Trust Built on Quality: Diamond Open Access Standard (DOAS)

<p xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" class="first" dir="auto" id="d7314091e100">Misinformation and declining public trust in science pose significant challenges to scholarly publishing. For Diamond Open Access (OA) publishers, who do not charge fees either to authors to publish or to readers to read, and are led by academic communities and public institutions, this challenge is particularly significant, as there is a misperception that the quality of their outputs is inferior to those of commercial publishers. At the same time, the tools and frameworks traditionally used to assess quality in scholarly publishing were largely developed for commercial publishing, leaving Diamond OA publishers with limited, often inadequate benchmarks for quality assurance. (Ševkušić and Kuchma 2023) <p xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" dir="auto" id="d7314091e102">The DIAMAS (Developing Institutional Open Access Publishing Models to Advance Scholarly Communication) project, funded by the European Commission, addresses this gap by developing the Diamond Open Access Standard (DOAS) (Consortium of the DIAMAS project 2024) – a comprehensive multidimensional framework tailored to the values and needs of Diamond OA publishing. DOAS defines required and desired quality criteria across seven quality dimensions: Funding; Legal ownership, mission, and governance; Open Science; Editorial management, editorial quality, and research integrity; Technical service efficiency; Visibility, communication, marketing, and impact; Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging (EDIB), multilingualism, and gender equity. DOAS does not impose rigid compliance models but rather encourages Diamond OA publishers to engage in self-assessment against the DOAS criteria and continuously improve using a free web-based tool (https://diamas.fecyt.es/). <p xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" dir="auto" id="d7314091e104">DOAS is particularly relevant in the current landscape of scholarly communication. It places transparency and research integrity at the heart of its criteria. Along with transparent policies detailing responsibilities, editorial workflows, peer review procedures, and handling conflictsof interest or misconduct, DOAS highlights the transparency of governance, funding sources, and business models. <p xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" dir="auto" id="d7314091e106">In addition, DOAS encourages Diamond OA publishers to embrace open science practices, such as using open licences, encouraging research data and protocols sharing, and accepting submissions previously published as preprints or open peer review, which contribute to reproducibility and reliability as essential factors in preventing and mitigating misinformation. <p xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" dir="auto" id="d7314091e108">DOAS also addresses the responsible use of generative artificial intelligence: publishers are expected to have publicly available guidelines for the responsible use of AI in editorial andpeer review workflows. This helps protect the integrity of research in a time when more and more tasks are being automated. <p xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" dir="auto" id="d7314091e110">By aligning their policies and practices with DOAS, publishers can enhance the credibility of their journals and contribute to a more trustworthy, equitable, and transparent scholarly publishing ecosystem. DOAS supports quality assurance, promotes open science and editorial integrity, and helps Diamond OA journals strengthen their role as reliable knowledge providers.