Diamond Open Access on the Path Towards Sustainability
The European Diamond Capacity Hub (EDCH) celebrated its official launch in Madrid on January 15, 2025. The hub will provide practical and sound support in several languages for all European stakeholders involved in Diamond Open Access publishing – institutional publishing services, infrastructure, and technology providers. This blog post (originally written in German for those working in a German context) presents these support services. The European Diamond Capacity Hub is the European resource and coordination center that supports Diamond Open Access practices. As such, it also supports those working in publication infrastructures to increase the quality and visibility of their services and content and to form an umbrella organization for national Diamond Open Access contact points.
The landscape of Diamond Open Access (Diamond OA) – the publication model without costs for publishers or readers – is highly fragmented at European and national levels. In recent years, numerous institutions have established journals, publication infrastructures, and services using the Diamond OA model.
By creating Diamond OA resources, academic institutions supplement large publishers’ profit-oriented Open Access (OA) offerings – which operate with Article Processing Charges (APC) – and provide publication infrastructures geared towards disciplinary and national needs. These services still have very different degrees of professionalization, scalability, discipline-specific transferability, and acceptance in the scientific community.
To combine the strengths of local or disciplinary approaches with the possible synergy effects of central services, overarching standards, and established publishing processes, central contact points for Diamond OA practices could be the obvious choices. These can be utilized to implement common tools, standards, and services for Diamond OA and secure their availability for the community of concern in the long term. At the European level, the European Diamond Capacity Hub (EDCH) has taken on the role of such a central resource and coordination hub.
Launch of the European Diamond Capacity Hub in Madrid
The EDCH was launched in Madrid on 15 January 2025 in conjunction with the launch of the ALMASI project (Aligning and Mutualizing Nonprofit Open Access Publishing Services Internationally). At the event, the EDCH and ALMASI were supported by UNESCO, the European Commission, Science Europe and other institutions. Numerous partners and interested parties attended the launch on-site and via live stream, celebrating this important step towards a shared future for Diamond Open Access. The well-known Diamond OA activists Johan Rooryck (ESF) and Pierre Mounier (OpenEdition) presented the future services and working groups of the EDCH and contextualized the high social importance of a scholarly community-led publishing system. In addition to short presentations on global, regional and national perspectives on the topic, the afternoon gave participants the opportunity to exchange ideas, for example, on current challenges in Diamond OA or practical developments such as the registry for Diamond OA journals and the Diamond Discovery Hub (DDH), currently being developed in the CRAFT-OA project (Creating a Robust Accessible Federated Technology for Open Access).
EDCH’s Function and Aim
The EDCH is a joint initiative under the leadership of OPERAS and coalitionS. The aim is to bring European Diamond Open Access structures together and establish the EDCH as an umbrella for (future) national and disciplinary Diamond Capacity Centers (DCC) in Europe.
The EDCH’s main tasks will be coordinating and pooling resources, i.e., the long-term provision of tools for the community that have been developed in projects such as DIAMAS (Developing Institutional Open Access Publishing Models to Advance Scholarly Communication) and CRAFT-OA. This includes guidelines such as the Diamond Open Access Standard (DOAS), as detailed below. To increase the professionalization of Diamond OA publishing, the EDCH provides appropriate training and communication formats. Specifically, a European Common Access Point (ECAP) will be set up as a hub for shared resources, such as the project results, and will be managed by the EDCH participants. The governance and rules of procedure for joint work were outlined at the launch in January. The governance model will ensure efficiency, complementarity, and subsidiarity between the existing European Diamond Capacity Centers (DDCs) while facilitating the establishment of new national DCCs in Europe. Such DCCs already exist in some European countries and operate at the national level, for example, OpenEdition in France, FECYT in Spain, TSV in Finland, and HRČAK in Croatia. The DFG-funded SeDOA project (Diamond Open Access Service Center) will establish the national DCC in Germany over the next three years. Discipline-focused capacity centers or even institutional DCCs are also possible and welcome.
The Colors of the Diamond – EDCH Services
The EDCH connects and supports the emerging or already active service centers for Diamond Open Access (Diamond OA) publishing in Europe. Each of the colored sides of the EDCH diamond stands for a specific service offering, three of which are presented below:
Diamond Open Access Standard
The Diamond Open Access Standard (DOAS), one of the central results of the DIAMAS project, is a public document that sets out broad standards for Diamond publishing practices of scholarly journals. The DOAS was developed considering 58 relevant guidelines and recommendations from the European research area and was supplemented and revised based on feedback from the Open Access publishing community. This best-practice standard was designed to be applied by publication services via a flexible, step-by-step process in line with the corresponding resources of their respective institution. The DOAS is available in several European languages.
Additionally, a Self-Assessment tool is available for institutional publication services to check the extent to which they comply with the DOAS guidelines and recommendations.
The DDH is being developed as a verification system for the Diamond Open Access (Diamond OA) status of European scientific journals. A DDH listing is based on six Diamond OA criteria created in the DIAMAS and CRAFT-OA projects and evaluated in several community consultations. The initial database in the DDH will consist of APC-free journals currently listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and journals from project partners that have been validated by a group of national Diamond OA experts based on these criteria. By being listed in the DDH, journals highlight their Diamond OA status and increase their visibility, discoverability, and acceptance. This makes the DDH a relevant reference system for anyone looking for reliable information on the Diamond OA status of individual journals and an overview of all European Diamond OA journals. This could be funders, research organizations, academic libraries, publication services, publishers, and anyone interested in a scientific publishing system oriented toward the common good.
EDCH Registry und Forum
The EDCH Registry for services offers increased visibility and networking of the various stakeholders in Diamond OA publishing: providers of (institutional) publishing tools and technologies (IPTPs) and institutional publishing service providers (IPSPs) can register there and present their services to the community. This makes it easier to identify suitable cooperation partners, for example. The associated community forum on EDCH serves as a platform for professional exchange and discussion of topics, tools, and technologies.
Participating in EDCH
How can publishing services and service providers wishing to improve the quality and sustainability of their offerings and publicly commit to the Diamond Open Access (Diamond OA) model participate in EDCH? They can register with the EDCH Registry and gain access to the forum. This can be followed by a self-assessment using the above-mentioned DOAS tool to identify strengths and weaknesses. Based on these findings, organizations can improve their skills through training, tools, and plugins. Those who provide Diamond OA journals that meet the required criteria can proceed and have them listed in the DDH to increase visibility and acceptance. Publishing services and publishers can display their profile and overall offering cumulatively in the Publisher Dashboard.
With these measures, services in the Diamond OA will enhance professionalization, improve visibility and acceptance, and thus increase their chances of receiving appropriate resources or funding. The EDCH services, some of which are still under development or available in beta versions, are planned to be ready for full use by the third quarter of 2025.
The EDCH task forces will also make it possible to play an active role in shaping EDCH services. Their topics are:
- Building a community of practice
- Quality assurance, in particular by publicizing the DOAS
- Promotion of skills and competencies through training courses and learning materials
- Maintenance/availability of tools and technologies to ensure interoperability and compliance
- “Diamondization” by supporting the transition to Diamond OA models
- Securing longer-term funding for the EDCH
The EDCH will be permanently resourced through the EDCH Collective, a membership model currently being established.
Conclusion and Outlook
Especially in the Global South, Diamond Open Access (Diamond OA) has been the most critical building block of the Open Access transformation for decades. In the Global North, and thus also in Germany, Diamond Open Access seemed to exist in the shadow of commercial Open Access and to consist of local initiatives to support and operate a mission-driven publishing system. However, the funding impetus of recent years, in particular, makes it clear that Diamond Open Access is on its way to becoming a global alliance and is positioning itself as an important complement to the profit-oriented Open Access of major publishers. This is supported by actors such as UNESCO, the European Commission, and major national research funding organizations, including the French National Research Agency (ANR), the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), and the German Research Foundation (DFG). Parallel to the developments in Europe, there is a lively exchange with colleagues from other parts of the world. In Latin America and Africa in particular, there are long-established Diamond Open Access infrastructures such as AJOL, AmeliCA, Redalyc, and Scielo. Cooperation with these will be strengthened as part of the ALMASI project. In Africa and Latin America, establishing regional Digital Capacity Hubs (DCHs) is planned for the coming years.
Projects Involved in and Contributing to EDCH
DIAMAS
DIAMAS strives for a harmonized, high-quality, and sustainable institutional environment for OA publications from the European Research Area, which will be established by a new standard for Diamond OA publication, supported and co-designed by all stakeholders.
CRAFT-OA
Creating a Robust Accessible Federated Technology for Open Access (2022-2025), https://www.craft-oa.eu/
CRAFT-OA focuses on expanding the technical offerings and organizational infrastructure for Diamond Open Access publishing.
ALMASI
Aligning and Mutualizing Nonprofit Open Access Publishing Services Internationally (2025-2027), https://doi.org/10.3030/101188192
The ALMASI project is an extension and continuation of the work that has been and is being carried out in the CRAFT-OA and DIAMAS projects. The European focus of these two projects will be expanded in ALMASI with partners from Latin America and Africa. This offers the opportunity to learn from each other, analyze good practices, find common standards, and promote European development through global networking.
Authors:
Katharina Müller (https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4212-8208),
Lisa Müller (https://orcid.org/0009-0008-3029-1888),
Tabea Klaus (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2791-1053),
Theresa Waldmann (https://orcid.org/0009-0002-2994-6660),
Hanna Varachkina (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5832-3983),
Malte Dreyer (https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5971-3572),
Margo Bargheer (https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8246-8210).
All authors of the blog post are employed at the Göttingen State and University Library (SUB Göttingen) and work in the “Electronic Publishing” group, among other things, as part of various EU projects.
Translation by DeepL, checked and adjusted by Kelly Achenbach
The original version of this blogpost in German can be found here: https://blog.dini.de/EPub_FIS/2025/02/17/der-european-diamond-capacity-hub/
CRAFT-OA is funded by the European Union under Grant Agreement no. 101094397. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or European Commission. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.