Focus on institutional publishing in universities and other organisation seeks to address “fragmented” landscape
An EU-funded team have taken their first concrete steps to map the continent’s landscape for ‘diamond’ open-access publishing—where costs for research papers are paid by organisations instead of by readers or authors.
The three-year Diamas project, which launched in September last year with a €3 million EU grant, is focusing on institutional publishers that often use the diamond model to make papers free to read.
It has begun with a survey attempting to map current institutional publishers such as university presses and learned society outlets in 25 countries in the European Research Area.
Despite the value of diamond journals and their importance in promoting open access, the landscape of institutional publishers is “fragmented”, the Diamas project said as it announced the survey on 31 March.
The project team want to use the results to create a registry of institutional publishers and their service providers, and build a community of non-profit publishers belonging to academic organisations.
Among the 23 European organisations involved in the Diamas project are Science Europe, the association of research funders and performers, and Coalition S, the partially overlapping group of funders that require the researchers they support to make resulting papers openly available immediately. The survey is open until 30 April.