Throughout 2025, DOAJ will spotlight Diamond open access journals that we index, highlighting our ongoing efforts to enhance the visibility and impact of no-fee community-led journals worldwide.
Rooted in Diamond
DOAJ has a long history of championing Diamond open access as an equitable and sustainable model for scholarly publishing. We launched in 2003 with around 300 journals, all of which were Diamond. Today, two-thirds of the journals we index do not charge fees of any kind. DOAJ indexing has provided, and will continue to provide, essential quality assurance, visibility, and impact for Diamond journals.
Shining quality and sparkling visability
For Diamond journals, DOAJ indexing serves as a mark of quality, demonstrating adherence to our rigorous criteria. DOAJ’s reputation as a source of trusted journals ensures that our journal and article metadata are widely shared and reused across the scholarly community. This distribution across library discovery systems, search engines, and a diverse range of services significantly enhances the visibility of Diamond journals.
Polishing together: collective action to support Diamond
Since our launch, DOAJ has actively collaborated with Diamond-publishing infrastructure to support no-fee publications and facilitate the indexing of their journals. We have established long-standing partnerships with key services such as Latindex, Redalyc, and SciELO, which are vital for publishing in Latin America, where Diamond scholarly publishing is the predominant model.
We are also delighted to participate in the new Horizon Europe ALMASI project, which aims to strengthen non-profit open access publishing across Africa, Europe, and Latin America. By building a greater understanding of the landscape of Diamond open access in these three regions, ALMASI will develop and align training resources, policy development, and standards. ALMASI builds upon the work of the CRAFT-OA and DIAMAS projects, which have focussed on enhancing European Diamond open access by establishing best practices, standards, and tools for sustainability, as well as improving technical capabilities and infrastructure. We are proud to be part of the new European Diamond Capacity Hub (EDCH) and the development of its services to support institutional publishers. DOAJ data will form the bedrock of EDCH’s Diamond Discovery Hub (DDH), which will showcase Diamond journals across Europe. We look forward to continuing our collaboration to support DDH journals through the DOAJ indexing process.
In addition, we are pleased to become a founder member of the Open Journals Collective, a collaborative initiative of libraries and university-based publishers looking to provide sustainable and scalable funding for community-led, no-fee journals.
All that glitters …
Our index remains open and committed to including quality open access journals of all business models, languages, disciplines, and geographies. While many community-led journals in DOAJ charge low APCs to cover their costs, we hope that the growing infrastructure and tools to support Diamond open access will enable them to transition to a no-fee model.
As the movement for equitable and inclusive scholarly publishing gains momentum, DOAJ remains a committed advocate and ally for Diamond open access. Throughout this year, we will continue to share updates on our collaborations to support Diamond journals and highlight their available contributions through our series of journal stories.
