No. 1 (2025)
DOI: 10.5282/o-bib/6131
The term ‘Diamond Open Access (OA)’ refers to a scholarly model of publication where publishers, journals, and platforms do not charge fees to either authors or readers, and where all content-related elements of publishing are directly controlled by the academic community and public institutions. It provides the research community with an aligned, high-quality, and sustainable open scholarly communication ecosystem at a controllable cost.
Diamond OA publishing also helps to strengthen positive research cultures that reflect core values such as autonomy, freedom, care, collegiality, collaboration, equality, diversity, inclusion, integrity, ethics, openness, and transparency. While these values are often implicit in scholarly communication, supporting Diamond OA is a concrete way to affirm them. Journals, platforms, and repositories within this model are led and owned by scholarly communities and serve a diverse range of typically smaller, multilingual, and multicultural scholarly communities, reinforcing the principle of bibliodiversity. By its nature and design, Diamond OA promotes equity and inclusion in the creation and dissemination of scholarly knowledge.1
In the Council of the European Union (EU) conclusions on high-quality, transparent, open, trustworthy, and equitable scholarly publishing from 23 May 2023, EU Member States unanimously supported “the development of aligned institutional and funding policies and strategies regarding not-for-profit open access multi-format scholarly publishing models in Europe with no costs for authors or readers, and to set and implement roadmaps or action plans for a significant expansion of such publishing models.”2
At the institutional level, Diamond OA is often adopted as a model for institutional publishing. Institutions, funders, sponsors, donors and policymakers also exercise their economic and financial responsibilities to ensure that scholarly publishing is sustainable and provides societal value. Supported by public funds and resources, Diamond OA publishing offers a sustainable funding model, characterised by cost transparency and control by public institutions. Dynamics of authority, patronage, and legitimacy play a significant role as well, including both top-down support, such as political, financial, and logistical backing from the European and national authorities and funding bodies, and bottom-up initiatives driven by universities, research institutions, and scholarly communities.3
At the global level, UNESCO is facilitating the Secretariat of the globally distributed cooperative for Diamond Open Access, the Global Alliance for Diamond OA,4 as part of their engagement through the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science5 and has recently run a survey ‘Consultation on a Global Diamond Open Access Framework’.6
The overall momentum Diamond OA is gaining as an equitable and community-driven approach to open scholarly publishing is flanking the work being done in the DIAMAS project. In September 2022, 23 organisations from 12 European countries started a joint effort by launching DIAMAS – Developing Institutional Open Access Publishing Models to Advance Scholarly Communication project to better understand the institutional publishing landscape in the European Research Area. DIAMAS aims to provide the institutional publishers and service providers with support to better align their practice, improve quality, and develop sustainability.7 The project runs until August 2025. This report reflects on the DIAMAS project outputs already delivered, such as a Diamond Open Access Standard and self-assessment tools, landscape and sustainability reports. It also sheds light on project output such as guidance, toolkits and community engagement. These resources and activities will help institutions and scholarly societies to better plan and manage their publishing activities and ensure the alignment of quality standards in Diamond OA publishing. Notably, through these outputs DIAMAS is also providing service components for the European Diamond Capacity Hub that was launched in January of 2025.8
The DIAMAS project outputs are designed to ensure the quality and transparency of governance, processes and workflows in Diamond OA publishing and to improve the sustainability of Diamond OA publishers and their service providers. They range from research reports to standards and practical tools.
The key to understanding the DIAMAS efforts and outcomes lies in the concept of quality, which revolves around seven core components of scholarly publishing outlined in the Diamond OA Action Plan of Science Europe, cOAlition S, OPERAS, and the French National Research Agency (ANR),9 which were subsequently revised in the DIAMAS project:10
Funding, aiming to ensure a sustainable Diamond OA business model, editorial independence, and cost transparency.
Governance, seeking to define and establish ownership and control by the scholarly community, transparent mission-driven strategic governance, and clear relations with service providers.
Open Science practices, promoting Open Science policies, authors’ rights, intellectual property rights, licencing practices, and sharing via a repository.
Editorial management, highlighting the importance of strong independent editorial bodies, transparency in peer review, editorial quality processes, and research integrity.
Technical service efficiency, aiming to ensure strong publishing infrastructures, interoperability and metadata robustness, as well as appropriate collaboration and preservation strategies.
Visibility, communication, marketing, and impact, seeking to enhance the visibility, communication, dissemination, and impact of published content through indexing, communication through various channels, and the provision of comprehensive usage metrics.
Equity, diversity, inclusion, and belonging (EDIB), gender, and multilingualism, focusing on promoting EDIB policies and practices, and ensuring equal participation, accessibility, and multilingualism as key quality elements.
These seven components are reflected in a Diamond OA publishing standard developed by the project and the supporting tools and guidelines.
The DIAMAS project developed a common quality standard for Diamond OA publishers and their service providers. This was necessary because the existing quality criteria were unsuitable for Diamond OA publishing – either because they did not address all relevant aspects of publishing or because they were designed in the context of commercial publishing. The new standard for Diamond OA publishing is conceived as a public good, i.e. it is defined and controlled by scholarly communities.
The development of the standard for Diamond OA publishing was an iterative process involving an analysis of existing quality evaluation criteria, best practices, and assessment systems in publishing developed by international publishers’ associations, research funding organisations, and international indexing databases,11 the development of the first version of the Extensible Quality Standard for Institutional Publishing (EQSIP 1.0),12 a gap analysis13 to understand differences between the first version of the standard and current practices in Diamond OA publishing, the development of a second version of the standard and its refinement through community feedback and public consultations. The final version, rebranded as the Diamond Open Access Standard (DOAS),14 defines required and desired quality criteria across the above-mentioned core components.
DOAS is deployed as a self-assessment tool, bundled together with the Diamond OA sustainability check tool.15 This free web service allows publishers to evaluate their compliance with the required and desired criteria using a structured questionnaire. Upon completion, users receive a detailed report that includes scores and recommendations across the seven core components.16
In addition to helping Diamond OA publishers assess their adherence to established standards, DOAS could play an important role in harmonising quality standards in Diamond OA publishing across institutions and countries. It could also be integrated into national frameworks for journal assessment and allocation of funding.
A Diamond OA Sustainability Check Tool and Statements were designed to help institutions gain continued insights into the financial health of the operations of Diamond OA institutional publishers and service providers. Available as a part of the self-assessment tool mentioned above (see chapter 2.1), the tool includes a few simple questions based on evidence gathered by the DIAMAS project from Diamond OA publishers’ and service providers’ experiences and challenges in financial sustainability. Answering this tool’s questions prompts to assess costs, resources, income streams, shared services efficiency and mechanisms allowing to grow financially and to control, monitor and manage finances and plan for the future. In the end, the tool generates a radar chart indicating the publisher’s level of sustainability in certain key areas of financial operations, which helps plan strategically for a more sustainable future.
The DIAMAS sustainability research report17 highlights that there are no funding models sustainable by definition, as publishers and their service providers largely rely on different funding streams, including the renewal of income streams, institutional in-kind support and an unpaid workforce to carry out their work. Many also rely on government funding. At the margin, these funding streams are combined with print subscription fees, Voluntary Author Contributions, collective funding initiatives, event organisation, commercial revenue and loans.
Personnel is more central to the sustainability of an institutional publisher or service provider than monetary resources. However, the contribution of this workforce is difficult to assess since work can be considered to be voluntary, in-kind or paid for a given task depending on institutional definitions. Large infrastructures also play a crucial role in the ecosystem, particularly Diamond OA hosting platforms and publishing software. “Sustainability cannot be considered at the level of the individual institution alone. If we are to envision the future, we need to look at institutional OA publishing at the national and international policy and practice ecosystem level. Supporting infrastructures that facilitate the development of small to mid-sized institutional publishers and service providers and efforts that connect, build capacity and share resources has the potential to make this ecosystem more technically and financially sustainable in the mid to long term.”18
To support Diamond ΟΑ and the adoption and implementation of the DOAS, the DIAMAS Toolsuite and Guidelines have been developed. These resources were published on a web platform19 in October 2024 and ultimately became part of the European Diamond Capacity Hub in January 2025.
The DIAMAS Toolsuite includes a set of relatively short (ca. 500 word) articles in English structured around the seven core components of DOAS, as well as a glossary of terms, keywords and frequently asked questions (FAQs). The Toolsuite has been enriched with a set of resources supporting the sustainability of Diamond OA publishing and will be further enriched with training materials.20 In terms of methodology and structure, the Toolsuite builds upon existing resources, such as the OAPEN Open Access (OA) Books Toolkit21 and the DOAJ/OASPA Open Access Journals Toolkit.22
The DIAMAS Guidelines23 are meant to support Diamond OA publishers and their service providers in implementing the Diamond Open Access Standard. They follow the structure of DOAS, i.e. the division into the seven core components, and cover 18 topics, including revenue streams, Diamond OA policies, community governance, copyright, open licences, research data sharing, preprints, self-archiving, handling negative results, research protocols, compliance with the EU general data protection regulation (GDPR), platform selection, metadata standards, marketing, metrics, gender diversity, and multilingualism.
The Toolsuite articles and Guidelines are tagged with keywords and signposted with links to related Toolsuite articles, Guidelines, training materials and external resources. They are organised in a modular way, allowing for text extension, for expanding the scope of topics covered, and for adaptations, and are written in simple language to make translation easier. So far, the DIAMAS Toolsuite and Guidelines have been translated into Croatian,24 Portuguese25 and Spanish.26 The collaborative translation process was supported by the online pilot translation service Mondaecus, which was developed by the University of Coimbra.27
Between March and May 2023, DIAMAS launched a survey targeting institutional publishing service providers (IPSPs) in the European Research Area (ERA). The report, written out of that data, the Institutional Publishing Landscape Report,28 is built on 685 survey responses from institutional publishers and publishing service providers across the ERA. The main finding from this report is that the scholarly publishing landscape is characterised by its significant diversity and complexity. Typically, IPSPs are small in terms of output, budget, and staff. Still, they often adhere to Open Science practices and uphold high editorial standards with remarkable professionalism. However, IPSPs face a few noteworthy, seemingly persistent challenges. Most prominently they often suffer from a lack of sustainable funding, limited indexation, and heavy reliance on unpaid or voluntary work. Similarly, there is significant room for improvement in integrating equity, diversity, inclusion, and belonging (EDIB) dimensions.
Overall, the findings of the report suggest that the transition toward Diamond OA is most successful when embedded within institutional contexts. Institutional publishing, in particular, has emerged as a key gateway for advancing the Diamond OA model in scholarly publishing, emphasising its critical role in fostering a more open and equitable scholarly publishing ecosystem.
The engagement of various communities (language, regional, national, disciplinary, etc.) has had an important role in a wide range of project activities, such as research, co-creation, dissemination and exploitation of project results. Some patterns in community engagement could be observed early on in the project. Namely, events organised in countries or regions with strong OA communities, as well as activities led by trusted entities (such as authoritative organisations, library consortia, or learned societies), tended to attract better responses and more participants.
Community engagement activities aimed at collecting data for the research conducted by the project included the dissemination of surveys, online events providing support for survey completion, focus groups and interviews. Online events to support survey completion were organised to support the first major research activity in the project – the analysis of the Diamond OA publishing landscape. The success of these events varied, revealing the pivotal role of local OA communities,29 which seems to have also been reflected by the survey results (the greatest number of responses were received from Serbia, Croatia and Spain).30 The research on the financial sustainability of Diamond OA publishing actively involved communities in data collection through national focus groups and interviews, many of which were conducted in participants’ native languages.31
The process of developing the DOAS is an example of a co-creative community engagement. Eight focus groups made up of 75 experts from over 10 countries, selected from a broad range of scholarly disciplines, regions, languages, and communication practices across Europe, and 60 individuals involved in public consultation analysed the early drafts of the standard and provided feedback, helping shape the final version and making sure that the institutional publishing community had a say in this process.32 Community feedback was particularly valuable in designing the DIAMAS self-assessment tools,33 where various communities were involved in testing.
A co-creative approach was also used to develop the Equality, Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging (EDIB) Toolsuite and Guidelines.34 To engage the broader community and gather feedback on the resources that were developed, different strategies were employed: questionnaires, webinars, and blog posts. Separate questionnaires were designed for each of the three EDIB dimensions – 1. multilingualism, 2. gender, and 3. accessibility of websites, content, and metadata. Two webinars were held in collaboration with other organizations to facilitate discussion and collect feedback on the developed toolkits and guidelines. Feedback from participants was gathered through a survey and incorporated into a revised version of the resources.
The project’s dissemination strategy takes into account the community engagement patterns which were observed. Along with events in English with a general focus on a wide audience, DIAMAS organises events in different languages for national or regional communities, e.g. to promote the landscape report35 or encourage the adoption of DOAS. A strong focus on perspectives and topics relevant to a local community and an opportunity to discuss them in a familiar language resulted in greater engagement and growing interest in project activities and results.
As demonstrated by the Toolsuite and Guidelines, DIAMAS actively encourages and supports the translation and adaptation of project outputs to increase their impact. Communities have been, and will continue to be, central to this process, ensuring that these efforts extend beyond the project’s lifespan.
Additionally, the DIAMAS project hosts dedicated event series tailored to specific outputs and/or audiences. In 2025, a series of “DOAS-a-thons” will aim to engage national communities with the DOAS. Similarly, an ongoing conversation series for libraries will highlight project outputs, thereby ensuring engagement with this stakeholder group.
The launch of the European Diamond Capacity Hub36 (EDCH) on 15 January 202537 presented the opportunity for all of the community to engage with those DIAMAS services and resources already operable. Together with the outputs of the CRAFT-OA project, the outputs of the DIAMAS project serve as the building blocks for the EDCH, which aims to align and coordinate all activities related to Diamond OA in Europe. Complementary to the DIAMAS project, the CRAFT-OA (Creating a Robust Accessible Federated Technology for Open Access)38 project aims to make the OA landscape of the ERA more resilient by developing technical solutions. More specifically, the EDCH is part of an infrastructure for Diamond OA that connects the European level to the national and disciplinary level of Diamond OA activities and a global dimension via the Global Diamond Open Access Alliance.
The EDCH follows up on the recommendation of the Open Access Diamond Journals Study39 to create a Diamond OA capacity centre and contributes to a high-equality, fair, open, trustworthy, and equitable scholarly communication ecosystem.
Officially launched in January 2025, the EDCH offers services and resources developed through both projects. These services and resources are:
DOAS, the Diamond Open Access Standard, is a tool to promote quality in Diamond OA publishing which serves as both a technical guide and a practical benchmarking resource. Complementing the quality standard, two self-assessment tools allow users of the EDCH to assess their compliance with the DOAS as well as their financial sustainability. (already available)
The Diamond Discovery Hub (DDH), a comprehensive registry of Diamond OA journals in Europe, helps Diamond OA journals increase their visibility. Diamond OA journals included in the DDH fulfil six operational criteria for Diamond OA.40 (soon to come)
Resources & Guidelines, a set of resources that support publishers moving towards Diamond OA. This includes concise high-level introductions to Diamond OA and to the DOAS as well as guidelines. Additionally, this component of the EDCH offers guidelines containing detailed instructions and practical guidance to assist Diamond OA publishers in meeting current standards as outlined in the DOAS. (already available)
Publishing Tools, such as OJS plug-ins (e.g. for multilingualism and GDPR compliance), help Diamond OA publishers facilitate their work and adhere to quality standards. (soon to come)
Registry & Forum are both a space dedicated to fostering collaboration and networking, and a marketplace to showcase Diamond OA services, tools and technologies The EDCH registry serves as an entry point for Diamond Service Providers and Diamond OA Tools & Technology Providers, and, simultaneously, as a comprehensive list of Diamond OA capacity centres throughout Europe. Additionally, the forum facilitates networking and discussions on topics relevant to the community. (soon to come)
The Training Platform is dedicated to helping Diamond Publishing Service and Diamond Technology and Tools Providers enhance their skills and build capacity by offering skill-building trainings in various areas, e.g. technological proficiency, compliance with the DOAS. (soon to come)
All components of the EDCH have been developed and will continue to be developed further in close collaboration with the European Diamond OA community. Notably, the quality standard that is the DOAS serves as a conceptual baseline for the EDCH. Thereby, the EDCH aims to not only present a quality standard but simultaneously provide the community with the tools to achieve compliance with the DOAS.
The network for Diamond OA Service Providers and Diamond OA Tools & Technology Providers is the core component of the EDCH dedicated to enabling and enhancing community engagement by fostering collaboration and capacity building. Service and Tools and Technology Providers that sign up for the network through the EDCH registry will benefit through access to enhanced networking and collaboration opportunities and the possibility to showcase and upgrade their services. Network members will gain visibility as Diamond providers not only through the registry displayed in the EDCH but also through interactions in the Diamond community forum that allows members to interact.
