EUA joins European project to foster the development of Diamond Open Access Publishing

The European scholarly communication landscape has reached a tipping point in the last decade and is now in rapid transition towards the full-scale adoption of Open Access (OA) as a default practice for communicating research results.

Nevertheless, the transition of institutional publishing activities towards full OA and Open Science (OS) still faces many challenges. While some of these are technical by nature, other are related to skills, management, visibility and, above all, sustainability. To address these challenges, EUA will be a partner of the “Developing Institutional OA Publishing Models to Advance Scholarly Communication” (DIAMAS) project.

The kick off of the DIAMAS project took place on 19-21 September in Zadar, Croatia, Croatia. The project officially started on 1 September for a duration of three years.

Partners of the DIAMAS project will work together to deliver an aligned, high-quality, and sustainable institutional OA scholarly publication ecosystem for the ERA, setting a new shared and co-designed standard for Diamond OA publishing, a scholarly publication model in which journals and platforms are free for authors and readers (as defined by cOAlition S). The new ecosystem will in turn substantially increase the capacity of institutions to provide innovative, valid, reliable and accessible publishing services, taking into account the specific needs of the different scientific communities across the diversity of disciplines, countries and languages.

DIAMAS brings together 23 public service scholarly organisations from 12 European countries, with the necessary expertise to develop a common set of European standards for institutional publishing across all regions, disciplines and languages, as well as the authority and the network to make sure that they are considered and adopted by all member organisations.

In DIAMAS, EUA will contribute to the activities of the project related to mapping the European landscape of Institutional Publishing Service Providers (IPSPs), building their capacity through knowledge sharing and providing actionable recommendations for their policies and strategies. In particular, the Association will lead a task on developing recommendations and guidelines for institutional leaders. These actions and the overall project’s objective reflect EUA’s commitment to advocate for a just scholarly publishing ecosystem that is transparent, diverse, economically affordable and sustainable, technically interoperable, and steered by the research community, as laid out in the EUA Open Science Agenda 2025.

In March 2022, EUA also endorsed the Action Plan for Diamond Open Access, aimed at promoting a sustainable, community-driven Diamond Open Access scholarly communication ecosystem. DIAMAS will bring forward some of the activities proposed in the Action Plan, working together with the global community of signatories.

This article was first published on 22 September by EUA.