Three European projects to promote the development of open access "diamond" publications

The "diamond" publishing model allows researchers to disseminate their work in open access without paying publication fees. The diamond business model relies heavily on grants from research institutions. In March 2022, OpenEdition was among the first signatories of the Action Plan for Diamond Open Access, launched by the ANR, Science Europe, the OPERAS consortium, coordinated by OpenEdition, and the cOAlition S. This plan proposed concrete actions to consolidate the diamond model and allow it to develop fully.

The European projects DIAMAS, CRAFT-OA and PALOMERA were launched in order to put in place the coordination, pooling and sustainable funding mechanisms provided by the Diamond Open Access Plan.

DIAMAS

As part of the transition towards open access, publishing carried out by research institutions is facing both fragmentation and variations in terms of quality of service, visibility and sustainability. To address this issue, DIAMAS (Developing Institutional Open Access Publishing Models To Advance Scholarly Communication) brings together 23 organisations from 12 European countries with experience in open access academic publishing and scholarly communication. Coordinated by Aix-Marseille Université, the project started last September (see press release).

DIAMAS will:

• Map the current landscape of Institutional Publishing Service Providers (IPSPs) in 25 countries of the ERA with special attention for IPSPs that do not charge fees for publishing or reading;
• Coordinate and improve the efficiency and quality of IPSPs by developing a European Quality Standard for Institutional Publishing (EQSIP);
• Formulate community-led, actionable recommendations and strategies for institutional leaders, funders/sponsors/donors, and policymakers in the European Research Area (ERA).

CRAFT-OA

Funded for three years, the CRAFT-OA project (Creating a Robust Accessible Federated Technology for Open Access), coordinated by the University of Göttingen and launched on 25-26 January, aims to evolve and consolidate the institutional open access diamond publishing landscape for journals. By offering services and tools applicable to the entire journal publishing lifecycle, CRAFT-OA will enable local and regional publishing platforms and service providers to grow, become more professional and achieve stronger interoperability with other scientific information systems. These developments will benefit the research community and editors involved in publishing.

The project is structured around four axes aimed at improving the technical and organisational infrastructure of diamond open access publishing:

• Making technical improvements to the platforms and software of the journals;
• Creating communities of practice to support the overall improvement of the infrastructure;
• Enhancing the value and visibility of the Diamond model;
• Integrating Diamond Open Access Publishing with the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) and other large-scale data aggregators.

The CRAFT-OA consortium gathers 23 partners from 17 European countries. CRAFT-will provide technical and community tools, training materials, resources and services for open access publishing and will encourage practices that will improve the project over time.

Find out more:

• European Commission grants substantial funding to improve institutional publishing for science
• Press release: Improving Diamond Open Access across Europe
• In French : CP Science ouverte : le CNRS apporte son soutien au plan d’action d’accès ouvert « diamant »

PALOMERA

Academic books continue to play an important role in scholarly production and communication of research, particularly in the humanities and social sciences. Academic books should be included in the open science policies and strategies developed by institutions and research funding bodies, to ensure that open science becomes the modus operandi of modern science in all disciplines. However, unlike the publication of articles in journals (especially in the fields of science, technology and medicine), academic books have not received much attention from policy-makers in terms of open access. As a result, funding bodies and research institutions rarely request that books be published in open access.

The kick-off meeting of the PALOMERA (Policy Alignment of Open access Monographs in the European Research Area) project took place on 17 and 18 January. Coordinated by OPERAS and lasting 2 years, it will investigate the reasons for this situation across geographies, languages, economies and disciplines within the European Research Area (ERA). Through literature reviews, surveys, in-depth interviews and use cases, PALOMERA will collect, structure, analyse and make available knowledge that can explain the challenges and barriers that prevent open access within academic literature. Based on this evidence, PALOMERA will provide actionable recommendations and concrete resources to support and coordinate aligned policies of funding bodies and institutions for open access books, with the overall objective of accelerating the transition towards open access for books to further promote open science.

The recommendations will be addressed to all relevant stakeholders (funding bodies and research institutions, research community, publishers, infrastructure providers, libraries and national policy-makers).

PALOMERA brings together 16 members and partners from approximately ten countries.

To learn more, please visit the dedicated post on the OpenEdition blog: https://oep.hypotheses.org/3196

About OpenEdition

OpenEdition is a national research infrastructure, co-managed by the CNRS, Aix-Marseille Université, EHESS and Avignon Université, that develops a portal for digital resources in the humanities and social sciences and brings together four platforms dedicated to journals with OpenEdition Journals, book collections with OpenEdition Books, research blogs with Hypotheses and scientific events with Calenda.

The platform hosts over 600 journals, 4,400 research blogs, 50,000 scientific event announcements and 13,600 books. Thousands of users edit and publish content on OpenEdition.

OpenEdition is leading the European infrastructure project OPERAS, to which some 50 institutions from 20 countries are contributing and whose objective is to coordinate and federate resources within the European Research Area in order to respond effectively to the scientific communication needs of the European research community in the humanities and social sciences.