamond OA infrastructure investments.
What is changing, and when
According to the European Commission’s own announcement, the new phase of ORE begins operating in autumn 2026 and is backed by 16 research funding agencies, scientific organizations, and ministries drawn from eleven countries: Austria, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland. Those bodies are providing collective financial and governance backing for the platform going forward, rather than the European Commission funding it alone as it has since ORE’s 2021 launch.
CERN — the European Organization for Nuclear Research, based in Geneva — will operate the platform’s infrastructure for this new phase, contributing its experience running large-scale open-science digital infrastructure. CERN already operates Zenodo, the general-purpose research data and publication repository built with OpenAIRE, so this extends CERN’s existing role as a host for European open-science infrastructure rather than being an entirely new line of work for the organization.
Funding: roughly €17 million over five years
The European Commission’s announcement puts the budget for the new phase at nearly €17 million for the 2026-2031 period, with the European Commission itself providing co-financing of up to €10 million of that total. The remainder comes from the participating countries’ funding agencies and organizations. This cost-sharing structure is the mechanism by which ORE moves from being a single-funder (European Commission) publishing venue to a collectively governed one.
Who can publish on ORE now
Since its 2021 launch, ORE has been open only to researchers who received funding from the European Commission (principally through Horizon Europe and its predecessor Horizon 2020). Under the 2026 relaunch, authorship eligibility broadens to researchers affiliated with institutions in the eleven participating countries, in addition to European Commission-funded authors. Publishing remains free of charge to eligible authors under both categories — ORE does not charge article processing charges (APCs), which is what makes it a diamond open access platform rather than a conventional gold OA journal funded by author-facing fees.
The publishing model stays the same
The relaunch changes who operates and pays for the platform, not how it publishes. ORE retains its distinguishing editorial model: articles are published first and then subjected to open, invited peer review, with reviewer reports and author responses published alongside the article rather than gatekeeping publication itself. That post-publication, transparent-review model has been in place since 2021 and is unaffected by the operational transition to CERN.
Scale to date
Per the European Commission’s own figures, ORE has published more than 1,200 articles since 2021 and has attracted over 6,300 authors from more than 3,000 institutions worldwide. Those figures describe activity under the pre-2026 European-Commission-only eligibility rules; the country expansion is intended to grow both the eligible author base and the platform’s long-term funding footprint beyond a single funder.
Why this matters for research administrators
- Funder mandate compliance. Institutions in the eleven participating countries should confirm with their funding agencies whether ORE becomes a recommended or eligible venue for compliance with national or agency open-access mandates, separate from any existing Horizon Europe obligations under Article 39.
- No APC to budget for. Because ORE is diamond OA, research offices do not need to route article-processing-charge requests through an open-access publishing fund for ORE submissions, unlike gold OA journals.
- A funding-diversification model. The shift from single-funder to multi-country cost-sharing is a template other diamond OA infrastructure (national and regional platforms funded through Plan S-aligned strategies) may follow as funders look for sustainable, non-APC publishing models.
What’s still unconfirmed
As of this writing, the European Commission and CERN have announced the funding envelope, the operating timeline (autumn 2026), and the list of backing countries, but full operational details — such as the exact submission workflow for newly eligible non-EC-funded authors, and any interim arrangements during the handover — had not yet been published in full. Research offices in the eleven participating countries should watch for guidance from their national funding agency and from Open Research Europe directly (open-research-europe.ec.europa.eu) as the autumn 2026 transition approaches.
