Raising Quality in Diamond Open Access - PMC

"In recent years, there has been considerable discussion about potential ways to improve the scholarly publishing system and bring research back to the community, especially when the research is publicly funded. Plan S (1) has made an impact on the development of national and institutional policies in the European Research Area (ERA). The goal is to develop more sustainable and equitable models in scholarly publishing by promoting the Publish-Review-Curate (PRC) model, diamond open access (OA), and the use of preprints.

Diamondisation is in the focus of the European Commission, based on the Action Plan for Diamond Open Access (2), supported by the CRAFT-OA (3) and DIAMAS (4) projects, which have strengthened the scholarly publishing infrastructure and provided guidelines and standards for diamond scholarly publishing. One of the key outputs of the DIAMAS project is the Diamond Open Access Standard (DOAS), a set of criteria for institutional publishers on seven core components: (i) funding, (ii) legal ownership, mission and governance, (iii) open science, (iv) editorial management, editorial quality and research integrity, (v) technical service efficiency, (vi) visibility, communication, marketing and impact, and (vii) equity, diversity, inclusion and belonging (EDIB), multilingualism and gender equity (5). Another output is the DOAS self-assessment tool, which helps publishers and editors to identify strengths and weaknesses in their diamond OA journals (6). The tool consists of two modules, one evaluates the alignment of a journal with DOAS, and the other evaluates the sustainability of the diamond OA publishing model."