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To address the challenges that the transition of institutional publishing activities towards full Open Access (OA) and Open Science (OS) still faces, DIAMAS will deliver an aligned, high-quality, and sustainable institutional OA scholarly publication ecosystem for the European Research Area. This includes setting a new shared and co-designed standard for Diamond OA publishing, a scholarly publication model in which journals and platforms are free for authors and readers (as defined by cOAlition S). The new ecosystem will in turn substantially increase the capacity of institutions to provide innovative, valid, reliable and accessible publishing services, taking into account the specific needs of the different scientific communities across the diversity of disciplines, countries and languages.

The project brings together 23 public service scholarly organisations from 12 European countries. This provides the project with the necessary expertise to develop a common set of European standards for institutional publishing across all regions, disciplines and languages, as well as the authority and the network to make sure that they are considered and adopted by all member organisations.

Within DIAMAS, EUA will contribute to mapping the European landscape of Institutional Publishing Service Providers (IPSPs), building their capacity through knowledge sharing and providing actionable recommendations for their policies and strategies. In particular, the Association will lead a task on developing recommendations and guidelines for institutional leaders.

For more information, please visit the project website.

For questions about DIAMAS and EUA’s involvement in the project, please contact Federica Garbuglia.

Funded by the European Union logoDIAMAS has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe project call HORIZON-WIDERA-2021-ERA-01-43, grant agreement 101058007.

After an initial period of slow uptake, the European scholarly communication landscape has reached a tipping point in the last decade and is now in rapid transition towards the full-scale adoption of Open Access (OA) as a default practice for communicating research results.

Research institutions started transitioning their publishing activities towards full Open Access. Academic institutions have managed publishing activities through their libraries, university presses and publication departments since the beginning of modern science. Most of these institutional efforts were based on economic models that do not require authors to pay fees for their manuscript to be published, nor readers to pay for reading publications. These are collectively known under the name “Diamond OA”. To finance their operations, Diamond business models rely on various types of institutional and governmental support. As revealed by the recently published Open Access Diamond Journals Study, the transition of institutional publishing activities towards full OA and Open Science (OS) faces many challenges. While some of these are technical by nature, others are related to skills, management, visibility and, above all, sustainability.

These challenges, the fragmentation of the institutional publishing landscape into an archipelago of publishing teams, and the modest role institutions have traditionally attributed to their publishing activities have prevented efficient coordination between institutions in the domain of institutional academic publishing. Proper coordination of institutional publishing should include the adoption of similar practices, standards, and guidelines for journal operations within and across all scientific disciplines. It should also address the challenges of multilingualism, i.e. how articles in various European languages can be made more accessible to an international audience.

The DIAMAS project will:

  1. 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. This will yield a taxonomy of IPSPs and an IPSP landscape report, a basis for the rest of the project.
  2. Coordinate and improve the efficiency and quality of IPSPs by developing a European Quality Standard for Institutional Publishing (EQSIP). This quality seal will professionalise, strengthen and reduce the fragmentation of institutional publishing in Europe.
  3. Formulate community-led, actionable recommendations and strategies for institutional leaders, funders/sponsors/donors, and policymakers in the European Research Area (ERA). Workshops and targeted networking actions will reach and engage institutional decision-makers.

In 36 months, DIAMAS will deliver an aligned, high-quality, and sustainable institutional OA scholarly publication ecosystem for the ERA, setting a new standard for OA publishing, shared and co-designed with all stakeholders.

  • Starting date: 1 September 2022
  • Duration: 36 months
  • 23 partners from 12 European countries

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