{"id":7515,"date":"2025-12-19T03:57:57","date_gmt":"2025-12-19T03:57:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.doaj.org\/?p=7515"},"modified":"2025-12-19T03:57:57","modified_gmt":"2025-12-19T03:57:57","slug":"reflecting-on-a-diamond-year-for-doaj","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.doaj.org\/de\/2025\/12\/19\/reflecting-on-a-diamond-year-for-doaj\/","title":{"rendered":"Reflecting on a Diamond year for DOAJ"},"content":{"rendered":"

This year\u2019s focus on Diamond open access<\/strong> has seen several of DOAJ\u2019s collaborative efforts take shape, from new infrastructure in Europe to deeper support for community-led journals worldwide.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

At DOAJ, we champion all open access journals, regardless of business models, but we know that our work has the most impact on smaller, community-led journals, most of which don\u2019t charge APCs. 2025 was the perfect year for us to shine a spotlight on the many aspects of our work that make a difference to community-led journals, given the level of activity both at DOAJ and across the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hubs, standards and centres: European Diamond activities<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

We\u2018ve celebrated the completion of the two Horizon-Europe-funded projects for which we were consortial partners, CRAFT-OA<\/a> and DIAMAS<\/a>. Together, these projects have had a significant impact on the Diamond open landscape across Europe, building tools, standards and frameworks. According to our project manager, Clara Armengou, who represented DOAJ across both projects, \u201cWhat really made the difference was working as a community. By pooling expertise from many organisations that share the same values and vision, we developed community-created solutions to support diamond publishing across Europe.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We were delighted to take part in the launch of the European Diamond Capacity Hub<\/a> (EDCH) earlier this year in Madrid, which will further develop many of these outputs as services and functions to support, coordinate and professionalise Diamond open access publishing across Europe. We\u2019re proud to contribute to two of the EDCH\u2019s taskforces and to share specific responsibility for the development of two of its services: the Diamond Open Access Standard (DOAS), a community-developed standards framework for Diamond publishers, and the Diamond Discovery Hub<\/a> (DDH), which supports the visibility and discoverability of Diamond journals. We look forward to collaborating with EDCH partners to ensure that these services develop in line with the community’s needs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Across Europe, new regional and national Diamond capacity centres are springing up, and we\u2019ve connected with many of them over the past year. A highlight has been our agreement with DFG<\/a> and the German national capacity centre, SeDOA, to strengthen Diamond open access journals in Germany.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Shaping new sustainability models for Diamond<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

We are excited to be founder members of the Open Journals Collective (OJC)<\/a>, a collaborative initiative that enables libraries to support high-quality, community-led Diamond open access <\/strong>journals. Rather than paying for transformative agreements or APC-based models, libraries invest in the OJC, which channels support to a curated set of Diamond open access journals. It offers a practical and transparent way for institutions to strengthen the sustainability of Diamond open access. Because all journals in the collection are indexed in DOAJ, quality and trust are built in from the start.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Diamond across the world<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Although 2025 has seen lots of Diamond activity in Europe, DOAJ\u2019s focus is, of course, global. Outside the Global North, Diamond open access  is the dominant form of open access, and our ambassador work naturally strengthens and supports these no-fee models. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our global network of ambassadors<\/a> focuses much of its efforts on improving the publishing practices of smaller publishers, many of whom publish journals without fees. Highlights from the work of our Ambassadors this year include:<\/p>\n\n\n\n