Notices by Björn Brembs (brembs@mastodon.social)

At last! It starts this fall:

"A new era for Open Research Europe"

https://research-and-innovation.ec.europa.eu/news/all-research-and-innovation-news/new-era-open-research-europe-2026-03-26_en

Diamond #openaccess for all authors from 11 supporting countries:

🇦🇹 Austria
🇫🇷 France
🇩🇪 Germany
🇮🇹 Italy
🇳🇱 Netherlands
🇳🇴 Norway
🇵🇹 Portugal
🇸🇮 Slovenia
🇪🇸 Spain
🇸🇪 Sweden
🇨🇭 Switzerland

Now "incentivize" institutions to make this the default #publishing option. #openscience

"success is often reduced to the size of a company or the bank account of its founder. Can we just stop equating success with short-term economic growth?"

https://ploum.net/2026-01-22-why-no-european-google.html

@Bundesregierung

Und morgen verkündigen Sie die Technologieoffenheit für die Bahn um die Dampflok wieder ein zu führen?

@dalias @lanodan @Gargron

Interesting take. Do you use, e.g., your work email at all?

@lanodan @dalias @Gargron

If I look around here and see how many students even know what Mastodon or the Fediverse is, this sure looks like a very promising strategy. 😇

Maybe almost as successful as the old strategy decades ago, to ask the professors if they wanted to become accessible to their students 24/7 with this newfangled tech called "email"? 🤣

Personally, I find institutional Masto servers as crucial for the future as email and web servers were for the internet.

TIL: apparently one of the main technical hurdles for universities to run their own #Mastodon instances is to make the instance work with the institution's SSO (most often Shibboleth). It seems there would be a huge opportunity to facilitate the entrance of such major multiplicators into the Fediverse. cc. @Gargron

#academicchatter

So true for so many problems of our times! @pluralistic got it so right:

"Systemic problems have systemic solutions, not individual ones. You can’t shop your way out of a monopoly."

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/oct/05/way-past-its-prime-how-did-amazon-get-so-rubbish

The natural history of #enshittification according to @pluralistic:
1 First, platforms are good to their users.
2 Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers.
3 Next, they abuse those customers to claw back all the value for themselves – and become a giant pile of shit.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/oct/05/way-past-its-prime-how-did-amazon-get-so-rubbish

1. This development essentially entails that all authors in the participating countries now have a venue where they can publish #openaccess without any fees.
2. The vision is to develop Open Research Europe (ORE) "as a collective non-profit open access publishing service for the public good".
https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/3603e219-6a65-11ef-a8ba-01aa75ed71a1/language-en

2/4

Here are two easy things YOU can do:

#1 Every academic supporting #openscience and #openaccess should consider ORE as their primary publishing venue and ask colleague/co-authors to do the same.

#2 Point your librarian, institutional leaders, funding agencies towards the documents linked above and ask them to support ORE, too.

#3 Make *everyone* and every institution aware that they now have a choice: support parasitic corporations or the public good. By their actions you shall know them!

3. As we outline in our article, such a decentralized public infrastructure can be highly resilient against not only natural or political disasters, but also "against corporate capture and surveillance technologies":
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.230206
4. If/when funding agencies realize that maintaining funding for legacy journals directly counteracts the goals they signed onto with their support of ORE, the legacy journals stand to suffer massive drops in revenue.

What can YOU do?

3/4

#academicchatter

This should have been big news!

Ten funding agencies from eight European countries have pledged to support a public infrastructure that is poised to replace academic journals:
FWF 🇦🇹
RCN 🇳🇴
Forte 🇸🇪
ARIS 🇸🇮
SRC 🇸🇪
FCT 🇵🇹
CSIC 🇪🇸
DFG 🇩🇪
Formas 🇸🇪
ANR 🇫🇷
Only two of them issued press releases in English:
https://www.fwf.ac.at/en/news/detail/joint-commitment-to-strengthening-open-research-europe
https://www.fccn.pt/en/atualidade/fct-assina-declaracao-fortalecimento-open-research-europe-ore/
and one more, FWO from 🇳🇱 considers joining:
https://www.nwo.nl/en/news/nwo-endorses-joining-open-access-platform-open-research-europe-ore
Why is this BIG? 1/4
#openscience #openaccess

Mark your calendars with this #openscience workshop:
Empower Your Research with Openness and Transparency - PANERIS

https://paneris.eu/events/empower-your-research-with-openness-and-transparency/

"Discover the latest advancements, best practices, and inspiring initiatives in Open Science through a series of expert talks from leading researchers and activists across the globe."

Register until Sep 7.

More anti-science at the US funding agencies.

“the #NIH will no longer seek proposals exclusively for animal models."
Slide at 2:48 (NIH section starting at 2:38).

https://www.fda.gov/news-events/fda-meetings-conferences-and-workshops/fda-nih-workshop-reducing-animal-testing-07072025

Apparently, hallucinating AIs will be sufficient for finding the next drugs, no animal tests necessary. Given the history of human testing in the US, I think it's quite clear which populations will get the newly discovered drugs first...

#science #pseudoscience #USpol

In some meetings, you wear a red band around your arm, in others, you bring your red basecap.

#uspol #USPolitics

If your buddy becomes an editor at a Nature journal, your chances of publishing a Nature paper more than double:

"For each additional original article published in the two years before the editor’s appointment, these authors had 161% more chances to publish another original article in this journal after the editor’s appointment"

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0322012

#academicchatter #publishing #openscience

It is more than just a warning sign when two experts on fascism (Snyder and Stanley) leave the US citing political developments - it's the canary fleeing the coalmine:

https://dailynous.com/2025/03/25/stanley-from-yale-to-toronto/

When people like these leave, you know it's bad.

#uspol #academicchatter

If science in the US is to survive, the opposite must happen: every single grant proposal must include as many of the "forbidden" words as possible:

"National Institutes of Health officials have urged scientists to remove all references to mRNA vaccine technology from their grant applications, two researchers said, in a move that signaled the agency might abandon a promising field of medical research."

https://kffhealthnews.org/news/article/nih-grants-mrna-vaccines-trump-administration-hhs-rfk/

Just in case anybody needed a reminder of where this is going.

"Most big science publishers are based in Europe, but a huge percentage of their revenue comes from the U.S. If the Trump administration demanded that these publishers block unapproved publications from the U.S., would they stand and fight?"

https://www.thetransmitter.org/policy/science-must-step-away-from-nationally-managed-infrastructure/

Of course they wouldn't! We've seen them roll over for much less, e.g.:

https://bjoern.brembs.net/2014/04/resigning-from-frontiers/

That was 11 years ago and things have changed for the worse since then.

#openscience #openaccess