Money, Trust and Tools
How Two New Projects Aim to Strengthen Diamond Open Access
Verfassungsblog faces the same challenges as any independent, non-profit, and community-led publication platform committed to Diamond Open Access (DOA). Recently, two projects were launched to strengthen DOA as a publishing model across borders and with a global reach. I attended the kick-off conference in Madrid to find out what we can learn from their approach, how we can benefit from their results and in what ways we can get involved to help shape the future of academic publishing.
New infrastructures for cooperation and visibility of DOA
The two projects launched at the event on the 14th and 15th of January 2025 were the European Diamond Capacity Hub (EDCH) and the ALMASI Project (Aligning and Mutualizing Nonprofit Open Access Publishing Services Internationally).
The ALMASI Project seeks to develop a non-profit, high-quality, and sustainable scholarly communication ecosystem across Africa, Europe, and Latin America.
ALMASI picked up on the UNESCO consultation on DOA with its call for global collaboration balanced with regional leadership alongside sustainable funding models: Its focus involves South America, Africa and Europe where the state of DOA differs considerably. In South America, 93% of DOA is financed by public funds. In contrast, Africa not only lacks national but also university-centred funding for (D)OA. The indexing platform African Journals Online (AJOL) offers services that enable quality African-published scholarly journals to transfer to DOA. It operates as a non-profit organisation that does not receive any funding from the government. In Europe, differing national contexts and the diversity of languages shape how DOA support platforms and infrastructures are being built. The funding for DOA from research funding agencies in Europe has been increasing and national Capacity Centres are being established or growing in France, Spain, and Germany.
The EDCH aims to strengthen the DOA community in Europe by supporting institutional, national, and disciplinary Capacity Centres, as well as Diamond publishers and service providers in their scholarly publishing efforts.
Various task forces will prepare and improve the services of the EDCH. The Diamond Open Access Standard (DOAS) is already providing orientation and quality assurance in DOA publishing and the DIAMAS Toolsuite offers resources and guidelines for publishers who are or want to become DOA publishers.
People and organizations can get involved in a number of ways: They can join the task forces of EDCH and organizations can register and become part of the community and forum of EDCH.
Building an infrastructure for the discovery of DOA content and connecting them with other directories and databases is crucial to make DOA more visible and establish it as an accepted standard. The Diamond Discovery Hub will make a significant contribution towards that end by offering an authoritative list of DOA journals.
A fundamental change of the publishing system
ALMASI and EDCH are important drivers of the internationalization of DOA. The work packages that include “mapping nonprofit publishing services”, “aligning quality support instruments for publishing services”, “funding and policies” and “knowledge transfer” illustrate how fundamentally DOA is supposed to change the entire system of academic publishing. It is not just a new financing structure but a novel approach to the organization of scholarly publishing and the corresponding infrastructure. The lacking clarity when it comes to structural questions of financing DOA highlights the need for international collaboration in order to talk about the recognition of beneficiaries and contributors of DOA and how these roles reflect responsibilities.
DOA is the new hope to transform the system of academic publishing where the open access movement has failed. Its basic understanding, however, was shaped early on and can already be found in the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities. DOA is now taking up on ideas like providing open, accessible and compatible content and tools of research communication. The fact that EDCH is building a new tool to register DOA journals and to make them visible and accessible alongside existing infrastructures like the DOAJ is pointing to a more fundamental change in the definition of Open Access.
Strengthening DOA requires “money, trust and tools”, as Johan Rooryck (cOAlition S / OPERAS) put it bluntly. It is not a trivial task and developing much-needed policy guidelines, tools and, importantly, a consistent definition of what DOA is will take time.
The speakers agreed that Open Access and Open Science are to serve society and Ana Persic (UNESCO) understands access to science as a human right. By facilitating equal access to information worldwide, DOA can help give effect to that right.
Remaining questions and challenges
Beyond their common goal, the speakers identified key challenges of achieving it. Changing the publishing system in a sustainable way not only requires new standards, policies and infrastructures but acceptance and involvement of the research community. CoARA (Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment) was mentioned as an initiative fundamental to the success of DOA journals and publishers that mostly don’t have the same bibliometric indicators as their competitors from big publishing houses. It was argued that collaboration with CoARA should in fact not be an afterthought but central to promoting DOA. The same is true for books that have largely remained a blind spot in the OA transformation of the past two decades. Although books are considered to be part of the EDCH project, it remains unclear how they will be included as the presented prototype did not contain options for DOA books.
Both projects will also need to clarify responsibilities for DOA content on an international level. Who should pay how much? A lesson from the big transformation agreements is that this is no trivial question. The free rider problem persists and as long as payments remain voluntary DOA publishers face being the first in line for funding cuts. This problem was mentioned several times during the conference but will policies be (quick) enough to not only shape the future of a more diverse and sustainable publishing landscape but to ensure the survival of existing DOA projects?
Why it matters for Verfassungsblog
For Verfassungsblog, these are pressing questions. 58 libraries are currently supporting Verfassungsblog with their financial contributions which amounts to a fundamental sum in covering the operational costs. How many of them will continue to do so in the coming years remains entirely open and continues to create uncertainties in the planning process.
Verfassungsblog receives project-related government-funding without being a governmental or university institution. We are non-profit and our mission is to publish high-quality research articles without any fees for authors and readers. But the costs for these services are high and very much visible. In contrast to many other scholar-led publications with institutional ties, we do not have the possibility – nor the inclination – to make these costs invisible through voluntary work and labour that is carried by a university and their library staff.
Yes, we need EDCH and ALMASI, we need guidelines for policies, standards, platforms for exchange and other trust-building mechanisms. But the research community cannot wait for ready-made solutions. DOA is a community effort and publishers, libraries, and research organisations should not wait for final results and clear guidelines before they take action.