This year’s focus on Diamond open access has seen several of DOAJ’s collaborative efforts take shape, from new infrastructure in Europe to deeper support for community-led journals worldwide.
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’t 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.
Hubs, standards and centres: European Diamond activities
We‘ve celebrated the completion of the two Horizon-Europe-funded projects for which we were consortial partners, CRAFT-OA e DIAMAS. 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, “What 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.”
We were delighted to take part in the launch of the European Diamond Capacity Hub (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’re proud to contribute to two of the EDCH’s 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 (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.
Across Europe, new regional and national Diamond capacity centres are springing up, and we’ve connected with many of them over the past year. A highlight has been our agreement with DFG and the German national capacity centre, SeDOA, to strengthen Diamond open access journals in Germany.
Shaping new sustainability models for Diamond
We are excited to be founder members of the Open Journals Collective (OJC), a collaborative initiative that enables libraries to support high-quality, community-led Diamond open access 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.
Diamond across the world
Although 2025 has seen lots of Diamond activity in Europe, DOAJ’s 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.
Our global network of ambassadors 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:
- Providing training and troubleshooting for journal editors in Türkiye to enable them to improve standards and policies in line with DOAJ criteria. Our Ambassador, Ramazan Turgut, has also established a collaboration with DergiPark, the national platform that hosts over 2,000 Diamond open access journals. “Working with journals in Türkiye has allowed me to turn DOAJ standards into practical, day-to-day improvements, such as clearer licensing, peer review policies, and cleaner metadata,” says Ramazan. “The result is fewer ‘policy grey zones’, more consistent trust signals for authors and readers, and a stronger Diamond ecosystem.”
- A new partnership with Latindex, the most comprehensive directory of Ibero-American journals, most of which are Diamond open access. The collaboration has been brokered by our Community Manager and Senior Ambassador for Latin America, Ivonne Lujano, who says, “By exchanging expertise and evaluation methodologies with Latindex, a pioneer in developing indexing criteria, we can better support Ibero-American journals to meet clear both our standards, and increase their visibility in the global scholarly landscape.”
- Our Open Access in Asia event highlighted our ambassador activities to support publishing standards across the region, and the 3000 Diamond journals from Asia in DOAJ.
We were also delighted to start work on the Horizon-Europe ALMASI project. With our Ambassador network already active across Latin America and Africa, we bring our knowledge and expertise to support the capacity of local journals.
Our communications efforts across social media also play an essential role in amplifying the voices of Diamond initiatives worldwide, such as the Tuwhera platform in Aotearoa New Zealand.
Other gems in our collection
As a member of the international oversight committee for the upcoming Diamond Open Access summit in Bengaluru in February 2026, we look forward to contributing to the global conversation around advancing equitable open access.
At DOAJ, we are also aware that the discussion around equitable models is more nuanced. Along with the 14,000 no-fee Diamond open access journals in DOAJ, we index many community-led journals that charge low APCs to support their sustainability, and also benefit from the quality assurance and additional visibility that DOAJ indexing provides. Whether no-fee or low-fee, these community-led journals show that equitable, high-quality open access is possible and needs our support.
