Diamond Open Access Standard (DOAS) is a set of requirements and recommendations that help scholarly publishers ensure quality and transparency in journal publishing processes. DOAS is published as a document:
Consortium of the DIAMAS project. (2024). The Diamond OA Standard (DOAS) (1.2). Zenodo. The Diamond OA Standard (DOAS).
It is also integrated in a self-assessment tool: https://diamas.fecyt.es/ available to all Diamond OA publishers and service providers.
To promote DOAS, the DIAMAS team has organized in-person and online demo sessions, DOAS-A-THONS, webinars. We will soon publish a simplified version and adjust it for use in individual journals.
Do you plan to integrate DOAS into your activities (e.g. align your publishing activities with it, translate and/or adapt it, include it in funding requirements, etc.)? Please share with us your ideas, plans and use cases?
Hi all, just a quick update since the last message: the short version of the Diamond Open Access Standard (DOAS) has now been published, so feel free to take a look and let us know your thoughts:
And we have just published a version of DOAS tailored for journals - DOAS Guide for Journals.
Journals can use the guide to analyse their current practices against DOAS requirements. This guide can also be helpful to those seeking to get indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). That’s why we marked DOAS requirements that align with DOAJ’s Guide for Applying.
To learn more and download the guide:
The fourth edition of the DIAMAS Conversation Series (24 April 2025) explored how the Diamond Open Access Standard (DOAS) can be applied in real-world contexts. We presented three early adopters: University of Milan, Diamond OA Capacity Centre in Serbia and the Diamond Open Access Expertise Centre in the Netherlands.
In this recent study Barbaro, Annarita, Maria Cristina Barbaro, and Federica Napolitani. 2025. “No Fees, No Barriers—But What Standards? Considerations on the DIAMAS Diamond OA Standard Applied to a Public Health Journal” Publications 13, no. 4: 53. https://doi.org/10.3390/publications13040053, the editorial team of Annali dell’Istituto Superiore di Sanità - a Diamond OA public health journal - applied the DOAS self-assessment tool to assess their compliance and identify opportunities for improvement. The paper reports on this process and shares lessons learned.
While I appreciate the initiative, the sheer number of mandatory conditions is overwhelming. We at CEUR-WS.org do not fulfill all mandatory conditions. We are a grassroots diamond OA publisher. For example we cannot afford at this point of time to assign persistent identifiers to all papers. Only whole volumes have a URN. CEUR-WS.org is not publishinh journals but workshop proceedings. The review process is rigorous but different from what DOAS describes. It seems that DOAS is written with journals in mind.
I understand what you’re saying, and that was one of many internal debates during its creation. However, if I recall correctly, it was settled by remembering that DOAS is not mandatory compliance but rather a goal that editorial services can aspire to.
We ourselves, as a service, still do not meet all the mandatory criteria, but labelling them as such highlights their importance and helps organise our growth priorities.
If it’s helpful, what’s working very well for us is using the self-assessment tool once or twice a year.
Regarding your second question, you’re absolutely right: although initially the scope was broader, DOAS was written with journals in mind—though that doesn’t prevent you from using it as a reference or inspiration to adapt it to your own context.