KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Diamond open access is a crucial facet of academic communication, but its implementation remains challenging.
• An action plan, focusing on efficiency, quality standards, capacity building, and sustainability, has been developed to further refine diamond open access.

Diamond open access (OA) is a scholarly publishing model with no fees for authors or readers. Although it is estimated that almost a tenth of academic articles are published using this practice, diamond OA is held back by certain challenges. To address these limitations, an Action Plan for Diamond Open Access has been prepared, and is currently undergoing endorsement, as described in a March article from cOAlition S.

The OA Diamond Journals Study, commissioned by cOAlition S, identified limitations associated with the technical capacity, management, visibility, and sustainability of diamond OA journals and platforms, and proposed a series of recommendations. Based on these recommendations, Science Europe, cOAlition S, OPERAS, and the French National Research Agency (ANR) have prepared an action plan focusing on:

• efficiency
• quality standards
• capacity building
• sustainability.

Each of these central elements was reviewed and discussed by participants of the February 2022 workshop on Diamond Open Access and experts of the Science Europe’s Working Group on Open Science; a summary of the action plan was presented at the Open Science European Conference 2022.

To date, over 110 organisations have endorsed the initiative.

“Endorsing the Diamond Action Plan is a sign of commitment to work together towards a scholarly publishing model that is equitable, community-driven, and academic-led and -owned. The Action Plan provides a set of priority actions to further develop and expand a sustainable, community-driven Diamond scholarly communication ecosystem.” – Marc Schiltz, President of Science Europe

Strategies to operationalise the action plan, including the Horizon Europe’s DIAMAS project (Developing Institutional Open Access Publishing Models to Advance Scholarly Communication), will be discussed at the upcoming  Diamond Open Access Conference in September 2022.

The authors hope that the action plan will increase bibliodiversity and, ultimately, “enable the global research community to take charge of a scholarly communication system by and for research communities”.

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