Diamond Discovery Hub: Where Community-Owned Research Shines

Kelly Achenbach; Hanna Varachkina; Margo Bargheer; Janne Pölönen; Tabea Klaus; Yin Chen

doi:10.7557/5.8247

Authors

Kelly Achenbach Max Weber Foundation https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6657-8057
Hanna Varachkina University of Göttingen https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5832-3983
Margo Bargheer University of Göttingen https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8246-8210
Janne Pölönen Federation of Finnish Learned Societies https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1649-0879
Tabea Klaus University of Göttingen https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2791-1053
Yin Chen EGI https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2976-4912

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.7557/5.8247

Keywords:

Diamond OA, Diamond Open Access, Open Access

Abstract

“Diamond Open Access (OA) refers to an equitable model of scholarly publication that charges no fees to authors or readers and in which the content-related elements of publication are owned and controlled by the scholarly communities.” (European Diamond Capacity Hub)

Our poster presents the Diamond Discovery Hub (DDH), an online platform service developed by the CRAFT-OA (Creating a Robust Accessible Federated Technology for Open Access) project that contributes to the visibility and recognition of Diamond Open Access publications and the community behind them. The DDH verifies and publicly lists European Diamond Open Access journals and enables data uptake into other indexes and aggregators. Although developed specifically for the European research community, documentation on the platform’s technical infrastructure will be available to global Diamond OA stakeholders who want to build a similar service in their regions. The DDH addresses two conference topics: It is part of a solution for "Repairing gaps in the research infrastructure," and it supports scholar "Agency," highlighting and giving visibility to community-owned and driven research.

Standardizing terminology leads to trust in the research community: When a journal is labeled as “Diamond Open Access”, it means more than being cost-free for authors and readers. To be included in the Diamond Discovery Hub, six community-determined Diamond Open Access criteria (Armengou et. Al. 2024) are considered. This standardized Diamond OA verification process and public display of Diamond OA journals will create more trust around the term “Diamond,” both within and beyond the Diamond community, ensuring that as the Diamond Open Access publishing model grows it continues to embrace the core values of the community, including autonomy, freedom, care, collegiality, collaboration, equality, diversity, inclusion, integrity, ethics, openness, and transparency.

Visibility leads to discoverability and recognition: When a journal is listed in the Diamond Discovery Hub (DDH), the technology within the DDH allows other aggregators (such as DOAJ, disciplinary indexes, and the EOSC) to import the journal data. This is an important feature that helps smaller, Institutional Publishing Services ensure the same recognition and acknowledgement (for their authors, publications, and publication channels) as commercial OA publishers, who are often more technically and organizationally adept. Because Diamond OA publications tend to be more linguistically diverse, the DDH also helps improve the availability of multilingual scientific knowledge in European languages, which is crucial for reaching decision-makers, professionals, and the general public.

Author Biographies

Kelly Achenbach, Max Weber Foundation

Kelly Achenbach is the communications lead for CRAFT-OA, a pan-European project dedicated to strengthening the technical infrastructure for Diamond Open Access publishing. Her work builds on experience in communicating about complex digital platforms designed to make research more open, collaborative, and impactful. Drawing on academic backgrounds in Communications and Applied Linguistics, Kelly is passionate about fostering synergies that advance the shared goals of the open science community.
Hanna Varachkina, University of Göttingen

Hanna Varachkina has an academic background in Linguistics, English, and Romance Philology, with research experience in Computational Literary Studies at the University of Göttingen. Since 2014, she has been working at the Lower Saxony State and University Library. Currently, she is a task lead in the CRAFT-OA project and serves as a product owner of the Diamond Discovery Hub.
Margo Bargheer, University of Göttingen

Margo is a trained graphic designer with an M.A. in social anthropology and media studies. She is the head of the electronic publishing team at Göttingen University Library, which encompasses the University Press, the OJS platform, several repositories, and open-access and open-science awareness activities on campus. Margo coordinates the CRAFT-OA consortium, comprising 23 European partners, and is convinced that Diamond OA is the right way to move forward.
Janne Pölönen, Federation of Finnish Learned Societies

Janne works as the Secretary General of Publication Forum at the Federation of Finnish Learned Societies. Since 2010, he has participated in the development of community-curated national classification of peer-reviewed journals and book publishers (Publication Forum), which supports the performance-based research funding system of Finnish universities. He hast raining in history (Lic.Phil.), specialising in Roman law and society research. His recent research is in the fields of research evaluation, bibliometrics, scholarly communication, open science and learned societies. He is also involved in policy work, including the Helsinki Initiative on Multilingualism in Scholarly Communication, the National recommendation for the responsible evaluation of a researcher in Finland, and EOSC Co-creation project on Making FAIReR Assessments Possible. He coordinates a CoARA Working-Group on Multilingualism and Language Biases in Research Assessment and serve as member of the CoARA Steering Board.
Tabea Klaus, University of Göttingen

Tabea Klaus studied German language and literature, psychology, and phonetics at the University Jena and holds a master's degree in library and information science (HU Berlin), additionally she is a learned bookseller. Since 2021, she has been working at the University of Göttingen in the field of electronic publishing on the EU projects DIAMAS and CRAFT-OA and at the university press. Since 2024 in a second job, she has also been managing the library of the Theodor Fontane Archive in Potsdam.
Yin Chen, EGI

Yin Chen is a Senior Community Support Officer for EGI.eu, and currently working on a number of projects including, EGI-ACE, EOSC-Future, PITHIA-NRF, TRIPLE. Previously, she was also involved in EOSC-hub, OPERAS-P, eXtreme DataCloud-XDC, INDIGO DataCloud, ENVRIplus and EGI-Engage. She holds a PhD from the University of Edinburgh School of Informatics. Her research focuses on large-scale scientific data and metadata management, distributed data e-infrastructure, cloud/grid computing and research infrastructures. Before joined EGI, she worked in the ENVRI project, where she led the development of the ENVRI Reference Model. She has worked for a number of research institutions in the UK, including Cardiff University, Edinburgh University, UK National e-Science Center, EDINA, and the UK Medical Research Council. She has also worked as a system analysis and design expert in the software industry in Japan.

References

Armengou, C., Bargheer, M., Gingold, A., Holsinger, S., Laakso, M., Mitchell, D., Mounier, P., Pölönen, J., Rooryck, J., Ševkušić, M., Souyioultzoglou, I., & Varachkina, H. (2024). Operational Diamond OA Criteria for Journals. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12721408

Diamond Discovery Hub. (n.d.). Home [Website]. Retrieved September 1, 2025, from https://ddh.diamas.org/en

European Diamond Capacity Hub. (n.d.). Home. Retrieved September 1, 2025, from https://diamas.org/