Quality as a public good: The Diamond Open Access Standard (DOAS) and its role in the Global Diamond Open Access Alliance

Authors

Abstract

The Diamond OA Standard (DOAS) sets out a comprehensive standard for Diamond Open Access (OA) journal publishing. It defines a shared understanding of quality in terms of 7 core components first outlined in the Action Plan for Diamond Open Access (Ancion et al. 2022: 4), and revised and modified by the DIAMAS project’s team:

  1. Funding;
    2. Legal ownership, mission, and governance;
    3. Open Science;
    4. Editorial management, quality, and research integrity;
    5. Technical service efficiency;
    6. Visibility, communication, marketing, and impact;
    7. Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging (EDIB), multilingualism, and gender equity.

DOAS sets a course towards quality improvement that all Diamond OA journals can align on via the DOAS self assessment tool. Even more importantly, it evinces the notion that the quality of academic publishing is a public good that should be acknowledged, defended, and preserved. The quality of academic publishing is the responsibility of the entire academic community: authors, editors, reviewers, and readers, requiring vigilance and a critical stance from all participants in the publishing process.

DOAS was co-created in collaboration with the Diamond OA publishing community in Europe through an iterative participatory process. First, DIAMAS team members carried out an extensive analysis of 71 documents on quality standards and best practices in scholarly publishing, which revealed a global consensus on editorial quality. This analysis led to a first version of a quality standard for Diamond OA publishing, which was called EQSIP v1. This version was further refined via a gap analysis and feedback from eight focus groups involving 300 people from various European Diamond OA publishing communities, resulting in a second version, the Extensible Quality Standard in Institutional Publishing (EQSIP) v2.0 for Diamond Open Access. This version was then republished as DOAS, to underscore its relevance beyond the DIAMAS project outputs EQSIP 1.0 and 2.0.

As one of the main outcomes of the DIAMAS project, DOAS will soon be discussed at the global level in the context of the EC-funded  ALMASI project, forging Diamond OA collaboration in Africa, Europe, and Latin America, as well as the Global Diamond Open Access Alliance announced by UNESCO on July 2024.

Author Biographies

Johan Rooryck, cOAlition S

Johan Rooryck is Executive Director of cOAlition S since 2019, and co-PI with Pierre Mounier of the DIAMAS project. Since 2016, he is co-editor-in-chief of the Diamond Open Access journal Glossa: a journal of general linguistics, a journal that transitioned to Diamond Open Access from the Elsevier-owned journal Lingua.  He is a member of the Academia Europaea, a doctor honoris causa of UiT – The Arctic University of Norway, and a visiting professor at Leiden University.

Pilar Rico Castro, Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology

PhD in Government and Public Administration. Her primary research areas focus on open science policies, open access repositories, the scientific information market, and academic publishing. In her role as an officer, Pilar supports the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities in the design, implementation, and evaluation of both national and European Open Science public policies. At the national level, she is an integral member of the National Open Science Committee (COS), where she contributed to the design and drafting of the National Open Science Strategy (ENCA). She coordinates key funding and certification services for digital infrastructures for the ENCA deployment like the National Scientific Journals Assessment Call and the National Funding Call for Academic Institutional Publishing Platforms. She is the Spanish Delegate at the European Commission’s National Points of Reference (NPR) for Open Science Expert Group, and at the EOSC Steering Board Expert Group. Additionally, she is a associated teacher and researcher at the National University of Distance Education (UNED). As part of the DIAMAS project, Pilar has played a key role in the creation of the Diamond Open Access Standard (DOAS).

Virginia de Pablo Llorente, Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology

Virginia de Pablo is a member of the Open Science Unit at the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology (FECYT), where she co-coordinates the development of the DOAS and its supporting self-assessment tool within the DIAMAS project. She has experience in creating, designing, and developing communication plans for European Open Science and Citizen Science projects, as well as designing data management plans for national projects.

Published

2024-09-24

How to Cite

Rooryck, J., Rico Castro, P., & de Pablo Llorente, V. (2024). Quality as a public good: The Diamond Open Access Standard (DOAS) and its role in the Global Diamond Open Access Alliance. Septentrio Conference Series, (1). Retrieved from https://septentrio.uit.no/index.php/SCS/article/view/7770

Issue

No. 1 (2024): The 19th Munin Conference on Scholarly Publishing

Section

Presentations

License

Copyright (c) 2024 Johan Rooryck, Pilar Rico Castro, Virginia de Pablo Llorente

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.