The EU wants to remove traditional publishers from scientific publishing, and replace their role in peer review with an open standard they call Publish, Review, Curate (PRC).

By early November, the European Commission will roll out an expanded version of its Open Research Europe (ORE) platform, which uses a ‘publish, review, curate’ model. In this approach, preprints are posted, reviewed openly — with the identity of the reviewers and their reports made public — then flagged as ‘peer reviewed’ on the same platform.

The idea here is to separate the publication, peer-review and evaluation of scientific research from the traditional academic journals that have historically controlled all three.

At the moment, much of the scientific publishing industry is built on a rather strange arrangement: research is largely paid for with public money, academics often carry out peer reviews for free, and universities then pay huge subscription fees to commercial publishers like Elsevier and Springer Nature to access the results.

If this new model catches on it could seriously disrupt that arrangement, make scientific research much more accessible and change the way academic work is evaluated and recognized.

Preprint-centric publishing model gets major boost: European funders put weight behind emerging ‘publish, review, curate’ approach for preprints.