In the transition towards Open Access (OA), institutional publishing was challenged by fragmentation and varying service quality, visibility, and sustainability. To address this issue, DIAMAS gathered 23 organisations from 12 European countries, well-versed in OA academic publishing and scholarly communication. The project objectives were:
- to gain knowledge on the institutional OA publishing landscape
- to standardise and to improve current institutional publishing practices
- to enhance the capacities of Institutional Publishing Service Providers (IPSPs)
- to support policies and strategies
The results of the project will lead to the European institutional publishing community being progressively structured around common standards, best practices, and use of resources. These will generate better alignment, synergies and efficiency in the operations of institutional publishing and increase trust among policymakers and funders to support this model of academic publishing. The overall goal of the project is to create a high quality, transparent, open, trustworthy and equitable scholarly publishing alternative to the “Gold APC” commercial model and a landslide shift in the scholarly communication system. This strategy is supported by three concurrent EC-funded projects – Diamas, Craft-OA and Palomera – that work hand in hand to create efficient community-driven pathways to equitable institutional publishing.
More broadly, this effort undergirds the implementation of the “Diamond Action Plan” that was launched in February 2022 by Science Europe, cOAlition S, ANR and OPERAS, and that was endorsed by more than 150 institutions and other types of academic organisations, who now constitute a community that is kept informed of progress in the three projects and is reflecting on ways to support Diamond Open Access institutional publishing in the future.
These activities around the DIAMAS project take place in the context of an even wider effort to build a global federation of diamond OA publishing, a plan that will be presented and discussed during the Global Diamond Conference in Toluca, Mexico on 23-27 October 2023.