Authors: Marcel Wrzesinski, Joanna Ball and Margo Bargheer
European research libraries are increasingly supporting open access publishing while managing rising costs and growing concerns about quality, sustainability, and trust. Many libraries are seeking to strengthen community-led Diamond Open Access publishing as an equitable alternative to commercial publishing, but need shared, practical tools to assess and scale these initiatives within their institutional contexts.
One such tool is the Diamond Open Access Standard (DOAS), developed by the European Diamond Capacity Hub (EDCH): a community-developed framework that strengthens and quality assures community-led publishing. It provides a practical roadmap for improving credibility, visibility, resilience, and reproducibility. Furthermore, it gives publishing libraries a structured way to demonstrate quality across their publishing activities. It can also help libraries assess their strengths, weaknesses, and development potential as providers of publishing services. In doing so, the DOAS provides a route to prestige through quality.
As part of the effort to gather feedback on the DOAS, members of the EDCH Quality Alignment Task Force organized the workshop “Libraries leading equitable scholarly publishing: Implementing the Diamond Open Access Standard” at the LIBER 2026 Annual Conference, held from 1–3 July at NTNU University Library in Trondheim, Norway. Following the conference theme of “The Power of Libraries in an Uncertain World”, the workshop framed libraries as active contributors to equitable scholarly publishing.
The DOAS at LIBER 2026 – A community workshop
The workshop had two main objectives: to introduce participating library representatives to the structure and scope of the Diamond Open Access Standard and to explore how libraries can apply it in practice. Both aspects were meant to guide support for institution-based publishing, inform funding and service decisions, embed quality expectations in library-led publishing programmes, and articulate the value of community-owned publishing to institutional leadership and research assessment processes. In this regard, the workshop brought in examples and experience from different European contexts and beyond: Participants represented institutions from across Europe as well as North America and Australasia.
The goal of the workshop was to discuss and exchange on the scope and the applicability of the DOAS. It began with three short presentations by the organisers, intended to establish a common basis for the subsequent discussions. Joanna Ball (Directory of Open Access Journals) introduced the DOAS, detailing its origins, explaining the core criteria and items, and offering guidance on using the DOAS to assess one’s own institutional publishing service provider (IPSP). Marcel Wrzesinski (Charité – University Medical Center) and Margo Bargheer (SUB Göttingen) followed with two case studies illustrating how libraries are using the Diamond Open Access Standard in practice.
In his presentation, Marcel Wrzesinski outlined how Berlin Universities Publishing (BerlinUP), the joint publishing house of Freie Universität Berlin, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Technische Universität Berlin, and Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, is currently aligned with the DOAS. As a relatively new university publisher, BerlinUP is looking at the DOAS to achieve the highest possible quality in scholarly publishing. In day-to-day practice, the DOAS provides BerlinUP with a standardised self-assessment framework for identifying practical and strategic goals based on clearly defined criteria. As BerlinUP currently meets the required and desired criteria to varying degrees, he pointed out that the ambition and level of detail of the DOAS may not always align with the operational realities of university publishers. In practice, university publishers such as BerlinUP may therefore need to take a pragmatic approach, postponing some desirable criteria and revisiting them when additional resources for infrastructure development become available.
As institutional open access publishing gains traction and several research libraries are already offering such publishing options, libraries without such services in their portfolio have to determine whether to offer them to their research communities. For this positioning exercise to be structured and goal-oriented, it requires an analytical framework. Margo Bargheer of the State and University Library Göttingen, who is in charge of the university’s publishing services (including a press), introduced the DOAS as such an analytical framework. The DOAS’ structure and its self-assessment tools allows research libraries to analyse its capacities with regard to scholarly publishing and offers insights on strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats associated with establishing or consolidating library-based publishing services. Especially useful for this scenario has been the Diamond OA Sustainability Check as a specific pathway through the self-assessment of the DOAS.
Research library perspectives: Observations from the group discussions
The World Café discussions highlighted the potential of the DOAS not merely as a list of criteria but as a structured tool for facilitating discussions about publishing quality among IPSPs, journal editors, and researchers. Participants selected five of the seven DOAS criteria for discussion: Editorial Management, Editorial Quality, and Research Integrity; Funding; Legal Ownership, Mission, and Governance; Technical Service Efficiency; Open Science.
In discussing editorial management, editorial quality, and research integrity, participants considered how the DOAS could help clarify terms of service and the division of responsibilities between editorial boards and IPSPs. This relationship has to be mutual and should be carefully agreed upon, especially to ensure editorial independence, quality control, and advisory support. Participants also highlighted the current lack of incentives or rewards for peer review, while emphasizing the need to explore the potential role of open peer review. Other points included the importance of journal design for reader uptake and reputation, despite the associated costs.
In the discussion on funding, participants agreed on the principle of no paywalls and a general need for transparency around any financial matters and funding arrangements. While participants agreed that editorial operations need to be sustained, they labelled fully-fledged sustainability planning as possibly too ambitious for most journals. Participants also questioned whether a detailed cost breakdown should be a core requirement, noting that such calculations are possible but very time-consuming. As for funding sources, participants mentioned reallocating or re-channelling funds from transformative agreements towards Diamond Open Access, as well as engaging research societies.
Participants used the DOAS criterion on legal ownership, mission, and governance as a starting point for discussing what community ownership means across different institutional contexts – such as public and private institutions – and different journal settings. This included remarks on the value of formally written governance structures, legal ownership arrangements, institutional recognition, and clear contracts between publishers and authors that define responsibilities. While some criteria, such as having a clear mission, generating PIDs, and using OJS, may be easy to meet, others may take time. To accommodate this diversity, participants discussed distinguishing between minimum, desirable, and recommended criteria, potentially alongside a future certification framework.
The group on technical service efficiency mostly addressed questions around the sustainability of teams and services. While qualified technical partners were perceived as important, several participants noted difficulties in finding appropriate staff. They also stressed the importance of built-in plans for creating sustainable technical services to increase prestige and trust. At the same time, they noted that a publishing platform cannot be equated with the editors or journals it hosts, and that a professional technical service needs to move beyond basic “housekeeping” (e.g. core maintenance and updates). Measuring usage on a global scale was also viewed as a considerable challenge.
In the discussion on Open Science, participants emphasised that some DOAS criteria are discipline-specific, e.g. concerning research software or the publication of negative results. At the same time, participants considered how the DOAS can accommodate emerging formats and remain future-proof. A recurring point was the difference between having a policy and enforcing it in practice. While policies can often be created or reused easily, changing researcher behaviour is considerably more complex. Institutional publishers have an important role in educating journal editors about why such policies and behaviors are important. Libraries and library-based publishers were considered well suited to argue for clear Creative Commons licensing, rights retention, and compliance with open access policies.
What’s next?
DOAS will continue to evolve as a shared framework for quality in Diamond Open Access publishing. As part of the AEGIS-OA project, a DOAS adaption for book publishers is being developed for launch in 2027, alongside a certification framework to enable institutional and other Diamond publishers to demonstrate how their publishing practices meet the DOAS criteria. These will become core EDCH services, ensuring DOAS continues to be maintained and developed beyond the project through the EDCH’s Quality Alignment Task Force.
Libraries play an important role in this work, and we encourage them to engage with the standard, sign up for the EDCH registry, and join the forum to share their experiences, learn from others, and contribute to ongoing discussions about quality in Diamond Open Access.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence.