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Monday-Friday
In our latest newsletter, we inform you about our events during the International Open Access Week, the Diamond Open Access platform Open Research Europe (ORE) and what the upcoming changes in the SNSF Open Access funding mean for you.
“The Cost of Knowledge” is the theme for this year’s International Open Access Week (19-25 October). It offers an opportunity to discuss benefits and challenges of Open Access, problematic developments in the publishing landscape and new innovations to tackle these problems. Lib4RI participates with information booths and a keynote lecture.
Björn Brembs is Professor of Neurogenetics at the University of Regensburg, Germany, and an advocate for reforming scholarly publishing for many years.
Björn Brembs will argue that today’s journal system is structurally broken: a handful of publishers extract far more from public budgets than the service justifies, starving the infrastructure that reliable, reproducible research actually needs. Thus, the research system faces not only a replicability crisis but also an affordability crisis and a functionality crisis.
Drawing on his paper “Replacing academic journals” he will sketch what a leaner, community-owned alternative could look like.
Mark your calendar Join online
Meet our experts at your institute! Our booth is staffed daily from 11:30-13:30.
As in previous years, several Swiss universities and libraries have joined forces to put together a wide-ranging program of online, hybrid and local events in different formats for the OA-Week in Switzerland (see here for the full program). Learn more about the International Open Access Week here.
The Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) recently announced that Swiss researchers will be eligible to publish free of charge at Open Research Europe (ORE) starting in autumn 2026. This is part of a bigger change of Open Access funding at SNSF (see below, “Upcoming changes to SNSF Open Access funding” for more details).
ORE is a Diamond Open Access publication platform (see our newsletter #38 regarding Diamond Open Access) established in 2021 and supported by the European Commission. This year, several European funding agencies, including SNSF, have announced their support as well. ORE currently operates on technical infrastructure provided by the commercial publisher Taylor & Francis but the additional funding allows to move the operation of ORE to an open infrastructure hosted and developed at CERN in Geneva. Moreover, due to the SNSF support all publications with at least one author with an affiliation at a Swiss institution will be eligible to publish in ORE; this is irrespective of any project funding of the SNSF or the EU to the authors. At the same time, publications in ORE will be published Open Access and fulfill the Open Access policies of Horizon 2020, Horizon Europe and SNSF.
Articles in ORE undergo peer review like articles in traditional scientific journals. However, in other aspects ORE is more similar to preprint servers, such as arXiv. This table compares these three venues in more detail.
| Traditional journal | Preprint server arXiv | ORE | |
| Screening and selection | Editors and reviewers judge quality and topical fit; novelty and expected impact may also count. | Light moderation and check for topical fit and form; endorsement for first-time submitters needed. | Only basic checks (originality, readability, ethics, author eligibility etc.); no selection by topic, novelty or expected impact. |
| When does peer review happen? | Before publication. | No peer review. | After publication. |
| Is peer review open? | In some journals. | Not applicable. | Yes, reviews are published together with the reviewers’ names. |
| Must an article pass peer review to be published? | Yes | No | No, but it must pass to be indexed in literature databases. |
| Can a published article be submitted elsewhere? | No | Yes (to the vast majority of journals) | No |
| Layout and branding | Typeset in the journal's house style. | None. Authors upload their own files. | Articles and versions are typeset in a consistent, functional style. |
| Costs | Readers pay (subscriptions) or authors pay (APCs). | Free for authors and readers. | Free for authors and readers. |
| Indexing in databases (visibility, citation tracking, bibliometrics) | Indexed at publication, depending on journal (PubMed, OpenAlex, Web of Science, Scopus, Google Scholar). | Inconsistent: indexed in Google Scholar, PubMed (if NIH funded), Scopus and Web of Science (in separate preprint collections). | In Google Scholar upon publication. Indexing in PubMed, OpenAlex, Scopus and others after peer review. |
Several other publication venues have started similar experiments to change the established publication workflow (sometimes called publish-review-curate model). Examples include journals of the European Geosciences Union (EGU; published by Copernicus), eLife or F1000. Ideally, such publication venues manage to combine advantages of preprints (fast publication, immediate Open Access, low costs) with the quality control of the peer review process. Due to the institutional support by EU funding programmes and important national funders, ORE has good chances to establish itself and its publishing model as an alternative to established journals. However, trust in the platform still has to be built. Ultimately, the number and quality of submissions will determine whether Open Research Europe succeeds.
The SNSF has announced that it will revise the way it funds Open Access (OA) publications. The new rules take effect on 1 January 2027 and introduce a cap on article processing charges, adjust book funding, and open a new route for Open Access publishing through ORE.
Cap on Article Processing Charges (APCs): 3’500 CHF
Adjusted funding rules for book publications
A free alternative: Open Research Europe (ORE)
f you are an SNSF-funded researcher planning to submit an article to a pure Open Access journal after 1 January 2027, verify the journal's APC. If it exceeds 3’500 CHF, the SNSF will not cover the costs. Please also note that hybrid journals remain ineligible for SNSF funding regardless of the APC. Use our Lib4RI Search Tool to identify journals that are covered by our Open Access agreements with publishers. For monographs, review whether your project falls within the narrower eligibility rules, and factor the 12’000 CHF basic module cap into your budgeting.
Consider Diamond OA venues, including ORE once it opens for submissions, as a way to publish without fees while still meeting the SNSF's Open Access requirements.
Our Open Access team is here to support you. Contact us at @email for personalized advice on journal selection, funding agreements, and SNSF compliance.