Published on: 03/12/2025
On 29 October 2025, the ALMASI project launched the Diamond Open Access Policy Forum with over 370 participants attending from across the world.
This unique new Forum convenes international, national, and local policymakers and funders from Africa, Europe and Latin America to discuss nonprofit scholarly publishing policy, and funding needs, progress, and challenges. These discussions will support participants in developing contextually relevant, realistic, and replicable policy recommendations and practicable funding mechanisms to implement those policies in support of Diamond OA research publication.
Speakers from Africa, Europe, and Latin America presented brief overviews of the Diamond OA nonprofit publishing landscape, and policy and funding successes for Diamond OA in their regions. We welcomed:
- national policymakers:
- Bianca Amaro (Ministério da Ciência, Tecnologia e Inovação, Brazil),
- Michelle Doran (National Open Research Forum, Ireland),
- Steven Sebbale (Uganda National Council for Science and Technology)
- institutional policymakers:
- Francisco Alarcón (Consejo Superior Universitario Centroamericano),
- Nicolas Fressengeas (Université de Lorraine, France),
- Birgit Schreiber (Southern African Regional Universities Association)
- ALMASI partners:
- Arianna Becerril García (Redalyc, AmeliCA, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México),
- Susan Murray (African Journals Online),
- Vanessa Proudman (SPARC Europe),
- Johan Rooryck (OPERAS)
- and Victoria Tsoukala, representing the European Commission, which funds ALMASI.
It was vital that many could contribute to the discussion, so we removed language barriers by providing live interpretation and welcoming questions in English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish.
The multilingual discussion focused on how to sustain Diamond OA and considered the importance of dedicated funding streams that can help cover operational costs, versus project-based funding, and as opposed to funding OA publication by APCs. In her presentation, Bianca Amaro noted that some OA publishers in Latin America charge APCs at a low rate with no intention of profit. In the Latin American model, public institutions support OA journals too. Michelle Doran described Ireland’s fund to assist project-based Diamond OA initiatives to transition to self-sustaining communities. How to secure sustainable funding for publishing costs, salaries, training, and other needs is key across all regions. Both the discussion and Birgit Schreiber’s presentation highlighted the provision of training resources for Diamond OA as a priority.
One of the main challenges to providing dedicated funding to Diamond OA is the choice between supporting Diamond publishing or hybrid/APC journals, as budgets that were initially dedicated to agreements negotiated with publishers can be reallocated towards Diamond journals. As Nicolas Fressengeas shared in his presentation, the OA policy at the Université de Lorraine in France has achieved that culture change within the institution. As for models that choose Diamond OA over APCs, participants shared some successes from Latin America.
We also discussed how to increase the visibility of Diamond OA publications, thereby breaking the cycle of Diamond OA journals being perceived as less visible and of lower quality across disciplines. There was debate on whether the low visibility of Diamond OA journals is due to the fragmentation of this publishing model, the perceived prestige of commercial journals, or since some research performing organisations lack capacity on research communication.
Funders and policymakers can also contribute to improving the visibility of Diamond OA publications. Francisco Alarcón described how establishing a centralised repository for Central America made Diamond OA journals more easily discoverable. Steven Sebbale spoke to the uptake in Diamond OA in Uganda thanks to advocacy efforts led by the national repository.
We will address these topics further and more at upcoming forum events.
The cross-regional forum will meet on a six-monthly basis. In the next six months, we will also launch three regional forums for Africa, Europe, and Latin America, where discussions on nonprofit scholarly publishing policy, funding needs, progress, and challenges will focus on region-specific priorities.
If you would like to be invited to the next meetings of the Diamond OA Policy Forum, please email: almasi@esf.org.
