European Diamond Capacity Hub (EDCH)

Summary

European coordination and service hub for Diamond Open Access, hosted by OPERAS, that supports publishers, service providers and capacity centres through standards, self-assessment, directories, training, community-building and tools to strengthen publications with no costs for authors or readers.

Promoting organizations

The European Diamond Capacity Hub (EDCH) is a programme hosted by OPERAS and built on the results of DIAMAS and CRAFT-OA. It is supported by European organisations active in open science, scholarly publishing and funding, including the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR), the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and the European Union, as well as international philanthropy through Gates Foundation.

Objectives

The EDCH responds to the fragmentation of the European Diamond Open Access ecosystem, made up of journals, platforms and services that publish at no cost to authors or readers, but often operate with limited resources, varying levels of professionalisation and weak coordination across countries, disciplines and institutions. The hub builds on the work developed by DIAMAS and CRAFT-OA and seeks to sustain it as a common infrastructure for the European Research Area (Mounier and Rooryck, 2025).

Its aim is to support an open, aligned, high-quality and sustainable scholarly communication infrastructure, governed and owned by the academic community. To this end, the EDCH coordinates national Diamond capacity centres, promotes the creation of new centres, aligns services and practices, redistributes technical and financial resources, supports editorial professionalisation and represents the European dimension within the global Diamond Open Access framework coordinated by UNESCO (EDCH, n.d.-a).

Implementation combines governance, community and operational services. The EDCH operates as an OPERAS programme and structures its activity through working groups, operational members, supporting organisations, national capacity centres and participation spaces. In practice, it offers a set of shared services aimed at increasing the visibility of Diamond journals, assessing quality and sustainability criteria, strengthening editorial skills, improving technical interoperability and connecting national initiatives with a common European infrastructure. The approach does not replace local capacities, but seeks to federate them, reduce duplication and create economies of scale so that publishers and providers can share standards, knowledge and support without losing linguistic and disciplinary diversity or community control (EDCH, n.d.-b, 2026).

Beneficiaries and stakeholders

It is aimed at Diamond OA publishers, editorial and technology service providers, and national or institutional capacity centres. It is also relevant to funders, libraries, universities, publishing consortia, open science policymakers and European academic communities.

Results

  • An initial portfolio of six professional services has been consolidated: the Diamond Discovery Hub, the Diamond Open Access Standard and self-assessment tool, Resources & Guidelines, Registry & Forum, Training Platform and Publishing Tools (EDCH, n.d.-b).
  • In January 2026, after its first year of activity, the EDCH reported 6 operational working groups, 6 professional services, 11 supporting organisations, 13 training modules, 267 active Forum members, 205 registered organisations and 2,981 Diamond OA journals listed in the Diamond Discovery Hub (EDCH, 2026).
  • As of May 2026, a total of 22 national capacity centres have been identified in Europe: 14 established and 8 in preparation, to coordinate and strengthen Diamond OA publishing and its technical support (EDCH, n.d.-d).
  • A governance structure has been formalised with an Assembly, a Steering Committee and an Executive Committee, supported by operational coordination and working groups. It combines community members, funding organisations and operational members responsible for EDCH services and activities (EDCH, n.d.-e).
  • Financial support from several public and philanthropic organisations has been documented: EUR 250,000 from ANR over 18 months, EUR 85,000 from CNRS over 24 months, USD 500,000 from Gates Foundation over three years, and an additional contribution from the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) of Portugal to support outreach, training and local stakeholder engagement (EDCH, n.d.-c).

Challenges

The EDCH needs to consolidate funding and governance beyond the initial momentum of European projects, coordinate national centres with unequal levels of maturity, and avoid duplication across European, national and institutional levels. Another challenge is ensuring that standards, self-assessment and interoperability do not create excessive burdens for small publishers or less-resourced communities, while preserving bibliodiversity, multilingualism and community control. The actual reach of its funding models and service uptake also remains to be assessed. Federating diamond OA in Europe and beyond: the European Diamond Capacity Hub (EDCH) acknowledges that at the time of launch the funding model was still under development and that the working arrangements of some of its task forces had not yet been defined (Mounier and Rooryck, 2025).

Interest and transferability

The EDCH is relevant as a model of federated coordination for strengthening non-commercial scholarly publishing without centralising it on a single platform. Its transferable elements include the combination of national capacity centres, common standards, self-assessment, training, a community registry, technical tools, distributed governance and shared funding. For universities, libraries, consortia or agencies, it offers an adaptable architecture to support Diamond OA journals and services, improve their visibility and connect them with shared European resources (EDCH, n.d.-a, n.d.-b).

Transfer requires prior editorial capacities, coordination among actors, sustained resources and adaptation to languages, disciplines and national frameworks. It should therefore not be understood as a single recipe, but as a framework that each country or institution can adapt to its publishing ecosystem. Its value lies in articulating shared services, standards and technical support without replacing local diversity or displacing academic ownership of publications.

Bibliography

Specific information

Topic: Policies supporting open science

Type of initiative: Infrastructure / platform / service

Implementation scale: European

Responsible agents: Research managers, Publishers

Location: Europe

Keywords: academic publishing, open access, digital infrastructures

Start and end date: 2025 -

Sustainability: Active with documented continuity

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Authorship information

Created on: 24/02/2026

Last updated: 25/05/2026

Author of record: Ana Carballo-Garcia

Author’s institution: Universitat de Barcelona

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