Action Plan for Diamond Open Access

Summary

Action Plan (Science Europe, cOAlition S, OPERAS and ANR, 2022) to develop and expand a community-driven scholarly communication ecosystem. Diamond Open Access is a publishing model in which journals and platforms charge no fees to authors or readers; it supports bibliodiversity and equitable, multilingual and multicultural publishing.

Promoting organizations

Science Europe (coordination), together with cOAlition S, OPERAS and the Agence nationale de la recherche (ANR, France). The plan was developed with input from experts from the Diamond OA community and from the February 2022 workshop.

Objectives

The Action Plan sets out an overall objective: to strengthen and expand a community-governed Diamond Open Access publishing ecosystem, and it translates this into four complementary lines of work.

It aims to bring Diamond Open Access journals and platforms together around shared principles, guidelines and quality standards (while respecting cultural, multilingual and disciplinary diversity), to substantially increase their capacity to deliver innovative, robust, reliable and accessible services, and to support the development of the model in line with the recommendations of the Open Access Diamond Journals Study (OADJS).

These lines of work cover improved operational efficiency, the consolidation of quality standards, capacity building, and the long-term sustainability of the model.

Overall objective: to develop and expand a sustainable, community-led scholarly communication ecosystem in Diamond Open Access, built around shared principles, guidelines and quality standards, while respecting cultural, multilingual and disciplinary diversity.

Specific objectives (4 pillars)

Efficiency and economies of scale: share resources and infrastructure, improve interoperability (submission systems, platforms, metadata) and create synergies among journals and platforms by discipline, territory or language.
Quality standards: flexibly align existing standards and good practices and co-create an international framework; define standards for key components (business model, integrity, governance, diversity, equity and inclusion, openness, etc.) and develop a self-assessment tool.
Capacity building: create a toolset with training materials, policies and guidelines available through a common access point; mobilise relevant stakeholders and roll out a communication strategy; and support the creation of a non-profit Capacity Centre for Diamond Publishing (CCDP).
Sustainability: ensure legal recognition of ownership and governance, improve the understanding and transparency of costs, promote a more balanced distribution of financial support, and design a coordinated funding mechanism for journals, infrastructures and the CCDP.

Beneficiaries and stakeholders

Researchers, research funding organisations, university libraries, university presses, faculties, departments, research institutes and centres, scholarly societies, ministries, and service providers that support scholarly communication.

Results

Since its launch in March 2022, the Diamond Open Access Action Plan has served as a shared framework to consolidate an international community around a publishing model with no fees for authors or readers. Over this period, the plan has steadily expanded its base of support (endorsements) and strengthened its global reach through translations, communication actions, and community-building activities, making it easier for very diverse initiatives (across disciplines, languages, and institutional contexts) to recognize themselves within a single shared goal.

Implementation has been shaped mainly through coordination and mutual-learning mechanisms: conferences, webinars, and exchange spaces that have helped translate priorities into concrete work in critical areas (infrastructure and interoperability, governance, assessment, and sustainability). This trajectory has led to a global point of synthesis and a shared roadmap (the Global Summit), as well as the formulation of conclusions to guide the ecosystem’s next steps.

On the operational side, a key milestone is the launch of the European Diamond Capacity Hub (January 2025), designed to strengthen capacities and coordinate services and support for diamond publishing in Europe, connecting actors and resources that had previously been dispersed. In parallel, the work of the DIAMAS project has translated the plan’s objectives into practical deliverables for implementation: the DOAS quality standard, a self-assessment tool, and recommendations and guidelines. Taken together, these outputs help professionalize practices, improve transparency and quality, and move toward a more robust sustainability of the Diamond OA ecosystem.

Challenges

Despite the momentum of the Action Plan, key challenges remain for consolidating Diamond Open Access: ensuring stable financial sustainability (beyond one-off grants) and improving cost transparency; strengthening shared infrastructures and interoperability without undermining bibliodiversity (multilingualism and disciplinary diversity); clarifying governance and ownership models for publications; professionalising capacities (training, tools and ongoing support for often small editorial teams); and achieving greater recognition in research assessment so that Diamond publishing is seen as a comparably high-quality and sustainable route.

Evidence of success

The Diamond OA model already has scale and institutional traction: the OA Diamond Journals Study estimated between 17,000 and 29,000 Diamond journals worldwide; as an up-to-date proxy indicator, DOAJ lists 14,110 journals without fees.

Since 2022, the Action Plan has broadened its endorsement base (more than 150 organisations and 150 individuals in 2023) and has been translated into multiple languages; in 2023, community webinars were held to prepare the global discussion, and at the Toluca Global Summit (October 2023) 160+ endorsers were reported and the plan was available in 11 languages.

Community mobilisation is also measurable: the Summit/2nd Conference (hybrid and multilingual) brought together nearly 700 participants, 457 institutions and 75 countries, and culminated in the “Conclusions and Way Forward” document, which sets shared priorities (infrastructure, governance, research assessment and sustainability) and announced the creation of a Global Diamond OA Federation with UNESCO participation.