Accelerating scholar-led Diamond Open Access through community support services

Abstract

To accelerate the transition to scholar-led Diamond Open Access publishing, it is crucial to support scholars, scholarly societies and other academic institutions to go forward towards scholar-led publishing models. The German Diamond Capacity Centre “SeDOA (Servicestelle Diamond Open Access)” is supposed to become the central contact point for Diamond Open Access in Germany. It aims to promote the Diamond Open Access concept in the community, offer publishing services and develop them further, make existing publishing infrastructures more visible, provide information, workshops and an innovation lab. SeDOA is a project funded by the German research funder DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft). SeDOA started in May 2025 and is supported by a consortium of 15 institutions. The project comprises six work packages.
The poster focuses on the work package Community Support Services. Within this work package, we want to help researchers, institutional publishing service providers (IPSP’s), subject specific information services (FIDs) and learned societies by offering advisory services and hands-on guidance for establishing and maintaining scholar-led Diamond Open Access publications.
The first element of this work is a comprehensive survey, complemented by in-depth interviews with the target groups. The goal of the survey is to identify the most pressing needs of the target groups. What kind of topics are relevant for the different stakeholders in the community? What kind of formats are helpful to them? These are questions that we want to answer with help of the survey. Also, it includes questions about the conditions under which journals and other publication formats are currently published. The poster presents first results of this assessment. Furthermore, it outlines the emerging support concept that is based on the findings of the survey as well as on existing information about support needs from other national and international initiatives and projects. With the support concept as one part of the work of SeDOA, we want to empower different stakeholders within the scholarly communication ecosystem to implement Diamond Open Access in their own context.