=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-3365/short12
|storemode=property
|title=A Discovery Hub for Diamond Open Access publishing
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3365/short12.pdf
|volume=Vol-3365
|authors=Alessia Bardi,Margo Bargheer,Paolo Manghi
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/ircdl/BardiBM23
}}
==A Discovery Hub for Diamond Open Access publishing==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3365/short12.pdf
A Discovery Hub for Diamond Open Access publishing
Alessia Bardi 1,*, Margo Bargheer 2, Paolo Manghi 1,3
1
Institute of Information Science and Technologies, National Research Council, Italy
2
University of Goettingen, Germany
3
OpenAIRE AMKE, Greece
Abstract
Open Access (OA) publishing is the set of practices thanks to which research publications are
accessible freely without barriers. With Diamond Open Access, authors can publish free of
charge as the institutional sector with universities, research institutions or libraries provide the
necessary technological infrastructure. However, the Diamond OA landscape continues to be
fragmented, is often underfunded, and is not always technically proficient enough to develop
its full potential for science and society. The CRAFT-OA project, started in January 2023, aims
to consolidate the Diamond OA publishing landscape both from the technical and
organisational point of views.
In this paper we describe the context and architecture of the Diamond Discovery Hub that will
be released by the project to increase visibility, discoverability and recognition of Diamond
OA institutional publishers and their content. The Diamond Discovery Hub will facilitate the
integration with the wider scholarly communication ecosystem and the European Open Science
Cloud to enlarge visibility, discoverability and reach of open access publications as part of the
emerging Open Science paradigm.
Keywords 1
Institutional publishing, Open Science, Scholarly Communication, Open Access
1. Introduction
After several decades of evolving, Open Access (OA) publishing is now at the centre of scientific
communication, providing access to scientific publications without barriers. The OA model features
three main implementation routes: Green, Gold, Hybrid, and Diamond Open Access. With green OA,
authors deposit the accepted version of their articles (i.e. after peer review) in an open repository (e.g.
institutional or thematic repository). The final version (i.e. the version of article with the final editing
and formatting of the editors and publisher) is available in the journal. Gold, hybrid and diamond OA,
instead, are the routes thanks to which the final version of the article is available in open access. With
gold OA authors must pay a fee, called article processing charge (APC), for publishing in a journal
where all the articles are available in open access. Hybrid OA instead refers to a route where the authors
pay the APC to publish their articles in open access, but other publications in the same journal may not
be open access (i.e. they are accessible only to subscribed users and institutions). With Diamond OA,
all the papers of the journal are open access and the authors have no APCs: the costs are covered by the
institutional sector with universities, research institutions or libraries providing the necessary
technological infrastructure. While the commercial models of Open Access dominate in anglophone
journals from the Global North, the Diamond OA model shows a much higher level of diversity and
19th IRCDL (The Conference on Information and Research science Connecting to Digital and Library science), February 23–24, 2023, Bari,
Italy
* Corresponding author.
EMAIL: alessia.bardi@isti.cnr.it (A. Bardi); bargheer@sub.uni-goettingen.de (M. Bargheer); paolo.manghi@openaire.eu (P. Manghi)
ORCID: 0000-0002-1112-1292 (A. Bardi); 0000-0001-8246-8210 (M. Bargheer); 0000-0001-7291-3210 (P. Manghi)
©️ 2023 Copyright for this paper by its authors.
Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org)
origin. However, the Diamond OA landscape continues to be fragmented, is often underfunded, and is
not always technically proficient enough to develop its full potential for science and society.
The CRAFT-OA project2 aims to consolidate the Diamond OA publishing landscape and responds
to the call of the European Commission for addressing the challenge of insufficiently tapped potential
of institutional publishing in Diamond Open Access Publishing. [1] The project contributes to the
implementation of the Action Plan for Diamond Open Access presented by Science Europe, cOAlition
S, OPERAS, and the French National Research Agency (ANR) [2], and focuses on four threads of
activities to improve the technical and organisational infrastructure of Diamond OA:
• Provide technical improvements for journal platforms and journal software
• Build communities of practice to foster overall infrastructure improvement
• Increase visibility, discoverability and recognition for Diamond OA publishing
• Integrate Diamond OA publishing with EOSC and other large-scale data aggregators.
CRAFT-OA’s 23 consortium partners from 14 European countries are all engaged in institutional
publishing and its infrastructures, and committed to sustaining and developing capacities in the
field.Many CRAFT-OA partners are leading organisations at national and European levels in terms of
open publishing and represent internationally visible centres of expertise in Open Science and FAIR
implementation, with strong connections to EOSC. Within 36 months, CRAFT-OA will deliver
technical and community tools, training events, training materials, information, and services for the
Diamond OA institutional publishing environment.
This work presents one of the main expected results of the project: the Diamond Discovery Hub: a
service to boost the visibility, discoverability and recognition of the European network of Diamond
Open Access publishers and technology providers. The paper is structured as follows. Section 2 presents
projects, initiatives and open challenges that inspired the CRAFT-OA project. Section 3 describes the
Diamond Discovery Hub. Section 4 concludes the paper.
2. Related projects, initiatives and open challenges
Latin America has a strong and long experience in policies and technical implementation of Green
and Diamond Open Access routes. Particularly relevant for the CRAFT-OA project is Redalyc3, a
network of non-commercial academy-owned Open Access scholarly and scientific journals. Founded
in 2003, Redalyc evolved into a Diamond open access journal indexing service. Redalyc's technical
approach serves several use cases. As an indexing service, it improves the visibility and recognition of
non-English content, which is hindered by the bias of the dominant commercial scientific information
infrastructures toward English language and Global North journals, such as Web of Science and
SCOPUS. As a technology provider, Redalyc supports publishers at adopting digital technology to
increase their level of technical maturity and their sustainability. One main aspect is, for example, the
adoption of JATS XML (Journal Article Tag Suite eXtensible Markup Language), a standard on which
services for the article editing and exporting are based, simplifying the processes for article submission
and inclusion in the Redalyc indexing system. In addition, thanks to the adoption of standards, Redalyc
can provide additional services, such as visualising usage metrics, linking content, and increasing the
discoverability and reach of journals and their content. These shared services bring journals to a level
of technical maturity they could not achieve on their own. The use of JATS XML is a prerequisite for
this model. While JATS XML is an established way to achieve machine readability and contextualise
the information contained in journals and their subsets (the articles in their various types such as
editorials, reviews, or research articles), its adoption in smaller open access journals outside of Redalyc
is still underdeveloped.
Many journal publishers struggle on a technical level and rather dedicate their scarce resources to
author management and content production instead of moving to full XML production and delivery of
JATS XML. For these journals, direct entry into a collection such as Redalyc is not possible, which
2
CRAFT-OA project: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101094397, CRAFT-OA announcement https://operas.hypotheses.org/6016
3
https://www.redalyc.org/redalyc/acerca-de/mision.html
means that they are not able to leave the typical dilemma of small content providers: due to technical
immaturity, they lack visibility and recognition, and due to the lack of recognition, they cannot strive
and innovate to achieve technical maturity (see f.i. [3] p.11). In support of such publishers, Redalyc set
up AmeliCA4, an initiative to strengthen editorial teams of journals in consolidation and increase their
visibility with a dedicated indexing service.
Full visibility and recognition of publications is usually achieved by their presence in the
acknowledged aggregators of science such as the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)5, Scopus6,
Web of Science (WoS)7 or disciplinary indexes like PubMed8. These function as a proxy for recognition
and acknowledgement of authors, their publications, and their publication channels. Most of the
medium and large commercial OA publishers are technically and organisationally capable of ensuring
eligibility for these aggregators, especially since they usually can draw on previous events of registering
new journals, due to their size as a publisher. Smaller institutional publishers often struggle due to their
limited human and technological resources.[3]
For journals to fully realise their technical capacity, they must be able to adopt community-
recognized and workable quality standards. Particularly in areas outside the anglophone STEM9
disciplines, standardised and general descriptions of the quality of content, processes, and platforms are
rather scarce. This lack of standardisation, while a positive expression of cultural, linguistic, and
disciplinary diversity and depth, is a disadvantage in organisational and technical terms.
The recently launched DIAMAS10 project serves as a non-technical predecessor project to CRAFT-
OA and aims to develop clear quality standards that are incorporated into the EQSIP (European Quality
Standard for Institutional Open Access Publishing) model. The DIAMAS project consortium consists
of several institutional publishing service providers (IPSPs) and established aggregators and
infrastructure providers in the field of institutional publishing. The EQSIP model will reflect the
capacities of this specific community and provide a clear path in which direction the development
should go, also in a technical sense. The findings and results of the DIAMAS project will be
incorporated into requirements engineering of CRAFT-OA’s Diamond Discovery Hub (DDH). With
this embedding in the community, DDH will significantly contribute to addressing several of the
challenges mentioned above (see also [2], [4] and [5]).
Another contact of relevance for CRAFT-OA is the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). The
EOSC is conceived as an environment to support European science, easing the access to research
services, tools, infrastructures, and research products. CRAFT-OA will contribute to the vision of the
EOSC by onboarding the services of the IPSPs and IPTPs of its network in the EOSC Marketplace and
service catalogue and including the Open Access articles they publish into the EOSC Research Product
Catalogue.
3. The Diamond Discovery Hub
The network of interoperable Institutional Publishing Service Providers (IPSP) and Technology
Providers (IPTP) that CRAFT-OA will set up will find in the Diamond Discovery Hub (DDH) a central
service through which the visibility, discoverability and recognition of their services and the articles
they publish is multiplied. Open Access (OA) publishing can serve as a strong facilitator as it rests on
a set of practices thanks to which research publications in a technical sense are accessible freely without
barriers. However, free access doesn’t equal full machine-readability and it does not necessarily make
those publications fully discoverable or result in recognition. Thanks to the CRAFT-OA network, IPSPs
and IPTPs will operate economy-of-scale when adding functionalities to content and indexing of
content providers (journals). For example, enriching metadata with funder information or matching
publications to the Sustainable Development Goals of the UN to emphasise the social benefit of
4
http://amelica.org/
5
https://doaj.org/
6
https://www.scopus.com/
7
https://www.webofknowledge.com/
8
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/
9
Science, Technology, Engineering, Medicine
10
DIAMAS, Developing Institutional Open Access Publishing Models to Advance Scholarly Communication
https://diamasproject.eu/about/
scholarly content only makes sense if the data collections are large enough to justify efforts and reach
robust results.
The DDH will centrally address technical challenges as described in Section 2 to improve the
visibility, discoverability and recognition of institutional Diamond OA publishers by:
• Creating a registry of diamond open access publishing platforms and services;
• Validating metadata with regards to standards and best practices to ensure high-quality
metadata for FAIR research publications;
• Integrating with the OpenAIRE Graph11 and the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC);
• Providing the technical tools for the inclusion of journals and journals’ articles in large
aggregators (e.g. DOAJ, WoS, SCOPUS, but also in international data aggregations to emphasise
visibility of institutional Diamond Open Access publishing).
The DDH will be developed and implemented with approved OpenAIRE technology and workflows
to safeguard long-term sustainability and interoperability with the OpenAIRE Graph and the EOSC.
The high-level architecture of the DDH is depicted in Figure 1. IPSPs and IPTPs will register their
services to the CRAFT-OA registry. The implementation of the registry will be based on the OpenAIRE
PROVIDE service12 and will connect to EOSC so that the services will also be visible and discoverable
via the EOSC Service Catalogue.
Figure 1: Architecture of the Diamond Discovery Hub
Providers will be able to validate if their services meet the minimal technical requirements for
metadata dissemination (as they will be defined by the CRAFT-OA project based on the outputs of the
DIAMAS project, standards such as the EQSIP mentioned in Section 2 and best practices from the IPSP
community). Upon successful validation, OpenAIRE will aggregate the metadata records they expose,
which contain descriptions of the research publications, possibly with links to research data, protocols,
software or other types of research products. OpenAIRE will include the records in its research graph
11
https://graph.openaire.eu
12
https://provide.openaire.eu
and in the EOSC Research Product Catalogue. Records will also feed to the DDH Indexing Layer,
which serves the DDH Search & Browse UI, and the DDH Export Layer, which is in charge of exporting
the metadata records according to the protocols, formats, and level of quality as requested by the other
large aggregators like DOAJ and WoS.
4. Conclusion
The landscape of Diamond Open Access publishing includes a large number of small institutional
publishers that lack resources and expertise to address technical challenges and achieve the best possible
level of visibility, discoverability and recognition solely on their own. With community-approved
shared services they can reach a virtual economy-of-scale, allowing them to technically perform on a
level that usually only larger and commercial units in scholarly publishing can achieve
The CRAFT-OA project sets out to fulfil the mission as expressed in the INFRA-2022 EOSC call
of the European Commission’s framework programme Horizon Europe, to build a community of
institutional publishers and supporting it with technical tools and services that is prone for integration
into the larger mission of the European Science Cloud, the EOSC.
The project will realise the described Diamond Discovery Hub to aggregate data on IPSPs and their
content and integrate them in a way to foster interoperability with other curated data aggregation in
scholarly publishing. It draws on the successful model of the aggregation service Redalyc and, building
on existing services of open infrastructures like OpenAIRE and EOSC, the hub will centrally implement
functionalities for the integration of institutional publishers and the articles they publish in the wider
scholarly communication ecosystem.
5. Acknowledgements
This work has been partly funded by the EC Horizon Europe project CRAFT-OA (grant agreement
101094397). Authors thank all the members of the consortium who contributed to the successful
proposal of the project.
6. References
[1] European Commission Horizon Europe call “Improving and coordinating technical
infrastructure for institutional open access publishing across Europe”,
https://ec.europa.eu/info/funding-tenders/opportunities/portal/screen/opportunities/topic-
details/horizon-infra-2022-eosc-01-02 . Last accessed December 2022.
[2] Ancion, Zoé, Borrell-Damián, Lidia, Mounier, Pierre, Rooryck, Johan, & Saenen, Bregt.
(2022). Action Plan for Diamond Open Access. Zenodo.
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6282403
[3] Stephen, Dr Dimity, & Stahlschmidt, Dr Stephan. (2022). Landscape study of small journal
publishers for the Knowledge Exchange Task & Finish Group for "Small Publishers and the
Transition to Open Access". Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7258049
[4] Bosman, Jeroen, Frantsvåg, Jan Erik, Kramer, Bianca, Langlais, Pierre-Carl, & Proudman,
Vanessa. (2021). OA Diamond Journals Study. Part 1: Findings. Zenodo.
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4558704
[5] Becerril, Arianna, Bosman, Jeroen, Bjørnshauge, Lars, Frantsvåg, Jan Erik, Kramer, Bianca,
Langlais, Pierre-Carl, Mounier, Pierre, Proudman, Vanessa, Redhead, Claire, & Torny, Didier.
(2021). OA Diamond Journals Study. Part 2: Recommendations. Zenodo.
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4562790