The following five goals where met, operationalised with the six Key exploitable Results (KERs):
1. Providing Orientation and Closing Technical Gaps (met esp. with KERs 1, 4, 5, 6)
CRAFT-OA conducted analyses of technical standards, workflows, and organisational requirements within the European DOA community as many services continue to be only partially aligned with existing recommendations, quality criteria, and Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable (FAIR) principles. Therefore, the project developed a range of support measures, including technical enhancements for publishing software, training materials, guidelines, and modular tools that promote interoperability and enable the sustainable advancement of services.
2. Increasing Visibility, Transparency, and Networking (met with all KERs)
CRAFT-OA improved discoverability and representation of DOA journals and service providers. It created structures for systematic collection and presentation of the output/ of the results of institutionally operated and scholar-led publishing initiatives, supporting data harmonisation, quality assurance, metadata enrichment, and collaboration with aggregators and international infrastructures.
3. Community Building, Empowerment, and Professionalisation (met with all KERs)
In DOA publishing, community empowerment and professionalisation is interconnected with technical capacities. CRAFT-OA focused on targeted capacity-building. Training and competence-development programmes supported editorial teams, service providers, and system administrators in transitioning towards standards-based, interoperable publishing practices. Smaller publishing initiatives were specifically targeted: workshops, summer schools, and online exchange formats offered skill-building essential for sustainable technical and editorial work. One of the major outcomes of the sister project DIAMAS, the EDCH, provides a community framework to maintain such project results beyond Funding periods.
4. Technical Tools for Interoperability and Data Integration (met esp. with KERs 1, 2, 3, 5)
CRAFT-OA developed technical solutions to facilitate the work of editors and Service providers and support integration with European infrastructures. These include enhancements to publishing systems that improve metadata quality, enable automated enrichment, and introduce new interoperability functions. They strengthen the quality and visibility of publications, and allow for new analytical and monitoring capabilities.
5. Sustainable Key Innovations for the Diamond OA Ecosystem (met with all KERs)
The project’s central innovations provide the foundation for sustainable services that will continue to operate beyond the project’s runtime. These solutions were designed to integrate with existing publishing systems such as Open Journal Systems (OJS) or Lodel and to enable their long-term maintenance and further development by the European infrastructure and developer community.
With its DoA CRAFT-OA contributed to the long-term strengthening of the European Diamond OA ecosystem, increased the visibility of community-led publishing models, and created improved conditions for technical and organisational maturity across the sector.CRAFT-OA channelled its activities into six key exploitable results to ensure all technical and scientific results were supporting DOA communities on a technical level, all delivered as fully functional MVPs or beyond, with TRL 7-9 and having respective sustainability plans including consortium partners providing long term commitment. They became part of the EDCH collective and its task forces to oversee target group orientation, collective governance and (if needed) technical updates beyond funding. CRAFT-OA KERs are meaningful contributions for the DOA communities of practice on a technical level, closing known technical gaps.
KER1 Diamond Discovery Hub: A central registry of scholar-led Diamond OA journals in Europe that boosts their visibility and discoverability by providing interoperable metadata and enhanced recognition across platforms.
KER2 Enhancements to OJS: A suite of new and improved functionalities within the Open Journal Systems platform to enhance metadata quality, support multilingual content, and improve GDPR-compliant handling of editorial and reviewer data.
KER3 Publisher Dashboard: A data-driven dashboard component integrated with the OpenAIRE MONITOR service, designed to help Diamond OA publishers access analytics and insights to support publication workflows.
KER4 Publisher’s Living Handbook for Diamond Open Access: A continuously updated and sustainable handbook documenting best practices, standards, and technical guidance for Diamond Open Access publishing. Among other resources, this collection includes all the training materials and sessions developed in the CRAFT-OA project.
KER5 Six OJS Diamond Plugins: A collection of additional plugins for the Open Journal Systems platform that extend support for Diamond OA publishing needs and interoperability with other tools.
KER6 Guide to Scholarly Indexes: A structured set of documentation that helps Diamond OA publishers understand and engage with the technical and indexing requirements of major scholarly publication indexes and aggregators.
