Nine responses received. Bulgaria has 88 journals in DOAJ: 33 with the DOAJ seal, 71 that let the authors retain all rights, and 52 are diamond journals. Bulgaria has 33 institutional publishers in DOAJ (via GOA8), 28 of which publish diamond journals.

Eight responses received. Czechia has 143 journals in DOAJ, three with the DOAJ seal, 111 that let the authors retain all rights, and 118 are diamond journals. Czechia has 67 institutional publishers in DOAJ (via GOA8), 58 of which publish diamond journals.

Six responses received. Hungary has 74 journals in DOAJ, none with the DOAJ seal, 53 that let the authors retain all rights, and 68 are diamond journals. Hungary has 34 institutional publishers in DOAJ (via GOA8), 34 of which publish diamond journals.

Three responses received. Moldova has 41 journals in DOAJ, one with the DOAJ seal, 32 that let the authors retain all rights, and 36 of the 41 are diamond journals. Moldova has 22 institutional publishers in DOAJ (via GOA8), 20 of which publish diamond journals.

31 responses received. Poland has 842 journals in DOAJ, 21 with the DOAJ seal, 413 that let the authors retain all rights, and 650 are diamond journals. Poland has 249 institutional publishers in DOAJ (via GOA8), 219 of which publish diamond journals.

The history of Open Access publishing in Poland has witnessed notable developments, including an increasing awareness and interest in diamond publishing. Beginning with the formation of the Open Science Coalition in 2008 (Bednarek-Michalska, 2017, pp. 13- 28), which engaged scientists, librarians, and non-governmental organisations, the country's commitment to OA gained momentum. Support from esteemed institutions such as the Polish Academy of Sciences and the Conference of Rectors of Academic Schools in Poland (KRASP) in 2013 further solidified the endorsement of OA principles in scientific publishing. In 2015, the Ministry of Science and Higher Education issued recommendations for the development of OA, including the adoption of institutional OA policies. Poland's proactive approach to OA is exemplified by the 2018 Act on Higher Education and Science, mandating OA for articles in journals funded through the ‘Support for Scientific Journals’ program. As Poland advances towards a national-level OA policy, these historical milestones underscore the country's commitment to promoting open and equitable access to research.

The DIAMAS Survey collected 31 responses from Poland, predominantly comprising 23 public institutions, with five not-for-profit organisations and three companies. The survey highlighted the diverse sizes and scopes of these entities, with only two university publishers employing over 30 people. While most journals are published in social sciences (23) and humanities (20), their linguistic diversity is evident, with 26 journals published in Polish, two in English, and 26 being multilingual. Bilingual full-text publishing, different language versions in various journals, and simultaneous language versions as separate documents are common practices. However, only 13 IPSPs translate metadata into English, and few provide language services to authors.

Poland's OA publishers are actively engaged in international organisations, with a minority participating in CoARA and COPE, among others. National scholarly communication associations boast greater membership engagement. The IPSPs primarily focus on publishing journals (30), academic books (26), and conference outputs (20). While fixed subsidies from parent organisations form a stable source of funding for most (23), content and print sales contribute minimally (13). Only a few IPSPs utilise article processing charges (APCs) for revenue. The reliance on in-kind support for facilities, IT services, and HR management is evident.

Governance structures are guided by internal documents like statutes (26) and by-laws (20), with representative involvement from the wider community (10) being the predominant model. Poland's approach to open access and open science is still evolving, with no comprehensive policy in place. The majority of IPSPs follow their own or their parent organisation's open access policies. OA policies primarily address copyright, open licences, and the use of identifiers, with Creative Commons licences (CC BY and CC BY-NC-ND) being prevalent.

Peer review practices vary, with double-anonymized peer review being the most common method. The majority of respondents have specific policies on research integrity and publication ethics. IPSPs engage significantly in editorial management, peer review coordination, monitoring, and adherence checks.

In terms of technical services, IPSPs provide full editorial workflows, metadata and quality control, hosting and software services, and partial editorial workflow services. Maintenance and updates are primarily managed in-house, while OJS stands out as the most popular publishing system.

PIDs, including CrossRef-DOI, ISBN, and ISSN, are widely employed, but there is room for improvement in metadata release and data format diversity. Financial constraints pose a challenge across various aspects of IPSP operations, along with a lack of human resources and technical limitations.

Visibility enhancement, marketing, and indexing are areas of concern for many IPSPs. While many employ newsletters and social media for community engagement, metrics, especially article-level usage metrics, are vital for IPSPs. Inclusivity measures are implemented in various dimensions, such as age, caring responsibilities, disability, and gender. However, some IPSPs find these measures not applicable in their context.

Accessibility policies are not universally adopted, with only nine out of 27 respondents having a published accessibility policy. Compliance with WCAG and other accessibility standards varies among IPSPs. Gender-sensitive research data reporting and Gender Equality Plans are not widely implemented. Challenges related to meeting accessibility standards include a lack of expertise, resources, and technical limitations. Finally, only a small number of IPSPs have implemented measures to use gender-impartial language in all communications.

17 responses received. Romania has 377 journals in DOAJ, two with the DOAJ seal, 168 that let the authors retain all rights, and 311 that are diamond journals. Romania has 200 institutional publishers in DOAJ (via GOA8), 183 of which publish diamond journals.

Romania has taken significant strides toward embracing Open Access, marked by a notable signal from civil society with the introduction of a document recognised at both national and international levels – "Understanding Open Access" in May 2012, acting as a catalyst for the ensuing initiatives, see (Landoy, Ghinculov et al., 2016, p. 647). The same year, the Romanian Academy further solidified its commitment by endorsing "Open Science for the 21st Century." Currently, Open Access and Open Science initiatives in Romania are guided by national strategic documents, including the National Strategy on Research, Innovation, and Smart Specialization for 2022- 2027, the White Paper on the Transition to Open Science (2023-2030), and the National Plan for Research, Development, and Innovation 2022-2027. Romanian scientific publishing is gauged and influenced by the Centre for Science Policy and Scientometrics (Centrul de Politica Ştiinţei şi Scientometrie) under the Executive Agency for Higher Education, Research, Development and Innovation Funding (UEFISCDI), offering guidelines to the preferred foreign and local outlets Romanian researchers should publish in.

Strategically, open access to publications, transparency and equity in APCs and access costs to scientific databases are considered paramount by the community, followed by the development of specific infrastructure and the adaptation of the evaluation process. Romania established a rich OA publishing landscape, with most journals freely accessible and a well-developed network of institutional repositories.

Preparations for the DIAMAS survey involved identifying 270 IPSPs (the DOAJ list was cleaned and deduplicated). Survey invitations were sent through Qualtrics, resulting in only 17 validated responses from IPSPs in Romania, comprising 15 IPs and 2 SPs. As the response rate is only 8%, the results described below should be considered cautiously, as they cannot be applied to the entire community of institutional publishers.

Among respondents, English emerged as the predominant language, with all IPSPs publishing in English. In addition, 10 IPSPs publish in Romanian and seven in French. Four IPSPs practise multilingual publishing, and 11 offer abstracts in multiple languages.

Half of the respondents were affiliated with parent organisations. Most IPSPs identified themselves as public (11/17) or private, not-for-profit organisations (4/17). Editorial services were provided by almost all respondents, with 60% offering production services. Most Romanian respondents publish 3-5 journals with 11-50 articles per year, primarily in humanities and social sciences.

Key findings regarding budgeting indicated that half of IPSPs work without an approved annual budget. For 40% of respondents, the annual budget is less than 10K EUR, with annual income monitored or formally administered by half of them. In-kind support from parent organisations primarily involves human resource management and general financial and legal services. In terms of funding reliance, surprisingly, only 30% of respondents strongly depend on fixed and permanent subsidies from parent organisations. Responses regarding the stability of different types of funding over the last three years varied, with a slight prevalence of voluntary author contributions as a stable income.

Areas for potential upskilling, collaboration, or shared services with other organisations were identified in editorial, production, IT, and communication services.

Governance structures predominantly rely on governing boards, and representative involvement from the wider community is balanced. Most IPSPs in the sample follow their own Open Science/Open Access journal policies, addressing copyright, self- archiving, and using open licences as the main aspects. Accordingly, most IPSPs support self-archiving of journal articles (12/15) and sharing the full text via academic sharing services (8/15) without embargo (6/10). Additionally, 6/13 IPSPs make references openly available according to I4OC principles.

Regarding licensing, 13/16 IPSPs use Creative Commons licences for journals and 2/16 for books. Regarding open peer review, 2/15 respondents have it implemented, 1/15 is experimenting, and 7/15 would consider implementing it later. Peer review is predominantly double-anonymous, and one IPSP applies open review reports. In terms of data sharing policy, 5/17 IPSPs have such a policy as part of the institutional Open Science/Open Access policy, and 2/17 have it at the journal level.

Romanian IPSPs demonstrate significant involvement in editorial management (15/17), primarily in editorial board recruitment (12/17) and other aspects such as reviewer sourcing, coordinating and monitoring peer review, and plagiarism scanning. Only one IPSP has no role in editorial management. IPSPs' participation in managing editorial quality is similar to their involvement in editorial management. They define quality criteria (12/17) and create guidelines (12/12). While 12/17 IPSPs have research integrity or publication ethics policies, 5 IPSPs need to be made aware of their existence.

In terms of technical services, IPSPs mostly provide full editorial workflow and hosting. Services are mainly maintained in-house by a dedicated publishing department and the IT department or personnel (6/14). The IT department also maintains the technical infrastructure in-house or is outsourced. The main publishing system used in Romania is Open Journal Systems (OJS), followed by WordPress.

Although using ISSN (7/9) and CrossRef DOI (5/9) is a prevalent practice among Romanian respondents, it is also clear that not all of them are currently assigning PIDs as only 9/17 respondents answered the question about PIDs. Yet, 7/17 are releasing metadata under CC BY or another Creative Commons licence and 1/17 under Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0).

Regarding content formats, PDF is the dominant format (17/17), followed by HTML (6/17). Archiving or backup policy is employed by 11 out of 17 IPSPs who responded, and the published content is actively preserved in the National institutional library or infrastructure (7/14).

IPSPs' technical challenges stem from financial constraints, technical limitations, and lack of expertise and human resources. Financial constraints primarily affect providing adequate resources for the infrastructure and services, archiving, backing up or preserving content and software, and supplying and enriching metadata/PIDs. At the same time, a lack of human resources is also responsible for providing adequate resources for the infrastructure and services.

Romanian IPSPs responding to the survey are equally satisfied/not satisfied with the current level of indexing. IPSPs are mainly involved in indexation management. Challenges in applying for indexation include technical and non-technical participation criteria and metadata requirements.

Most IPSPs don't have a newsletter, social media or networking profile to inform the community about updates (10/17), but they have a data protection and privacy policy (11/17). Only four IPSPs are publicly displaying metrics. The prevalent metrics already in place are the data about submissions, acceptance and publication dates.

Regarding EDIB services offered, age (career stage), gender and language are prioritised by IPSPs. The main measure taken by IPSP to ensure and promote the dimensions of EDIB is the code of conduct. 6/17 IPSPs have an accessibility policy, but it is not published. Accessibility standards are mainly unknown to Romanian IPSPs, being reduced to what the software provides by default. According to the responses, the main challenge that IPSPs face is a need for more expertise and less technical limitations of existing infrastructure.

For the Romanian scholarly communication community, what lies beyond the surveys’ scope is a variety of practices set within the boundaries of Open Access. These practices need coherence, and DIAMAS efforts will offer valuable insights into a possible unified framework in which the best practices will set solid foundations for the Romanian Open Science practitioners.

One response received. Slovakia has 51 journals in DOAJ, none with the DOAJ seal, 38 that let the authors retain all rights, and 41 of the 51 are diamond journals. Slovakia has 34 institutional publishers in DOAJ (via GOA8), 34 of which publish diamond journals.

Ukraine has 438 journals in DOAJ, 19 with the DOAJ seal, 352 that let the authors retain all rights, and 226 are diamond journals. Ukraine has 203 institutional publishers in DOAJ (via GOA8), 125 of which publish diamond journals.

Ukrainian OA journal publishing continues despite the war. The registry of Ukrainian scholarly journals lists 2160 titles and the number of DOIs issued didn’t seem to drop during the war.

12 responses were received from Ukrainian IPSPs. A majority of them operate independently but are owned or governed by the parent organisation (a university or the Academy of Sciences). Some IPSPs are departments of the parent organisation. When asked about services offered, the majority of IPSPs provide editorial, IT, production, communication, administrative, legal and financial services, training, support and/or advice.

Half of IPSPs report having an approved annual budget. For those IPSPs that have a parent organisation, the most common in-kind services provided were facilities and premises, salaries of permanent and temporary staff, and general IT services. Over one third of IPSPs also received human resource management services, general financial and legal services, and service-specific IT services from their parent organisations.

Responses show a very high reliance on fixed and permanent subsidies from the IPSPs’ parent organisations. Time limited grants or subsidies (private or public) from outside the organisation, permanent public government funding, collective funding, voluntary author contributions, content and print sales and any other income were marked as non-applicable for the majority of IPSPs.

Training, support and/or advice on publishing policies and best practice and communication services are among the top areas in which IPSPs would consider collaborating with other organisations, followed by editorial, IT and production services, administrative, legal, and financial services.

All IPSPs use persistent identifiers and almost all use open licences, with CC-BY being the most popular licence. The vast majority allow for self-archiving and address metadata rights in their Open Access and Open Science policies. One third of IPSPs address third-party copyright in policies and one fourth of IPSPs report publishing negative research results. Almost half of IPSPs accept submissions that have been publicly shared as preprint or working paper for all their journals. But just one journal enables open peer review, although the majority would consider implementing open peer review at a later stage.

Providing adequate resources for the infrastructure and services is mentioned as a major challenge for all IPSPs, particularly financial constraints, technical limitations of existing infrastructure, lack of human resources, and lack of expertise. Financial constraints are also mentioned among the challenges of supplying and enriching metadata/PIDs. A majority of IPSPs would like to see better indexing in scholarly search engines/indexes. Lack of expertise and resources are mentioned as major challenges in meeting accessibility standards.

For more specific challenges related to the ongoing war see (Zhenchenko, Izarova et al., 2023) who discuss changes in editorial structure and work, which are particularly evident in fewer articles published, a switch to working remotely owing to relocation of staff, changes in the frequency of publication, changes in the topics covered in the articles, and staff cuts.

We received 10 responses from Denmark. Denmark has 51 journals in DOAJ, four with the DOAJ seal, 41 that let the authors retain all rights, and 50 are diamond journals. Denmark has 22 institutional publishers in DOAJ (via GOA8), 21 of which publish diamond journals. A reasonably large share of Danish institutional publishing appears to be represented by these responses.

In the survey, the institutional publishing landscape in Denmark is dominated by universities and university-based publishing services, although there are also activities in other sectors. IPSPs are generally small to mid-sized, with only one of them above the 11–20 journals bracket. Three report publishing more than 100 journals, but two of these are not publishing journals themselves, but only providing international publishing services. The one that stands out is a national publishing platform for journals with more than 100 journals, in itself representing a solid fraction of all journals in Denmark. Among the respondents, there are only three stand-alone journals. It can be safely concluded that this group is underrepresented in the survey. Among the survey respondents there is one commercial entity, an international service provider. Although two report having 21-30 FTEs, one of these responses looks incorrect – more likely this is the number of FTEs including the mother organisation. Other respondents report 2–5 or less than two.

Humanities is the field best represented, followed by social sciences.

Danish respondents seem less reliant upon fixed and permanent subsidies than other respondents in the survey, and periodically negotiate support from the parent organisation. This is also the case for permanent public government funding, where 80% of Danish respondents say this is ‘not applicable’. Among the three respondents who have provided information on the size of the budget, one is in the 1-10K EUR bracket and one in the 11-50K EUR bracket. One respondent, an international service provider, reports a budget over 1M EUR.

Nearly everything published by respondents is published OA, except for one respondent reporting 5-10% OA for books and conference outputs. Danish respondents report a lower need for better indexation than the survey total. 11.1% of Danish respondents report having a research data sharing policy at any level, compared to 58.4% for the survey total.

Two responses received. Estonia has 35 journals in DOAJ, none with the DOAJ seal, 28 that let the authors retain all rights, 22 of the 35 are diamond journals. Estonia has 13 institutional publishers in DOAJ (via GOA8), 12 of which publish diamond journals.

Open science has been a very visible part of science policy in Finland in the last ten years, which has impacted the environment for scholarly publishers active in the country. A national policy on open access publishing has been in place since 2020, striving for full open access to journal articles. The government funding model for Finnish higher education institutions incentivises research publications (journal articles as well as books) being available open access, giving institutions 20% extra funding for each peer-reviewed publication if it is available OA (including gold, hybrid and green OA). Continuous development of open science policies is handled through national Open Science coordination funded by the Ministry of Education and Culture operated by the Federation of Finnish Learned Societies (TSV).

A thorough study of the peer-reviewed journal landscape in Finland is provided by Linna et al. (2020). The study found that of the 336 journals identified, 53% were publishing immediate OA, with a further 6% as delayed OA, and 2% of journals offering a hybrid OA option. Diamond OA is the dominant model of OA publishing among journals, with the study only identifying seven journals in the country that ask for an APC. Looking at what is visible through the lens of indexing in DOAJ, Finland has 66 journals in DOAJ of which almost all (59) are diamond journals. Of the journals in Finland listed in DOAJ a large majority (49) are institutional publishers (via GOA8), of which almost all (46) publish diamond journals. The national register of publication channels (JUFO portal) currently includes 195 Open Access journals from Finland. Overall it can be concluded that journals from Finland are more likely to be included in DOAJ.

According to Late et al. (2020), learned societies publish around 70% of 402 peer- reviewed publication channels in Finland, mostly in the fields of humanities and social sciences. Commercial publishers produce only 2.6% of Finnish journals and books. Finland has had a national journal platform based on OJS hosted by TSV at Journal.fi since 2015 (Pölönen, Syrjämäki et al., 2021). In 2023, 140 journals were publishing on the platform. It is possible for any peer-reviewed journal published in Finland to make use of the platform, but the journal has to be at least delayed OA to be eligible, thus incentivising journals to adopt that level of openness at a minimum. The platform is free for TSV member societies and a nominal fee is asked from other publishers. There is also a similar service for the publication of OA books based on OMP, Edition.fi, which launched in 2020 and currently has a handful of publishers providing content on the platform.

27 responses were received from Finland, 22 identified as institutional publishers and five as service providers. The publication languages reported by the respondents represent a high degree of multilingualism, with eight different languages represented where the most common were English (22), Finnish (19), and Swedish (13). 19 of the respondents were members of COPE, and two of AEUP. The type of legal entities of the IPSP or the parent organisation was split between ‘Private not-for-profit’ (17) and ‘Public Organisation’ (10). The number of paid staff directly employed or contracted in FTE was less than two FTE for over half of the respondents (15). A clear majority of the respondents published only a single scholarly journal (17). As for academic book publishing volumes most organisations published between 1-10 books (7). The budgeting practices seem organised with 20 IPSPs starting each year with an approved annual budget. Responses were collected for all budget bands but most fell within the 1-10K EUR bracket (7). A high degree of respondents (20) rely on external services for publishing, particularly IT services (16), which is likely explained by the widespread use of the national journal platform journal.fi that many use as their primary digital workflow and publishing system. Respondents raised interest in a variety of different collaboration areas, the most frequent response (16) was ‘training, support and/or advice on publishing policies and best practice’. The responses to the funding-related questions were quite inconclusive with a high number of responses being ‘not applicable’ to the different funding mechanisms that were asked about.

Finland has a relatively unique public funding system for supporting non-profit peer- reviewed journal publishing, one of the most inclusive in Europe. It can rely on a public funding subsidy that is distributed by TSV and that can be applied for by any peer- reviewed journal (Laakso & Multas, 2023). In addition to this governmental funding, which provides some basic income in case of deficit, there have long been both formal and informal negotiations for developing a new funding model particularly suited to the circumstances of diamond OA journals where there might be very little other income to support publication activities. The disciplines covered by the respondents were heavily skewed towards humanities and social sciences with over half of respondents selecting either option.

Finland has contributed to the trend of internationally oriented OA university presses, with the two largest universities in the country operating such functions: Helsinki University Press and Tampere University Press (now also on the Edition.fi platform).

The Association for Scholarly Publishing in Finland funds development projects of publishers in the country through competitive funding rounds, and has in the last two years also handed out grants of a few thousand EUR that academic publishers can use for any purpose they see fit to support their activities.

Three responses received. Iceland has seven journals in DOAJ, none with the DOAJ seal, three that let the authors retain all rights, all seven are diamond journals. Iceland has five institutional publishers in DOAJ (via GOA8), five of which publish diamond journals.

With only three responses, it is not possible to provide many comments on the information collected in the survey. However, information openly available on the internet was collected as a basis for identifying possible respondents to the survey.

While DOAJ lists seven journals from Iceland, the initial work for the survey indicates that there are 27 Icelandic journals. There are no clear indications as to how many of these are OA. The University of Iceland is the major publisher, with eight of these journals. The rest are mainly stand-alone journals published by other scholarly institutions. No commercial publishing activity has been clearly identified.

Ireland has 22 journals in DOAJ, one with the DOAJ seal, 17 that let the authors retain all rights, 19 are Diamond journals. Ireland has eight institutional publishers in DOAJ (via GOA8), eight of which publish Diamond journals.

10 responses were received from Ireland. However, on closer inspection two responses were received from the same IPSP. The two duplicate responses are interesting to look at in a little more detail as they differ in some of the answers. Most notably is self- declaration of IP or SP, where the first response identifies the IPSP as an IP and the second as an SP. When comparing this to the question about whether an IPSP publishes or provides a service, this particular IPSP only publishes. Therefore, the first set of responses from the IP perspective have been used in this country report.

When taking the duplicate response into account, the Irish responses represent five IPs and four SPs. English is the dominant publication language, but four IPSPs also publish in Irish. German, Bulgarian and Italian are also represented.

The majority of Irish IPSPs in the survey are based in universities, either as part of an academic department or library, or independently run but owned and supported by the university. Staffing is low, with most IPSPs reporting less than two FTE or none. Only one IPSP has 6-10 FTE. Memberships of other organisations are low. However, all university-based IPSPs state that they are members of a national publisher/scholarly communication association. This is likely to be the recently established Irish Open Access Publishers (IOAP) community of practice, which has been instrumental in bringing institutional publishers together.

All but one IPSP publish or provide a service for journals, the remaining IPSP only publishes books. Four other IPSPs publish books and one provides services for book publishing. Conference proceedings are also published by five IPSPs. Grey literature and other forms of publishing are less well represented. Irish IPSPs are small to medium sized publishers with only one publishing over 20 journals per year. Two of the IPSPs represent standalone journals, although one considers itself a service provider rather than a publisher. IPSPs that publish books tend to publish 1-10 titles a year, with only one publishing 11-20. Irish IPSPs are predominantly humanities and social science publishers or multidisciplinary. Those that selected ‘multidisciplinary’ qualify this by selecting a number of STEM subjects.

Only three IPSPs have a fixed budget, two of these are below 50K EUR, with one over 100K EUR. For these IPSPs, monitoring of annual income is obligatory. For the most part, IPSPs rely on in-kind services, such as facilities, IT services, and salaries of permanent staff. This includes IPSPs with a fixed budget, which might account for the low budgets. Six of the IPSPs also rely on the use of external services and much of this is voluntary or in-kind. When asked about the potential for collaboration, most IPSPs selected all of the options. Indeed, collaboration is already happening as part of the IOAP community of practice.

Most IPSPs in Ireland rely on a subsidy from parent organisations, with most viewing these subsidies as stable or very stable. All but one IPSP reports a very high reliance on non-monetary or in-kind support, and monetary support was also important to most IPSPs. When asked if IPSPs were expected to make a profit, only one answered yes, and this is to invest in their own operation or create a financial buffer. Looking at challenges, IPSPs were almost unanimous in the need for security of/stable funding from their parent institution, even if this was just a small guaranteed amount for some. Regarding governance, most Irish IPSPs do not have formal documents describing activities or governance models.

There were few responses to the question on how much of the IPSPs’ content is open access. However, the majority of those that did answer publish 100% on OA, another respondent answered in a comment to a previous question that they want to move to 100% OA as soon as they could.

Hosting and metadata are the two most common technical services offered. A range of different publication systems are used, OJS being the most common. Most IPSPs assign PIDs to all or some of their published content. CrossRef or Datacite DOI being the most commonly used PID alongside ISSN/ISBN where appropriate. However, only three IPSPs release metadata with an open licence.

Regarding equity, diversity, inclusion and belonging, only one or two IPSPs have implemented some of the options in the survey. The majority were not planning, didn’t know or answered ‘not applicable’ to most options.

Five responses received. Latvia has 18 journals in DOAJ, none with the DOAJ seal, nine that let the authors retain all rights, 12 of the 18 are diamond journals. Latvia has nine institutional publishers in DOAJ (via GOA8), seven of which publish diamond journals.

Seven responses were received. Lithuania has 96 journals in DOAJ, 33 with the DOAJ seal, 75 that let the authors retain all rights, 77 are diamond journals. Lithuania has 17 institutional publishers in DOAJ (via GOA8), 17 of which publish diamond journals.

Most major universities filled out the survey. To save costs, IPSPs would consider collaborating with other organisations on editorial services, production services, IT and communication services, training, support and/or advice on publishing policies and best practice.

All IPSPs’ Open Science/Open Access policies addressed copyright, self-archiving, use of open licences, metadata rights and use of identifiers; and some IPSPs also addressed embargoes, third-party copyright and publication of negative research results.

Some IPSPs mentioned financial constraints and lack of expertise in providing adequate resources for the infrastructure and services. Technical limitations of existing infrastructure, lack of human resources and lack of expertise also created a challenge for some IPSPs of supplying and enriching metadata and PIDs, or making metadata available for use. Lack of expertise and technical limitations of existing infrastructure, lack of human resources, financial and administrative constraints were mentioned as a challenge by some IPSPs when trying to achieve and maintain interoperability with other services. Lack of human resources, lack of expertise, technical limitations of existing infrastructure were also mentioned as a challenge of archiving, backing up or preserving content and software by some IPSPs. And, finally, lack of resources is a challenge for most IPSPs in meeting accessibility standards.

15 responses to the survey were received from Norway. Norway has 127 journals in DOAJ, 21 with the DOAJ seal, 120 that let the authors retain all rights, 109 are diamond journals. Norway has 42 institutional publishers in DOAJ (via GOA8), 35 of which publish diamond journals. 

The oldest academic journal in Norway that is still being published, started in 1870. Until the 1950’s, scholarly publishing was done by institutions, even if technical and mercantile functions were performed by commercial entities like publishers, booksellers etc. In 1950, Universitetsforlaget (later renamed internationally to Scandinavian University Press) was formed. This publisher was owned by the major universities and the students’ welfare unions. Over time many journals were taken over by this publisher. These were Norwegian journals published for various institutions, but also Nordic journals. After buying a Swedish publisher, the Swedish and Nordic profile was strengthened. Universitetsforlaget started by publishing compendia and lecture notes, rapidly expanding into textbooks and scholarly books. University and student welfare union ownership meant that Universitetsforlaget evolved into the foremost scholarly publisher in Norway. Following financial problems in the 1990’s, Universitetsforlaget was ‘cut up’, with various parts being sold off, and a reformed Universitetsforlaget becoming an imprint of a major publisher. The new Universitetsforlaget took over the journals publishing in Norwegian (and other Nordic languages) and the book publishing in social sciences and humanities. International journals were taken over by Taylor & Francis. 

A result of this history is that a commercial publisher, Universitetsforlaget, has a strong position in scholarly publishing in Norway especially in social sciences and humanities, and is still publishing many titles owned by institutions. They publish a number of journals, either as subscription journals or as diamond OA journals; they have only one APC-based journal. Cappelen Damm Akademisk publishes a number of scholarly journals, a mix of APC-based and diamond OA titles. 

Norway has a financing scheme for Norwegian-language scholarly OA journals in social sciences and humanities, NÅHST. Journals are invited to compete for three-year funding, and a committee of researchers select titles to be included in NÅHST. 37 journals were granted support for the upcoming period (2024-2026). A vast majority of the selected journals are published by commercial publishers and are all diamond. 

Responses to the survey find that the institutional publishing landscape in Norway is dominated by a) a handful of university-based publishing infrastructures, probably publishing near half of all scholarly journals in Norway – most are medium-sized (11-20 or 21-50 journals); and b) two commercial publishers publishing a large number of scholarly journals, most of them owned or controlled by institutions. There is no national publishing service/platform in Norway. Stand-alone journals are typically associated with institutions that are not primarily scholarly in their activities, or that are more profession oriented. 

Among the respondents there are only three stand-alone journals. It can be safely concluded that this group is underrepresented. Among the survey respondents there are three commercial entities. These are commercial publishers, all engaged in publishing scholarly journals for institutions. One respondent reports to have 11-20 FTEs employed, two 6-10 FTEs, five 2-5 FTEs, while six report less than two and one reports no FTE. 

Humanities is the field best represented, followed by social sciences. 

Norwegian respondents seem less reliant upon fixed and permanent subsidies than other survey respondents, this is also the case for periodically negotiated support from the parent organisation. The same is the case for permanent public government funding, where 85.7% of Norwegian respondents say this is ‘not applicable’. Among the three respondents who have given information on the size of the budget, one is in the 11-50K EUR bracket, two respondents report a budget over 1M EUR. 

Nearly everything published by respondents is published OA, except for one respondent reporting 60% OA. This is a commercial publisher with a large portfolio of subscription journals, published electronically – but without a hybrid option. Norwegian respondents report a greater need for better indexation than the survey total; 62% want improvement compared to 54% in the survey total. 50% of Norwegian respondents report having a research data sharing policy, compared to 58.4% for the survey total. 

There are indications that diamond OA is increasing in Norway (Frantsvåg, 2022).

5 responses were received from Sweden. Sweden has 56 journals in DOAJ, six with the DOAJ seal, 50 that let the authors retain all rights, 42 are Diamond journals. Sweden has 23 institutional publishers in DOAJ (via GOA8), 23 of which publish Diamond journals.

The survey results indicate that a reasonably large part of Swedish institutional publishing is represented by these responses.

Survey responses indicate that the institutional publishing landscape in Sweden is dominated by universities and university-based publishing services. They are small to mid-sized, none of them above the 11–20 journals bracket. Among the respondents there are only two stand-alone journals. It can safely be concluded that this group is underrepresented. No commercial entity is represented among the survey respondents. None have more than 10 FTEs employed, most less than two. Social sciences is the field best represented, followed by humanities. Swedish respondents seem more reliant upon fixed and permanent subsidies, and periodically negotiated support from the parent organisation than for the survey in total. This is also the case for permanent public government funding. No respondent has a budget over 100K EUR, four of the seven have a budget in the 51–100K EUR range. Generally, Swedish respondents point to financial problems to a lesser degree than the survey total, but at least as much as others when it comes to resources and competences. 

Nearly everything published by respondents is OA. Swedish respondents report a higher need for better indexation than the survey total, especially when it comes to indexation in DOAJ. 

When it comes to EDIB, Swedish respondents have implemented measures for most aspects investigated to a lesser degree than the survey total. The percentage of respondents that are in progress or considering EDIB measures is also, for most aspects, considerably lower than for the survey total. We must conclude that such questions seem to have received less attention in Sweden than is the case for the majority of respondents in the survey.

Journal publishing in the UK has been dominated by vendor consolidation, vertical integration and lock-in with UK institutions spending 96.3M GBP with the top five journal publishers: Elsevier, Springer, Wiley, Taylor & Francis (Informa), and Sage. In July 2023, 96.1% of UKRI (UK Research and Innovation) funded research articles are compliant and eligible for UKRI OA funds through Transitional Agreements (TAs), or compliant via the green route. There is a growing concern among institutions and funders about the impact of larger publishers’ commercial strategies on long term sustainability and equity, including the ability for less well-resourced countries or institutions to publish. 

However, in the last 10 years the UK has seen a rise in the number of New University Presses and scholar-led publishers. A 2017 report highlighted a new wave of university presses. In tandem, a small but notable number of academics and researchers set up their own publishing initiatives, often demonstrating innovative and unique approaches either in workflow, peer review, technology, or business model (Adema & Stone, 2017, p. 102). Both New University Presses and scholar-led publishing have used the diamond OA model from the outset. There are also examples of consortial university publishing where universities with existing collaboration agreements have launched collaborative university presses. These presses have been successful in using the combined strength of participating universities to pool resources in order to promote diamond OA. 

The UK also features a number of ‘service providers’ based or established in UK institutions, which either offer diamond OA publishing or services, which can be used by open access publishers to publish diamond journals. Many libraries in the UK are running OJS servers, but do not consider themselves as publishers. There are approximately 180 OA journals in the UK using OJS. Many of these use library hosting services and/or are based within academic departments. 

A number of new university presses in the UK have now come together to launch the Open Institutional Publishing Association (OIPA), which aims to be a community of practice for new university presses, library publishing and departmental publishing in the UK. It will hold its first membership meeting in November 2023. 

Twenty responses were received from UK IPSPs, this included four that did not formally complete the survey, but after contact approved the data for analysis. The majority of IPSPs are located within UK universities. Of these, four responded that they only served their parent institution. There was also a standalone journal reporting to a community network and a learned society. 

The majority of IPSPs employ less than 10 FTE. Two employed no staff and only one IPSP employed over 30 FTE, this is an established university press. When asked about services offered, there was a fairly even split with most IPSPs providing communication, editorial, IT, production, and training, support and/or advice. Other services provided were curation and preservation, and journal set-up and advice. All IPSPs published in English, one IPSP also published in Welsh. Other languages were offered by just 4/20 of the IPSPs. 

Most IPSPs in the UK had very little membership engagement with the options provided in the survey. Ten IPSPs reported that they were members of a national publishing scholarly communication association, which may relate to OIPA call for expressions of interest and membership applications at the same time that the survey was issued. 

It would appear that definitions of IP and SP are fairly fluid. For example, all SPs provide services for academic journals, however, one also publishes them. Two IPs report that they only provide a service for academic journals. Indeed one of these IPs reports that it only provides services and does not publish anything, yet it self-identifies as an IP, not a SP. Nearly 80% of UK IPSPs report that they publish between two and 20 titles. Of the 14 IPs that publish academic books, only one publishes over 100 titles a year, this is the established university press. The majority published between 1-10 titles a year with just over half publishing 100% of their scholarly journals on OA and just under half publishing all of their books on OA. 

The majority of IPSPs do not rely on APCs or print sales. Just over half of IPSPs start the year with an approved annual budget, one additional IPSP reported that this is part of the society budget as a whole. Amounts are evenly spread between 1-10K EUR and over 1M EUR. However, seven IPSPs do not have an approved annual budget. For those IPSPs that have a parent organisation, the most common in-kind services provided are general IT services, facilities and premises, human resource management, general financial and legal services and salaries of permanent staff. Regarding fixed and permanent subsidies from their parent organisation. IPSPs are fairly evenly spread for the survey question on profit/surplus. Although more IPSPs were permitted to make losses/overspend than any other category. 

When asked about external funders, most of the funders listed were UK based. However, it was reported that two Spanish funders funded one of the SPs. It is interesting to note that two national funders from outside of the UK and a number of international funders were also listed. 

Most IPSPs do not have experience of failed collaboration. Three examples were given, one involving an external contractor failing to deliver on a website, loss of editorial staff in an academic school leading to the cessation of a journal title, and one open access business model failing to raise enough funds. One IPSP commented that OIPA was being established to promote collaboration between IPSPs. 

There was a mixed response for questions about the governance model, with a 60/40 split between those that do and those that do not have a model. Regarding the governing board, there was a much clearer trend with 14 saying that they did and only four saying they didn’t. 

Regarding open science/open access practices, four IPs follow parent institution open science/open access policy for both journals and books with a further IP following the institutional policy for journals only. 10 IPSPs follow their own policy. However, three IPSPs answered that they follow the parent organisation policy as well as their own. Only one IPSP does not use CC licences, and one didn’t know. Four IPSPs were either implementing or were experimenting with open peer-review. A further seven said that they would consider implementing open peer review at a later stage. 

All IPSPs offer one or more technical services, with hosting and user interface being the most common. When asked about metadata released openly with a standard metadata description schema, nine IPSPs did not know, which indicates that more awareness might be required in this area. Five IPSPs did release metadata openly, either CC BY or CC0. Providing adequate resources for the infrastructure and services is seen as much more of a challenge, particularly lack of human resources and financial constraints. When asked about specific challenges of applying for indexation the majority of UK IPSPs found that paying for membership or recurring fees; satisfying metadata requirements, and non-technical and technical participation criteria important or very important. 

Although most UK IPSPs have data protection and GDPR policies, there is a need for the remaining IPSPs to understand why they might need one. Of the various options offered for EDIB, disability, ethnicity and gender had the highest number of implemented policies, or those that were in progress or being considered. However, as many as half of the IPSPs are either not considering this, do not know or answered ‘not applicable’. The number of UK IPSPs engaged in EDIB is likely to increase in the future with the launch of OIPA in the UK as many of the founder members are keen to progress EDIB policies and support as an organisation allowing individual IPSPs to adopt.

One response was received. Albania has five journals in DOAJ, none with the DOAJ seal, three that let the authors retain all rights, four are diamond journals. Albania has three institutional publishers in DOAJ (via GOA8), two of which publish diamond journals.

Four responses received. Bosnia and Herzegovina has 43 journals in DOAJ, none with the DOAJ seal, 25 that let the authors retain all rights, 39 are diamond journals. Bosnia and Herzegovina has 33 institutional publishers in DOAJ (via GOA8), 29 of which publish diamond journals.

The publishing landscape in Croatia is significantly shaped by universities and learned societies, championing the non-profit model and driving early adoption of open access (OA). This commitment has led to the creation of HRČAK, a national platform hosting 405 active scholarly, professional and popular OA journals (536 in total, with only 155 in DOAJ) with 285,000 articles. The presence of Croatian journals in DOAJ decreased after more than half of the journals ceased in 2016, together with corresponding back issues, mostly because of non-valid reapplication and/or non-transparent rights and licensing. Government subsidies, allocated based on evaluation, further underscore Croatia's dedication to unhindered knowledge sharing. The preference for not resorting to APCs highlights the community's strong support for the diamond OA model and the free dissemination of knowledge. The transition to publishing OA books/monographs in Croatia is much more limited, with only a few active institutional publishers, such as MorePress at the University of Zadar and FF Open Press at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Zagreb. 

The DIAMAS survey, targeting 251 IPSPs in Croatia, achieved a robust response rate of 77. Among the respondents, an intriguing shift towards editorial teams was observed, with 40/77 respondents hailing from editorial offices, while merely nine represented institutional publishing departments. This adjustment might be attributed to the survey's complexity, encouraging institutions to enlist knowledgeable editors for accurate responses. 

Almost half of Croatian IPSPs fall under universities, faculties, and learned societies. However, only four institutions possess dedicated web pages for publishing activities, and 29% are standalone journal websites. This journal-centric focus may skew the representation of other IPSP publications. 

Voluntary efforts significantly influence the Croatian IPSP landscape, with 54% of respondents not employing paid staff. This complex interplay of factors shapes Croatia's distinctive and challenging scholarly publishing ecosystem. 

41/69 IPSPs use Croatian as the primary publication language (only three of them publish exclusively in Croatian), while 11 exclusively publish in English. Multilingualism is a notable trait among IPSPs, with 80% publishing in multiple languages (besides Croatian and English, most often in languages of culturally, historically and geographically close countries like German, Serbian, Bosnian, Italian, or Slovene), reaching broader audiences. The scientific community's commitment to extensive outreach remains evident despite linguistic complexities and the need for human translators. 

Most Croatian IPSPs align with the Croatian Association of Scholarly Communication (ZNAK). The European Association of Science Editors (EASE) is notable, mainly due to its active Croatian chapter. Despite many IPSPs embracing the principles of the COPE in their policies, actual COPE membership remains modest. 

IPSPs mainly handle academic journals, academic books, and conference outputs, with services extending to other research outputs, media, digital products, and non- academic content. Almost all IPs report publishing academic journals. On average, a Croatian IPSP publishes 1-5 scholarly journals, 11-100 scholarly articles, 1-10 academic books, and 1-20 conference proceedings annually. 

Scholarly journals in Croatia primarily rely on government funding from the Ministry of Science and Education, awarded through an annual call. Excluding one IPSP with a budget above 1M EUR, the average IPSP budget is below 10K EUR. Given this, the heavy reliance on voluntary work is not unexpected. Financial monitoring is mandatory, especially for IPSPs receiving government subsidies, as they must submit annual financial reports to the Ministry. 

IPSPs describe the type of in-kind support of the parent organisation, primarily in facilities, IT services, and staff salaries. Human resources management, general financial, and legal services are not supported. 

Regarding services, editorial services are primarily provided voluntarily or as in-kind contributions. In contrast, production services and IT services are mostly outsourced. Communication services, administrative, legal and financial services and training, support and/or advice on publishing policies and best practices are not represented enough and are often marked as ‘None/N/A’. IPSPs' external services rely mainly on the University Computing Centre SRCE (HRČAK, central installation of OJS) and the National and University Library (Crossref DOI).

Dominant funding types are fixed and permanent subsidies from the IPSPs’ parent organisation and permanent public/government funding. Most IPSPs consider fixed and permanent subsidies from the parent organisations and permanent public and government funding stable or very stable. Delays and remittances do not influence the perception of the reliability of government funds. In contrast, voluntary author contributions, content and print sales, article processing charges, and other incomes from event organisations, commercial revenue and loans are considered very unstable by many IPSPs. 

An insight into external funding sources confirms the government as the main funder of the Croatian IPSPs, primarily through the Ministry of Science and Education, followed by private companies, universities, counties, cities, national foundations, state agencies, and learned societies. It is certainly interesting to see the various minor funders, such as tourist boards, state companies, co-editors, co-publishers, churches, etc., supporting IPSPs in their publishing endeavours. 

Croatian IPSPs strongly rely on non-monetary or in-kind support, but there is also a high to very high dependency on monetary income. In general, it is not expected that Croatian IPSPs generate profit, surplus, shareholder value, or to subsidise other activities of the organisation. Limited losses and overspending are permitted and not permitted in the same proportions. 

Three main challenges to financial sustainability are the lack of continuity/permanency/stability of funding, irregularity and delays, and insufficient funding. Changes in government funding eligibility without notice, price increases in printing and copy-editing, and the online submission system provision are among the noted challenges. Suggestions to address these challenges include enhancing financial literacy, collaborating with more institutions, and promoting scientific publishing. 

IPSP activities are often guided by internal documents such as statutes or by-laws. Governance models predominantly rely on governing boards, and representative involvement from the wider community is balanced. 

Although most Croatian IPSPs publish in OA and have institutional repositories, only 59/77 IPSPs responded to the question on the percentage of OA content, with only 49/59 selecting 100% journals published in open access. The sliding scale question format led to mix-ups, reflecting some inaccurate data points. Checking IPSP websites for verification reveals that all of them actually publish 100% of their journals in OA. 

Despite Croatia's involvement in OA publishing since the 1990s, a comprehensive national OA/OS policy is still in progress. Nonetheless, support for OA exists through different national laws and strategies. Notably, the government mandates OA and inclusion in the HRČAK portal for subsidised journals and graduation and doctoral theses archived in OA repositories. Over 90% of the respondents reference some form of OA/OS policy, which reflects the integration of OA principles into scholarly publishing practices over decades. The absence of formal policies does not seem to hinder progress in the OA/OS domain. 

Croatian IPSPs exhibit positive trends in copyright and licensing practices, although some awareness gaps persist. Creative Commons licences are commonly used (with CC BY being the most common), with 16 IPSPs applying them to books. Self-archiving is largely permitted, often without embargoes, due to the prevalence of OA content. However, there's a lack of understanding of the benefits of preprint sharing. 

Research data sharing in Croatia is developing. While negative responses dominate, some IPSPs include data sharing in OA/OS policies and implement it at the journal level. Despite challenges, these instances highlight positive developments. 

The contributorship model is being implemented in some Croatian IPSPs using the CRediT taxonomy, which outlines contributor roles. Though, the prevalence of ‘no’ and ‘don't know’ responses may indicate a lack of familiarity with the contributorship model. 

The context of respondents' roles should be considered when analysing the answers regarding IPSPs' participation in editorial management. IPSPs demonstrate significant involvement in editorial management (71%), primarily in editorial board recruitment and other aspects such as reviewer sourcing, coordinating peer review process, basic checks, and plagiarism scanning. Only two IPSPs have no role in editorial management. It is important to mention that editorial independence is valued in Croatia, so these findings warrant cautious interpretation. IPSPs' participation in managing editorial quality is similar to their involvement in editorial management. They define quality criteria and create guidelines. 

A double-anonymous peer review is preferred (77%), followed by a single-anonymous peer review (26%). A few implement open identities (6/43), and one applies open review reports. While these responses suggest improvement, some misunderstandings about open peer review may persist.

While 57% of IPSPs have research integrity or publication ethics policies, 36% lack such policies, raising concerns. Additionally, five IPSPs are not aware of their existence. 

IPSPs mostly provide full editorial workflow, hosting, and user interface. Metadata and quality control, software and partial editorial workflow are represented less. Services are mainly maintained in-house by a dedicated publishing department and the IT department or personnel. The IT department also maintains the technical infrastructure in-house or is outsourced. 

Technical services efficiency reveals IPSPs' focus on full editorial workflow, hosting, and user interface maintained mainly in-house. However, improving the assignment of PIDs and refining metadata sharing practices require attention. 

The main publishing system used in Croatia is OJS, followed by the customisation or own development of existing open source solutions. Furthermore, OMP, WordPress, Editorial Manager and Scholar One are in use among open source publishing systems. Concerning commercial software, Indigo and Manuscript Manager are in use. 

The situation with PID assignments for Croatian publishers could be improved. There is a national DOI office within the National and University Library Zagreb, but it only serves journal publications, and DOIs are assigned only to the original scientific articles. The national repository network Dabar provides URN-NBNs, also managed by the National and University Library Zagreb, thus assigning this type of PIDs to books and conference outputs. Consequently, although using CrossRef DOI is a prevalent practice among Croatian IPSPs, it is also clear that not all of them are assigning PIDs, and those who use it do not assign it to all published content. As DOIs are considered a standard practice in OA publishing and crucial for enhancing discoverability, some serious measures are required in Croatia. 

Only 42% of IPSPs share metadata under CC BY or another Creative Commons licence. Most IPSPs stated they either do not release metadata in such a way or they do not know about metadata sharing policy. Clarifying the present HRČAK metadata policy (CC BY or CC0) would benefit other IPSPs, as it is the main and most visible and interoperable source of journal metadata. 

Regarding content formats, PDF is the dominant format in the Croatian publishing landscape (99%). One of the reasons may be that the national HRČAK portal did not support formats other than PDF until recently. Also, such a large representation of PDF as the only format in most IPSPs could be a consequence of the existence of printed versions of publications. It is hoped that HTML and other formats will be better represented in the future, and the recent work with Croatian editors to accept the XML format is welcome.

Two thirds of IPSPs have an archiving or backup policy in place, and the published content is actively preserved in the national library, the national infrastructure provided by SRCE, and the institutional library or infrastructure. 

IPSPs' technical challenges stem from financial constraints, lack of human resources, expertise, and technical limitations. Financial constraints primarily affect infrastructure and services, while a lack of human resources is responsible for inadequate resources, missing or low quality metadata and PIDs and the lack of interoperability with other services. Lack of expertise is a challenge equally distributed among services. 

Although Croatian IPSPs strive for the inclusion of their journals in Web of Science Core Collection and the Scopus databases, other indexes such as DOAJ, DOAB, ERIH PLUS, PubMed, search engines such as Google Scholar, scientific networks such as ResearchGate, and book repositories and search engines such as Google Books and OAPEN are also mentioned. 46% of IPSPs are satisfied with the current level of indexing. IPSPs are mainly involved in indexation management (66%). The main challenges in applying for indexation include technical participation criteria. 

Most IPSPs have a newsletter, social media or networking profile to inform the community about updates, data protection and privacy policies. 42% of IPSPs are displaying metrics publicly. The prevalent metrics are the data about submissions, acceptance and publication dates, followed by article/publication level usage metrics such as visits, views, downloads, and publication-level impact metrics, such as Journal Impact Factor. 

Among the offered dimensions of EDIB, the language and educational and professional background are prioritised by IPSPs, followed by age, gender and ethnicity and culture. The main measure taken by IPSPs to ensure and promote EDIB principles is a code of conduct and non-discrimination or positive discrimination policy. It should be noted that the highest numbers of responses are in the ‘not applicable’ and ‘don't know’ choices. 

33% of IPSPs don't have a publicly available accessibility policy. Accessibility standards are mainly unknown to the Croatian IPSPs except for OpenAIRE guidelines implemented in some institutional repositories. The main challenge that IPSPs face in meeting accessibility standards is a lack of resources and expertise. 

Among gender equality measures, the Gender Equality Plan (GEP) is implemented by 25% of IPSPs. In conclusion, the DIAMAS report illuminates the intricate landscape of scholarly publishing in Croatia, showcasing its commitment to diamond open access while addressing challenges and embracing opportunities for improvement.

One response received. Cyprus has two journals in DOAJ, none with the DOAJ seal, both let the authors retain all rights, One is a diamond journal. Cyprus has two institutional publishers in DOAJ (via GOA8), one of which publishes diamond journals.

Cyprus has made significant steps in transitioning to the open science paradigm over the past decade through the adoption of national and institutional OS policies aligned with international developments. The National OA policy was approved in 2015 by the Council of Ministers, while the update of the policy that was initiated in 2019 resulted in the adoption of the new and revised policy in 2022. During this period, institutional policies have also been adopted, while training and awareness-raising events have taken place on a regular basis, targeting various stakeholder groups involved in the transition to OA/OS (policy makers, researchers, librarians, IT specialists). RPOs have also been actively involved in EU-funded projects related to the promotion of OA/OS, while the University of Cyprus has recently joined OPERAS, and is also the National Open Access Desk (NOAD) of OpenAIRE for Cyprus.

Despite the initiatives taken over the past years, the OA publishing landscape is still embryonic as OA diamond journals are limited in number. These have in turn been established primarily by researchers (benefiting from institutional support), while they are open to submissions from researchers outside Cyprus. At the same time, researchers have also been involved through various roles (e.g., editors in chief) in OA journals published in other countries, thereby showing their support for OA publishing.

Five responses received. Greece has 44 journals in DOAJ, three with the DOAJ seal, 40 that let the authors retain all rights, 32 of the 44 are Diamond journals. Greece has 20 institutional publishers in DOAJ (via GOA8), 19 of which publish Diamond journals.

Various initiatives have been developed over the past 20 years towards the promotion of OA/OS. Among the most recent ones is the establishment of a Working Group (of consultative nature) in 2017 to support the General Secretariat of Research and Innovation in the adoption of a national Open Science strategy. While the work was not completed, the Hellenic Open Science Initiative (HOSI) has gathered representatives from research centres to actively support the transition to the OS paradigm via the adoption of concrete measures. A significant number of RPOs have also been involved under various roles (coordinators or partners) in EU-funded projects that support the adoption of OA/OS policies and the development of the necessary infrastructures. RPOs have also been active in the organisation of awareness-raising activities and training especially for researchers.

In terms of OA publishing, the National Documentation Centre (EKT) through its e- publishing platform, based on OJS, hosts close to 70 diamond journals, primarily (but not limited to) social sciences and humanities making it the biggest platform in Greece. The e-publishing platform also hosts academic books and conference proceedings. The platform, in addition to hosting, offers publishers additional services like training, advice on copyright issues etc. free of charge. Universities have also been hosting OA journals, which have been established by faculty members with the majority using OJS.

The transition to OA books/monographs is more hesitant, despite the fact that the Kallipos initiative has led to the publication of more than 1000 OA university textbooks.

Despite the existence of the National Plan for Open Science (PNSA), Italy continues to grapple with the absence of a comprehensive national operative strategy that actively champions Open Access and Open Science. As a result, open access to scientific publications runs the risk of becoming increasingly associated with the business model of large commercial publishers, namely, paid Open Access (transformative agreements). However, Open Access Scholarly publishing is gaining strength and interest from different actors, in most cases from the institutional world. There are efficient journal platforms that maintain, develop and promote centralised e-publishing platforms dedicated to university-owned open access journals. Good examples are within big Universities (Piattaforma riviste Unimi, Rosa, AlmaDL Journals, Sirio@Unito). Italy has 100 publishers indexed in DOAJ, 513 journals in DOAJ, 53 with the DOAJ seal, 409 that let the authors retain all rights and 455 are Diamond journals. At the moment 15 university presses in Italy are in line with the Diamond Open Access model (at least for authors internal to the institution).

In this still changing landscape, it is useful to mention two communities that play a significant role in the promotion of OA scholarly publishing: a) AISA -Italian Association for the Promotion of Open Science, a nonprofit organisation whose mission is to advance open science at the scholarly publishing level, since its creation in 2015; b) the Association Coordination of Italian University Presses whose purpose is to explore issues related to the positioning, function and promotion of university and high-quality science publishing: it includes 14 university presses (not all of them responding to the diamond model).

An important step at the policy level to implement Open Science policies and practices in the Italian scholarly publishing sector is the mentioned National Plan for Open Science (PNSA), recently published by the Ministry of University and Research (MUR). This plan complements and enriches what was prepared by the National Plan for Research Infrastructures (PNIR), and both are an integral part of the National Program for Research 2021-2027 (NRP), whose actions promote and strengthen the scientific research landscape in Italy. In particular, PNSA aims to create coordination among all the actors involved for the development of an institutional publishing infrastructure of open science results built through the interconnection of repositories operated and/or maintained by the various actors that contribute to national scientific production.

The objective of the Plan is also to establish coordination among all the stakeholders involved, namely the Ministry of University and Research (MUR), research institutions, universities, the National Agency for the Evaluation of Universities and Research Institutes (ANVUR), and research infrastructures, engaging the actors of the system in clear and measurable goals. In this scenario, the role of the Italian Computing and Data Infrastructure (ICDI), is recognized, which is the technical forum bringing together research infrastructures operating in Italy, public research institutions, universities, and other institutional members to support synergies in Italian contributions to the construction of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). ICDI also acts as the mandated organisation in the EOSC Association, designing a national infrastructure for scientific data. The Competence Center of ICDI, in collaboration with the service www.Open-Science.it, provides information and reference tools on Open Science aimed at the scientific community.

These initiatives reflect the strong interest within the Italian scientific community in creating a fertile ground at the national level, regarding new modes of scholarly communication and new possibilities for scholarly publishing, through concrete promotion at the national level.

The survey gathered responses from 52 Italian IPSPs, 45 identified themselves as IPs, and the remaining 7 as SPs. Service providers represent 13.5% of the Italian responses. The feedback from these IPSPs mirrors the aforementioned scenario, particularly highlighting the work still to be done for the integration of Diamond publishing within the public institutional framework. The largest part (78.8%) of the IPSPs or their parent organisations were either public organisations (28) or private not for profit organisations (16). The rest were either private companies (7), private companies entirely owned by the parent institution (3) or an informal group of volunteers (1).

These IPSPs ranged widely in size, from small, isolated journals to big publishers. The majority of IPSPs (57.7%) employed less than 10 staff, with an additional 32.7% employing no staff. Only five IPSPs (9.6%) employed more than 10 staff members. Among these, two organisations had more than 30 employees. One of these two is a major Italian private academic publisher.

Italian IPSPs show limited involvement in international and European professional networks and organisations like COPE, OASPA, AEUP, EASE, and similar entities. 6 IPSPs reported membership in a national publisher scholarly communication association.

53.8% of IPSPs (28/52) reported having an approved annual budget, with an additional IPSP reporting that the annual budget is approved by its parent organisation. In terms of budget volume in EUR, the most common amount (11/28) is in the range of 11-50K EUR, though the situation is rather diversified with a significant number of IPSPs either in the lower or higher ranges.

When asked about reliance on different forms of funding over the last 3 years, 21/52 (40.4%) IPSPs reported reliance on fixed and permanent subsidies from parent organisations, in most cases high (6) or very high (12) reliance.

The financial sustainability of IPSPs presents a multifaceted challenge, encompassing issues related to funding sources, operational efficiency, and the changing landscape of scholarly communication. Stable funding from parent organisations is crucial, with considerations for ongoing financial stability being pivotal for IPSPs. Despite a majority of Italian and institutional funders, a wide variety of funders (private foundations, private companies, museums and cultural institutes, international organisations) could be observed.

When asked to what extent IPSPs rely on non-monetary or in-kind support, most IPSP that expressed a preference had a high (7) or very high (17) reliance. Similarly for monetary income, where more IPSPs had a high (7) or very high (8) reliance than low (4) or very low (5).

For those IPSPs that have a parent organisation, the most common in kind support offered by the parent organisation consists in facilities and premises (81.2%), general IT services (78.1%), salaries of permanent staff (68.8%), Human Resource management, general financial and legal services (56.2%), service-specific IT services (50%). Other services mentioned are printing and shipping.

Most IPSPs reported that they rely on external services (76.9%). Those IPSPs that declared to use external editorial services (23/52) receive them on a voluntary basis (17) and/or outsource them (5) and/or as in-kind contribution (6). External production services are used by 32/52 IPSPs, provided on a voluntary basis (17) and/or as in-kind contribution (6) and/or outsourced (5). IT services are reported to be externalised for 28/52 IPSPs, mostly outsourced (17) and/or received as in-kind contribution (8) and/or on a voluntary basis (5).

It is worth noting that disposition towards collaboration with other organisations was surveyed, revealing higher interest for collaboration in production, communication, training, and IT services (24, 24, 21, and 21 responses, respectively). In contrast, Editorial services received 17 responses, and administrative, legal, and financial services garnered only 9 responses, indicating relatively lower consideration for collaboration in these areas.

In terms of content, IPSPs primarily focus on journals, spanning social sciences, humanities, engineering, and natural sciences. Almost all responding IPSPs (50/52, 96%) either publish and/or provide publication services for academic journals with academic books being the second most published type of output.

Language preferences reveal the dominance of Italian, used in a majority of publications. English and Italian services are common, but multilingual publishing is limited, mostly bound to the publication of abstracts in English when the original language is other than English, with some considering bilingual publishing and others contemplating simultaneous different language versions.

Out of 40 respondents to the question, 29 IPSPs (72.5% of respondents) publish 100% of their scholarly journals in Open Access, while the level of open access publishing in other products - academic books, conference proceedings, grey literature, has lower percentages.

25 IPSPs (53.2% of respondents) declared following their own policy for Open Science/Open Access of journals, 14 (29.8%) declared that they followed their parent organisation’s policy, 12 (25.5%t) declared following the national policy. Another 3 IPSPs (6.4%) are in the process of adopting a policy either own or national as soon as it will become operational.

IPSPs provide one or more technical services, with a prevalence of full editorial workflow management, metadata and quality control, and hosting. Maintenance and updates of the services provided is often reported to be managed in-house by a dedicated publishing department or by an IT department. However, the share of full or partial outsourcing is significant in the responses. A similar pattern of distribution among the options emerged when respondents were asked about the maintenance and update of the technical infrastructure.

Open Journal System (OJS) is by far the prevalent response (65.3%) to the question on which publishing system IPSPs use. For books, Open Monograph Press (OMP) was the option preferred by 7 IPSP, in line with the share of book publishers among the respondents.

When asked about the assignment of PIDs, only three IPSPs responded they do not assign them while 5 don’t know. Mostly PIDs are assigned for all publications of the IPSP (31), then for all journals (8) or at least for some journals (2). DOI were the most commonly used PIDs with CrossRef DOI (18), DataCite DOI (12) and Other DOI (14). ISSN identifiers (31 responses) and ISBN (23) were similarly common among responses. 2 IPSPs used Handle and 1 URN as PID.

Metadata released openly with a standard metadata description schema did not appear as a very common practice. 19 IPSPs declared to release metadata openly with a standard schema mostly under CC BY or another Creative Commons licence.

Not surprisingly, PDF is a publishing format adopted by all IPSPs who responded to the question (49). HTML (15), EPub (11), Video formats (10), Sound (3), XML (3), csv (2) are also formats used by IPSPs.

For most IPSPs archiving, backing up or preserving content is a challenge. Lack of human resources, financial constraints, technical limitations of existing infrastructure are the obstacles most frequently reported when asked about challenges for providing adequate resources for the infrastructure and services, supplying and enriching metadata and PIDs, trying to achieve and maintain interoperability with other services. A consistent sign of the need of resources and training to improve such services. Rarely these are not considered challenges. IPSPs aim to improve indexation, facing hurdles related to metadata requirements and participation criteria.

Regarding EDIB, proactive measures are observed in certain dimensions. However, the survey underscores the complexity of comprehensively addressing diverse needs. Tailored and context-specific strategies are essential to foster a truly inclusive scholarly publishing environment in Italy.

The overview provides valuable insights into the challenges and opportunities faced by Italian IPSPs. As the scholarly communication landscape evolves, addressing issues such as financial sustainability, multilingualism, and enhanced visibility will be pivotal for Italian IPSPs to thrive in this dynamic publishing environment.

No responses received. Kosovo has no journals in DOAJ.

No responses received. Malta has two journals in DOAJ, none with the DOAJ seal, one that lets the authors retain all rights, both are diamond journals.

One response received. Montenegro has nine journals in DOAJ, none with the DOAJ seal, 7 that let the authors retain all rights, five are diamond journals. Montenegro has seven institutional publishers in DOAJ (via GOA8), four of which publish diamond journals.

Two responses received. North Macedonia has 15 journals in DOAJ, none with the DOAJ seal, 10 that let the authors retain all rights, nine are diamond journals. North Macedonia has 12 institutional publishers in DOAJ (via GOA8), seven of which publish diamond journals.

Portugal has 166 journals in DOAJ, 6 with the DOAJ seal, 86 that let the authors retain all rights, 142 are diamond journals. Portugal has 93 institutional publishers in DOAJ (via GOA8), 88 of which publish diamond journals.

The Portuguese landscape report was completed by 18 IPSPs; 13 of them responded as IPs and 5 as SPs. These IPSPs were largely connected to public institutions (72.2%) and a minority (22.2%) are private or not-for-profit organisations. Half of them have a parent organisation.

More than half of the IPSPs interviewed have no paid staff directly employed by them (55.6%), while almost one-third (27.8%) have between 2 and 5 employees. Only 11.1% of the Portuguese participants had more than 30 people hired. In general, those IPSPs provide editorial services (77.8%), but also IT services (61.1%), production and communication services (50% of the sample).

A majority of IPSPs (16/18) provide publication and/or services for academic journals. Nine of them also provide publication or services for academic books. Half of the IPSPs publish from two to ten scholarly journals a year (based on information about 2022), while almost 40% of them published only one journal.

Social sciences are the most common area in which these IPSPs provide services and publication, with 58.8% of the cases. Humanities come in second place, with 47.1% of the participation, followed by 41.2% of multidisciplinary publications.

Less than half per cent of the participants start the year with an approved budget (47.1%). In the cases where there is a parent organisation, it generally provides in-kind support in three types: general IT services; Human Resource management, financial and legal services; and service-specific IT services. The most common technical services provided by the IPSPs are the full editorial workflow and hosting (58.8%); then user interface cited 41.2% of the time.

More than half of the participants use external services, including editorial ones, either in kind or voluntary. Portuguese IPSPs were mostly open to collaboration when considering IT services (58.8%), but also communication, editorial and production services (47.1% each).

Regarding the funding situation for IPSPs, the survey revealed low stability. The only types of funding appointed as stable or very stable were rather small. Among the stable or very stable forms, there were time-limited grants or subsidies from outside the organisation (stable for 14.3% of the participants and very stable for 7.1%); permanent public government funding (stable for 21.4% of the sample and very stable for 14.3% of them); voluntary author contributions (very stable for 7.7%) and content and print sales (stable for 7.7% of the respondents). These were the only categories in which the participants indicated stability in funding sources. The Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), the country's public science funding agency, was the most indicated name of an external funder.

The arguments related to challenges for the financial sustainability of the services included a lack of responsiveness from the parent organisation regarding the expansion of human resources, an excessive reliance on editors due to the independent nature of one of the IPSPs, a dependence on the national funding agency, and the evaluation of the research centre (parent organisation). In general, the survey participants are not expected to produce a profit or surplus in their organisations.

The majority of the sample reported following a national policy for open science/open access for journals (61.5%). 23.1% of the respondents follow the parent organisation policy, and 46.2% have their own policy. The reality for books is less developed than for journals, but still, 50% of the respondents said they follow a national policy for books, while 33.3% reported having their own policy.

75% of the respondents affirm publishing the totality of their journals in open access and a vast majority of IPSPs (93.8%) confirmed their implementation of open licences for all of their journals. 87.5% of IPSPs allow for self-archiving by authors.

The majority of the participants have not yet enabled open peer review practices and the recognition for contributor roles is still at an initial level.

Considerations of equity, diversity and inclusion dimensions are not yet common among Portuguese IPSPs. Only one participant has implemented them, and another one is considering them. All of the questions on these topics received fragmented answers, with no majority of respondents having implemented specific practices of diversity, inclusion and equity in a range of areas such as language, gender, ethnicity, culture, professional background, age, caring responsibilities, religious background, sexual identity, disability, among other topics.

210 journals from Serbia are indexed in DOAJ, four with the DOAJ seal, 147 that let the authors retain all rights; 182 are diamond OA journals. According to GOA8, Serbia has 185 institutional publishers in DOAJ, 170 of which publish diamond journals.

The main actors in scholarly publishing in Serbia are scholarly institutions, learned societies and small non-for-profit organisations established and managed by scholars. The scholarly publishing landscape is marked by the prevalence of OA and free-to-read journals (the number of local subscription-based journals has always been insignificant). It is estimated that more than 400 scholarly journals are published in Serbia, which is a fairly large number compared to the size of the research community (17,512 researchers, according to the official statistics (2023)).

About two-thirds of journals have explicit OA policies and the vast majority do not charge publication fees. Public subsidies for publishing are provided by the Ministry of Science, Technological Development and Innovation: for journals, monographs and conferences, through annual calls, but applicants are not required to make the subsidised outputs open access. Although Serbia has a national open science policy since 2018, there are no policy incentives for diamond OA publishing. So far, the national library consortium (KoBSON) and EIFL have played a major role in diamond OA advocacy and training for local OA publishers.

No definitive lists of scholarly journals, monographs and conferences are publicly available on the national level, nor are there any nation-wide aggregators or publishing platforms. Until 2014, the Serbian Citation Index (SCIndeks), developed by the non- profit organisation Centre for Evaluation in Education and Science (CEON/CEES), operated as a national aggregator and publishing platform for journals, but it changed its role and business model when the support by the ministry responsible for science was discontinued.

Major service providers in scholarly publishing include: CEON/CEES (service SCIndeks; more than 100 journals), National Library of Serbia (service doiSerbia, supported by the Ministry of Science, Technological Development and Innovation; 51-100 journals), University of Belgrade - Faculty of Philology (service doiFil) and the University Library of Kragujevac (DOI UBKG). While CEON/CEES offers a wide range of services, supporting both content display and editorial workflows, the other three providers act as DOI agencies providing landing pages for articles.

The only nation-wide study addressing open access journals in Serbia was published in 2017 (Ševkušić, Janković et al., 2017).

The DIAMAS survey, which targeted 280 Institutional Publishing Service Providers (IPSPs) in Serbia, received 79 responses. Survey invitations were sent via Qualtrics and were followed by repeated individual email invitations to institutions and an invitation posted on the website of the national library consortium. Three survey-a-thons were organised to help publishers respond to the survey. Two entities responded twice - as a journal and as a publisher.

According to the survey data, 73 (92.4%) respondents represent IPs, whereas 6 (7.6%) self-identify as SPs. One response is obviously incorrect. It is noteworthy that three- quarters of major local SPs responded to the survey. A higher response rate was expected among standalone journal publishers, and it would have been higher if the invitation had been directed to editorial boards, but this was not done to avoid duplicate responses. Despite this, the sample offers a good insight into the local OA publishing landscape.

The majority of respondents come from public organisations (73.4%according to the survey data, 69.6% after eliminating incorrect responses). The majority (32; 40.5%) of the individuals who responded to the survey are part of the editorial staff, but the number of librarians (16; 20.3%) is also significant.

Nearly 40% of the surveyed IPSPs (30) do not have any paid staff responsible for publishing activities. As expected, the majority of them (28) are IPs. A significant number of IPSPs (27; 34.6%) have 2-5 paid staff members involved in publishing.

All respondents mentioned English as one of the publication languages used and this has to do with the national guidelines for scholarly journals defined by the ministry responsible for science, according to which journals must provide at least abstract- level metadata in English. For 43 (54.4%) IPSPs, Serbian is the primary language, while in 27 (34.2%) it is English. There are nine (11.4%) IPSPs that publish in English only. Nearly half of the IPSPs use Serbian and English. Other common languages include French, Russian, Croatian, Bosnian and German. The survey does not reveal the long tail of languages used, as it looked only into the five main languages, nor does it reveal the tendency in local scholarly journals to fully switch to publishing in English, observed in previous research. (Ševkušić et al., 2017; Ševkušić, Kosanović et al., 2020).

The survey data about membership in international organisations are inaccurate. Although 18 respondents claimed membership in a ‘national publisher/scholarly communication association’, this information cannot be confirmed based on available data. According to the official membership information, there is only one OASPA member from Serbia (two claimed membership in the survey), three COPE members (five in the survey), no EASE members (one in the survey), and there is only one signatory of DORA.

IPSPs in Serbia mostly publish journals, book and conference outputs. The survey data are not fully reliable due to several incorrect responses. Most IPSPs publish one (34; 43%) or 2-5 journals (47; 46.8%). SPs are evenly spread across size categories, with the largest one publishing more than 100 journals. Nearly 80% of IPSPs publish 11-100 articles and 1-10 books per year, while more than 70% publish 1-20 conference outputs. Three service providers publish journals only.

The majority of IPSPs (56; 70.9%) use external services. While editorial services, communication and administrative, legal and financial services are often provided in kind or on a voluntary basis, production and IT services are more commonly outsourced, and IPSPs are the most likely (28; 35.9% and 30; 38.5%, respectively) to consider collaboration with other organisations in order to obtain these services. Editorial services (23; 29.5%) are another area where collaboration is welcome. The most commonly used external services include DOI assignment (by the national Library of Serbia and CEON/CEES), hosting (by the national academic network AMRES or through commercial providers), the provision of journal management platforms (e.g. CEON/CEES Aseestant), as well as copyediting, translation and prepress services.

The full scope of the in-kind support provided by the parent organisation is difficult to assess, as less than one-third of the respondents provided information, but it usually includes facilities, IT services and human resources management.

Nearly 60% of IPSPs (46) have an approved annual budget. However, less than half of them shared the information about its approximate amount. Most IPSPs have a budget of 1-10K EUR (21; 26.6% of the total sample) and less than 1K EUR (7; 8.9% of the total sample). There are no IPSPs with a budget higher than 50K EUR and the 11-50K EUR group includes three IPs and one SP. In most IPSPs (61; 77.2%) the income and expenses are monitored and formally administered. IPSPs are usually not expected to create a profit.

Dominant funding types include subsidies, permanent government funding and grants, which tend to be stable for nearly 50% of the respondents, while collective funding and author contributions are not common forms of funding. Apart from the Ministry of Science, Technological Development and Innovation and some research institutions and local public authorities, few other funders are mentioned and they include Horizon and ERASMUS+ programmes and several private companies.

Major challenges to sustainability are related to public funding: the risk of discontinued support, as subsidies are provided through annual calls; excessive dependence on public subsidies; and insufficient funding. Several IPSPs also mentioned unstable submission rates and difficulties in providing volunteer support, while the major SP highlighted the influence of the big international databases and service providers, who act as competition.

Most IPSPs have internal documents such as statutes or by-laws (66; 85.7%) and policies (35; 52.2%). Governance models predominantly rely on governing boards and the IPSPs that include representation from the wider scholarly community account for nearly 40%.

While journals are mostly fully OA, a significant share of academic books are not OA. Conference outputs are more likely to be OA than books. As for journals, most publishers follow either the national OA policy or the parent institution’s policy, or they have their own policy (most respondents provided links to journal policies; more than 300 journals in Serbia have OA policies). Although the national and institutional policies mandate OA to publicly funded books and conference outputs, it is impossible to assess their effectiveness, all the more since the survey data relating to the openness of these outputs are unreliable.

More than 80% of IPSPs allow self-archiving in open repositories and sharing on social networks. The majority use Creative Commons licences (59; 77.6%) for all journals, but less than 20% (14; 18.4%) use licences for books. CC BY and CC BY-NC-ND are the most common licences (29; 47.5% and 20; 32.8%, respectively). However, the share of those who have data policies, accept submissions previously published as preprints, and would consider introducing open peer review is still small and it ranges between 20% and 30%. The compliance with I4OC for journal outputs (more than 60% of IPSPs) is ensured thanks to two service providers (National Library of Serbia and CEON/CEES). Although some IPSPs claim that they follow the I4OC principle for books, it is unlikely that any of them can ensure this. A small number of IPSPs use the CRediT taxonomy (10; 12.8%) and many are not even familiar with the concept (24; 30.8%).

About 80% of IPSPs are involved in the editorial management of journals, especially in recruiting editorial board members (nearly 90%) and reviewers (more than 60%), coordinating peer review, basic checks on the adherence with the scope of the journal and compliance with author and reviewer guidelines (around 50%). This corresponds to their involvement in managing editorial quality (nearly 70%) and creating guidelines (85%).

Double-anonymous peer review prevails (44; 77.8%), and this has to do with the fact that until recently this peer review model was required by the national guidelines for scholarly journals. Single-anonymous peer review accounts for less than 20%. The information about open peer review and editorial review is probably not reliable. In all scholarly books, reviewers' identities are open, but this is not reflected in the survey data.

Most IPSPs (60; 76.9%) have research integrity or publication ethics policies.

IPSPs usually provide the full editorial workflow (51; 65.4%) and hosting (30; 38.5%) and take care of metadata and quality control (39; 50%). Most IPSPs provide multiple services. Services are mainly maintained in-house by an IT department (28; 41.8%) or a dedicated publishing department (22; 32.8%). However, a significant number of respondents outsource services fully (6; 9%) or partially (21; 31.3%). The technical infrastructure is also prevailingly maintained in-house by IT departments (29; 45.3%), publishing departments (22; 32.8%), or other departments (9; 14.1%), though more than one-third of the respondents outsource infrastructure fully or partially. Half of the respondents use OJS as the publishing platform.

The survey data do not reveal the real scale of the usage and the role of locally developed or customised publishing platforms, such as OJS-based SCIndeks Aseestant (six IPs and one major SP), doiSerbia. Previous research (Ševkušić et al., 2017) shows that many journals use multiple platforms, which makes the analysis even more difficult. The survey data on the implementation of PIDs do not reveal the full PID usage landscape. The usage of ISBN, ISSN and DOI (in journals only) is mandatory for the recognition of publications in the national research evaluation system, and the survey data on ISBN and ISSN seem to understate the actual usage of these identifiers. The most commonly used PID is CrossRef DOI (53; 81.5%), but other DOIs are also used (nearly 20%).

Although the survey data suggest that some IPSPs share the metadata under CC licences, in reality few of them have a metadata policy.

All IPSPs provide content in the PDF format. Nearly 30% of the respondents provide content as HTML, while the share of those providing full text in XML is still very small (6; 7.7%).

Less than half of the respondents have a backup policy in place. The published content is preserved by the National Library of Serbia (nearly 90%). A small number of IPSPs use services like LOCKSS or CLOCKSS. Financial constraints primarily affect infrastructure and services, while the lack of human resources is a major challenge for the missing or low quality metadata and PIDs and the lack of interoperability with other services.

More than half of the respondents would like to have better coverage in search indexes and databases but only some of them mention specific services (mostly the Web of Science and Scopus). IPSPs are actively involved in indexation management (53; 74.6%). Meeting the metadata requirements and technical and non-technical criteria are perceived as major challenges in applying for indexation.

Nearly 40% of IPSPs do not have a newsletter, social media or networking profile. The survey data about data protection and privacy policies should be taken with reserve. There is a national law on privacy and data protection and it is possible that some IPSPs refer to the law and others to institutional policies.

Less than half (35; 44.9%) of the respondents display metrics. The prevalent metrics are the data about submissions, acceptance and publication dates (this is required by the national guidelines for scholarly journals and the survey figures seem to understate the presence of this information). Article/publication level usage metrics such as visits, views, downloads, and publication-level impact metrics, such as Journal Impact Factor are also used.

The share of IPSPs that address various dimensions of EDIB ranges between 40% and 50%, depending on the dimension. Less than half IPSPs have a code of conduct/non- discrimination/positive discrimination policy and the share of those who are implementing measures to ensure and promote equity diversity inclusion and belonging ranges between 15% and 30%. The high share of the ‘not applicable’ and ‘don't know’ answers (15-50%) might suggest that some IPSP are not familiar with these concepts.

Less than 20% of IPSP claim to have an accessibility policy. None of the accessibility standards are implemented by local IPSPs and they are largely unfamiliar with these standards. The lack of expertise is either a very important or important challenge in this area for about 65% of the respondents.

Eight responses received. Slovenia has 73 journals in DOAJ, two with the DOAJ seal, 54 that let the authors retain all rights, 69 are diamond journals. Slovenia has 34 institutional publishers in DOAJ (via GOA8), 31 of which publish diamond journals.

Spain has 53 public universities and 36 private ones, according to the Universities, Centers, and Degrees Statistics (EUCT) published by the Ministry of Universities in 2022. Their publishing departments provide the bulk of scholarly communication in the country, in a compact and well-structured sector.

Institutional publishers and scientific journal publication services are strongly represented in the Spanish University Publishers Union (Unión de Editoriales Universitarias Españolas or UNE), which, with 72 registered members, aims at coordinating editorial efforts among its members, facilitate co-editions of university publications across institutions, and promote the dissemination and promotion of the editorial assets of its members.

In addition to universities, some research institutions, like the Spanish National Research Council (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas or CSIC), also play a significant role. The Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) is the largest research institution in Spain, with more than 4,000 researchers.

There appears to be no clear link between the number of journals and the quantity of papers published by Spanish IPs. According to the data extracted from the survey, there are universities with a number of journals ranging between 51 to 100 for a total of more than 500 papers, and other institutions editing no more than 20 journals with the same number of published papers.

Most survey respondents consider themselves IPs, while only four position their work within editorial services (SPs).

The survey was distributed to the complete FECYT journal database (approximately 1,700 journals) and the UNE database (72 members). All emails sent informed the target audience of the survey: Institutional Publishers and Service Providers (IPSPs). The importance of reaching editors was communicated, so that journals could forward the survey to the editorial representatives of the supporting institution.

A detailed analysis of the entities that publish journals contained in the FECYT database indicates that a total of 124 publishing entities, including universities, research centres, and professional associations, publish most of the identified journals.

The survey was sent to 1,772 email addresses (1,700 FECYT journals plus the 72 UNE associates), reaching a total of 124 IPSPs.

Only four of the 74 (5.4%) respondents consider themselves SPs, while the remaining 71 (95.4%) define themselves as IPs. Most of the 74 IPSPs who responded to the survey claim to be involved in editing and/or providing services in a multidisciplinary environment. Among them, 19 (25.6%) are editors in the specific disciplines of Social Sciences and/or Humanities, and 7 (9.4%) are editors in Natural Sciences and/or Engineering.

18 (24.3%) IPSPs were not affiliated with any parent organisation, while 9 (12%) stated that they do not have access to this information. The remaining 48 (64.8%) rely on a parent organisation for support, which may encompass facilities and premises, human resource management, general financial and legal services, general IT facilities, and salaries of permanent staff.

Out of the total survey participants, one works with texts in English, and three publish exclusively in Spanish (Castilian). The remaining 70 respondents confirm that they work with publications in Spanish and at least one other language. These additional languages include both regional languages within Spain (Galician, Basque, and/or Catalan) and international languages such as French, English, German, Italian, Portuguese, or Russian. English is the second most used language after Spanish. It is noteworthy that almost all journals that have versions in both Spanish and Catalan also provide their services in English. Many of the journals published in Spanish and Catalan also offer versions in Galician, while no more than five (6.7%) are additionally published in Basque, alongside other national languages.

Multilingualism thus seems to be a well-established practice in open access scientific journal publishing in Spain.

When discussing membership associations, 28 (37.8%) IPSPs stated that they do not belong to any association or coalition, 13 (17.5%) were unsure about their association membership, and 24 (32.4%) claimed to be part of an international organisation. Among the 32.4% who reported being part of an international association, there is no single one standing out significantly. The most mentioned are OASPA, OPA Europe, the Federation of European Publishers (FEP), CoAra, DORA, and EASE.

69 out of the 74 respondents (92%) focus on publishing academic journals, with some also involved in book publishing and texts or other content resulting from conferences and professional meetings. Fewer IPSPs reported other publishing products such as research-derived items, datasets, digital scholarship, or software. A limited number of respondents mentioned publishing materials directed toward the media, in addition to digital outputs and non-academic content. Only seven (9.4%) respondents claimed to publish some form of non-academic content.

Most IPSPs indicated that they cover various fields of knowledge, making them multidisciplinary. Only five (6.7%) respondents specified that their publishing scope is limited to a single discipline: humanities, social sciences, or natural sciences. Most academic journal publishers in Spain, 58 out of 74 respondents (78.3%), start the fiscal year with an allocated annual budget. They confirm that both their revenues and expenses are monitored, as it is mandatory.

When detailing the activities carried out by external maintenance (75.6% make use of them, while 18.9% handle all editorial work in-house), IPSPs mention editorial and production services, IT and/or communication support, administrative, legal, and financial services, training, and/or advice on publishing policies and best practices. There is a wide range of contracted assistance, and the percentages do not provide a clear overall picture of which activities are generally outsourced. It is noteworthy that the term ‘volunteer’ appears repeatedly, and that the idea of collaborating with other organisations is sometimes considered, with no unanimity.

External funding often comes from national or local political entities. Mentioned funders include the Government of Spain or specific ministries like the Ministry of Culture, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, or the Ministry of Innovation and Universities. Additionally, financial support from initiatives such as María de Guzmán, managed by FECYT, as well as municipalities, provinces, and/or autonomous communities where IPSPs operate, are mentioned. In a couple of cases, other management entities, both public and private, like CEDRO or the University-Company Foundation, are cited. Only seven (9.4%) of the respondents confirm that they expect to generate profits or surpluses, stating that they plan "to invest in our own operation or create a financial buffer".

The majority of the 74 entities that responded to the survey do have a document describing their governance: 75.6%, a total of 56 IPSPs, answered this question affirmatively, confirming that they have some form of statutes or association regulations (internal rules). Meanwhile, 10 (13.5%) of them stated that they have no governance model, and five (6.7%) were unsure of how to respond.

Out of the 74 surveys received, 62 (91.8%) indicate that 100% of their academic/scholarly journals are published in OA, while the level of OA publishing in other products - academic books, conference proceedings, grey literature, non- standard research outputs, datasets, digital studies, software… - has much lower percentages, sometimes as low as 1%.

The publication of scientific journals in OA appears to be a widespread and common practice among Spanish IPSPs. Many of these publications can be considered diamond OA.

Institutional publishers mostly have OA policies. Only nine (12.1%) out of the 74 participants stated that they do not follow any open science/open access policy. Among the 65 (87.8%) IPSPs that do have OA policies, there is a similar share in terms of whether the policy they follow aligns with a national policy, their parent organisation's policy, or their own policy.

In Spain, 58 out of 74 respondents (78.3%) claim to be involved in the editorial management of their publications, either through hiring, management, coordinating the peer review process, or through checks on compliance with guidelines, ethical consent, or plagiarism control. Most editors appear to be involved in editorial quality management through some form of guidance or instructions to maintain quality. Regarding peer review, and considering the total responses, there is some diversity. The majority (27/74, 36.4%) conduct only a double-blind peer review, although there are also editors who add an editorial review to it. Single-blind peer review, confirmed by a total of 10 (13.5%) respondents, is the second most used modality.

In response to the question of whether they have a specific research integrity policy for publication, the majority (53/74, 71.6%) answer affirmatively, while nine (12.1%) state that they do not have any such policy, and another nine are unaware.

When discussing technical support, only two (2.7%) IPSPs that participated in the survey state that they offer a full editorial workflow. The other 72 (97.2%) offer, in addition to a full editorial workflow, a range of other services such as hosting, software, metadata, quality control, or user interface. Both the services and the technical infrastructure of the IPSPs, according to their responses, are managed internally: through an in-house department with technical staff, through the editorial department itself, or across different departments. In contrast, external contracting for both functions, whether partial (28, 37.8%), primary (10, 13.5%), or total (6, 8.1%), is less common.

Only four (5.4%) participants claim to use customization software or own development, but just three of them (4%) specify the type of development they work with. When it comes to a proprietary system and OJS, the number rises to five (6.7%), while only one (1.3%) says that they use other open-source software without specifying which one, and another one mentions using WordPress.

The majority of IPSPs that responded to the survey (62/74, 83.7%), say they use OJS, either exclusively or in combination with other systems such as Drupal, Janeway, Dataverse, WordPress, etc.

Regarding identifiers, 59 out of the 74 respondents (79.9%) state that they use them, either for publications, for all journals, or for some journals, while four (5.4%) say they do not use any identifiers. The main identifiers they refer to are CrossRef DOI, ISSN, ISBN, Datacite DOI, Handle, URK, and URN.

Almost all respondents (only seven, 9.4%, claim not to use a licence) state that they use a CC BY licence or CC BY along with some other Creative Commons licence, while four (5.4%) publish their content under CC0.

The 74 IPSPs that responded to the survey publish their content in PDF, either exclusively or in combination with other formats such as HTML, XML, JSON, ePub. The archiving policy leaves no room for doubt, except for six (8.1%), the rest claim to have some archiving policy. PKP PN is the most used: 16 (21.6%) of the total. Financial problems, administrative constraints, and a lack of personnel are, according to the responses, the main challenges facing Spanish IPSPs.

Most of the respondents confirm being responsible for the management (inclusion) of their products in scientific information databases. Many claim to be satisfied with the level of inclusion of content in academic indexes and search engines, mentioning Scopus, Clarivate, Scimago, or Google Scholar as their preferences for improving the indexing of their editorial outputs.

Regarding communication, eight out of the 74 IPSPs who responded to the survey (10.8%) claim to have an informative newsletter, and two (2.7%) cannot confirm it. Regarding data protection policy, only one of the participants indicated that they do not have one, and two (2.7%) cannot confirm it. All those with a privacy policy adhere to the guidelines of the GDPR of the European Union.

When it comes to metrics, 17 (22.9%) confirm that they do not offer any type of measurement publicly, and two (2.7%) have no information. Of those who do offer metrics or public measurements, the majority focus on submission, acceptance, and publication dates, as well as usage metrics (both for papers and publications in general) related to visits, page views, and downloads. Impact metrics, rejection rates, and alternative metrics (such as Altmetric, PlumX Metrics) are barely mentioned in the survey, as are samples of geographic distribution.

Among the dimensions offered in terms of EDIB, IPSPs prioritise language and gender equity. In these two aspects, around 30-40% of the respondents consider that they have implemented some measures, or that these are in progress and/or under consideration. Other elements, such as sexual identity, ethnicity, culture, socioeconomic background, educational and professional backgrounds, caregiving responsibilities, or disability, do not generate as much interest among the editors. These elements are not considered a problem in Spain.

Most respondents use ‘don't know/no answer’, or ‘not applicable’ to talk about these aspects, although there are IPSPs (few) that openly acknowledge not having planned any policies in this regard.

There is a significant group of IPSPs, 32 (43.2%), that have implemented accessibility measures, although they do not highlight specific requirements such as ATAG, WCAG, UAAG, OpenAIRE guidelines, or DINI certification. Some mention compliance with the Royal Decree 1112/2018 of September 7, 2018, on the accessibility of websites and mobile applications in the public sector.

Even though the DIAMAS survey was answered by only a few IPSPs in Austria, conditions for OA and institutional publishing are currently extremely favourable, and Open Access/Open Science has been receiving a great level of attention and support for some time now. In 2012, the Open Access Network Austria (OANA) was founded as a central information source and contact point for OA, and recommendations were already formulated in 2015 on how to shift all scientific publishing in Austria to OA by 2025.

In addition, Austria has had an Open Science Policy since February 2022 and with Open Science Austria, a platform from the Austrian University Conference that advances the topic of Open Science with an interdisciplinary perspective. Looking at the key numbers determined by DIAMAS for all participating European countries with regard to publishing in Open Access and diamond Open Access, the already well advanced transformation is approved, even if the complete conversion to Open Access has not yet been completed. The DOAJ lists 59 journals for Austria, six of which have the DOAJ seal. 46 of the 59 journals let the authors retain all rights, already 50 of the 59 are diamond journals. A total of 37 IPs are listed in the DOAJ for Austria, of which 31 publish diamond OA journals. Besides these numbers four institutions from Austria are members of the Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Universitätsverlage (AG Universitätsverlage) as the central network for German-language university presses.

Five IPSPs, all public organisations, participated in the DIAMAS survey, which publish mainly (4/5) in German and English, besides which one IPSP also publishes in French, Greek and Italian. Four of the five identify themselves as IPs, the other as an SP. Four of the five have a parent organisation of which two are providing their services only to the parent organisation, which might be influenced by the small size of the IPSPs (four out of five have fewer than two employees). Two IPSPs support external publishing and one participant did not answer the question. The services provided include IT support (4) and/or Editorial (3) and Production (2) support. Perhaps also due to their small size, the participating IPSPs are members of only a very small number of the 13 queried international coalitions and initiatives on Open Access.

The publications made available from the IPSPs are mainly academic journals (2) and academic books (3). Regarding the publication outcome for 2022, three out of five publish between 21-50 journals, two only publish a single academic journal. One out of five publishes academic books, one 11-20, and one 51-100.

Almost all the participants are active in the humanities (4) and/or social sciences (3), sometimes in combination with a multidisciplinary approach (4).

Belgium has some 12 universities, four each in Flanders, Wallonia and the Brussels region. Many universities have university colleges or so-called ‘Hogescholen’ attached to them. While the universities have a strong research focus, the university colleges are more teaching oriented. In addition to the higher education sector, there are also a few dozen technology institutes. There are two academies of arts and sciences (ARB and KVAB), promoting arts and sciences. FWO (Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek - Vlaanderen or Research Foundation - Flanders) is the main funding organisation for the Flemish community, and F.R.S.–FNRS (Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique – FNRS) for the French community. BELSPO is an organisation that prepares, implements and evaluates federal science policy on behalf of the Government. The Universities of Liège and Leuven/Louvain have university presses. The Flemish Royal Academy KVAB publishes scholarly publication series through a commercial publisher.

Both FWO and FRS have open access mandates, requiring green OA but providing some financial support for financing gold OA through grant budgets (for FRS, only for full OA journals and with a maximum of 750 EUR, for FWO no limitations are specified). Since 2018 there is a federal law for secondary publishing rights. It gives authors the right (with retroactive effect) to make the results of their research freely available for social and human sciences after a period of twelve months and for other sciences after a period of six months, in the form of the author accepted manuscript, if at least half of this was funded with public funds. As yet there is very limited uptake of transformative agreements. In Flanders there is the Flemish Open Science Board (2019) that invests 5M EUR in Open Science (mainly RDM), and Open Science KPIs have been agreed upon, one of which strives for an 80% Open Access rate for journal articles resulting from Flemish public funding.

DIAMAS research found that Belgium has 53 journals in DOAJ, two with the DOAJ seal, 41 that let the authors retain all rights. Almost all (50/53) journals in DOAJ are diamond journals. Belgium has 22 institutional publishers in DOAJ (according to GOA8), 22 of which publish diamond journals.

The DIAMAS survey received eight valid responses from Belgium, five of which self- identify as IPs and three as SPs. The number of responses mean that the data should be treated with caution but do give evidence of practices and opinion in a part of the Belgian institutional publishing sector.

Respondents in the survey indicated they use either English, French or Dutch as primary language, with the majority publishing in all three languages, and some also in German, Spanish and/or Italian. Two IPSP publish in French but not Dutch, and one only in Dutch.

Membership of organisations and signing of charters is very low, with just a couple being members of publisher organisations (including OASPA) or signing DORA. Two organisations/initiatives with slightly higher uptake are AEUP and CoARA , which each have three out of eight IPSPs as members or signatories.

More than half of the IPSPs are part of a parent organisation, with three operating independently but owned or governed by the parent organisation, and two being part of a library. Most have at least some paid staff, with half of the respondents employing more than five FTE.

Most Belgian IPSPs in the survey focus on a subset of publishing activities, with a clear difference between IPs and SPs: the latter focus more on IT, communication, and training/support/advice and the former on average more on editorial functions and production. Regarding portfolios: seven IPSPs say they publish and/or service journals, four say they publish and/or service books, with a further five involved in conference output and four (not necessarily the same) working on grey literature, non-academic outputs or other output formats. In terms of the size of journal portfolios, most IPSPs in the Belgian subset of the survey results are quite small, with five or fewer journals, with two publishers having 21-50 journals. The four IPSPs that are engaged in (supporting) book publishing publish less than 50 books a year, with half of them publishing 10 books or less.

Unsurprisingly, in terms of disciplines, the majority of IPSPs are active in humanities, social sciences and multidisciplinary publishing, with for instance only two out of eight active in the natural sciences.

Five out of eight IPSPs (both IPs and SPs) indicated to use a range of external services, most often via in-kind contributions.

Most types of funding are viewed as not applicable for half or more of the responding IPSPs. Subsidies from the parent organisations are the funding sources that IPSPs most often report being somewhat or highly dependent on. Overall though, the funding picture is scattered with all sources used, but no clear pattern or reliance on a specific type. The different sources of funding are perceived as stable for most IPSPs. Of the five IPSPs that also rely on non-monetary/in kind support, all but one indicate that reliance is high to very high, regardless of whether they see that as problematic or not.

Five organisations (including one SP) state that they would consider collaboration with other organisations: most often on IT services, communication, and training and support.

Regarding the formal description of activities, five IPSPs say they have formal statutes or by-laws, but only one says there is external legislation or policy requiring that. All but one organisation state they have OA policies for journal publishing: they either follow a national policy, and may also have a policy of their own or in their parent organisation.

Even though seven out of the eight respondents are involved in journal publishing, four say that preprints are not applicable to them. The others accept preprinted submissions for some or all of their journals. Very few IPSPs impose embargoes. Three organisations provide open metadata and two do not. Almost all work with Creative Commons licences for journals and one also for books, the majority offering CC BY, and sometimes also CC BY-NC or CC BY-SA. One IP only offers CC BY-SA licences. Open peer review is not currently offered, but one respondent is considering it. CRediT contributor roles are apparently not known or not considered, as no IPSP is using these. Over half of respondents are involved in editorial management, performing all or most of the tasks involved in that. Double blind peer review is by far the most common practice, with a minority also offering single-blind peer review.

All but one of the Belgian IPSPs responding provide at least one type of technical service, with hosting and full editorial workflow being the most common one, closely followed by metadata and quality control and user interfaces. Publishing systems used are mixed, with OJS used by four respondents. Dataverse, Editorial Manager, Janeway and Lodel are also mentioned. PDF is the most popular format for publications by far, with about half also using HTML. The majority of IPSPs do have an archiving policy, with most using national or institutional library infrastructure.

It appears that in general, and for most types of activities, at least some IPSPs face challenges. These are mostly varied though, with IPSPs indicating at the same time different types of constraints and different challenges. Some challenges do jump out. For instance, there are often financial and human resource constraints to providing adequate infrastructure and services. Indexing seems to be a relatively minor issue among respondents, with four out of six IPSPs saying their content is already well indexed - the other looking to be indexed in DOAJ and databases like Scopus, respectively. Challenges in indexing are varied, with more than one IPSP mentioning an issue with communications/requirements/paperwork being only in English.

Most IPSPs have a privacy policy and a data protection policy. Regarding EDIB issues, most IPSPs are not (yet) planning measures or policies, or consider these not applicable. All but one have their services available in English, as well as either in Dutch (2) or French (2) or both (3). Only two IPSPs provide their services only in Dutch or French, respectively. Quite a few do publish texts in multiple languages.

France has a longstanding tradition of supporting institutional and diamond publishing, a practice outlined in the position paper titled "Le modèle d’accès ouvert Diamant: Politiques et stratégies des acteurs français." Infrastructures play a pivotal role in bolstering the diamond model, with its origins tracing back to 1999 when four learned society journals collaborated to pool resources for hosting and disseminating their content online. The grassroots platform, initially known as Revues.org, steadily expanded over the years and sought sustainability through institutional support. Later, it transformed into OpenEdition, becoming a national research infrastructure. This transformation allowed the hosting and dissemination of 521 diamond journals and 10,000 books on OpenEdition platforms, recently complemented by other platforms (e.g. Réseau Repères for new diamond Open Access journals (85 journals), Centre Mersenne for 24 journals in mathematics, Episciences for 27 overlay journals). In addition, France boasts 38 university presses and more than 60 other publishing departments within research institutions, publishing a total of 279 journals with various business models, according to the recent Dandurand report. Today, France has 311 journals in DOAJ, 40 with the DOAJ seal, 133 let the authors retain all rights, 279 are diamond journals. France has 163 institutional publishers in DOAJ (via GOA8), 160 of which publish diamond journals.

Since the adoption of the first National Plan for Open Science by the French Ministry of Research in 2018, most universities and research institutions have adopted institutional policies. These policies encompass not only the green route of open access but also their publishing activities through their presses and other publishing units. This robust support for institutional open access and diamond publishing extends to both journals and books. As a result, a specific national landscape has emerged, underpinned by a strong national policy. This is reflected locally through institutional open science charters and implemented by institutional presses, as well as a blend of institutional and national infrastructures.

In the domain of social sciences and humanities (SSH), which plays a pivotal role in this model, the SSH institute of CNRS (INSHS) has shifted its general funding policy in support of all SSH journals, towards progressively more OA journals, a part of which fall under the diamond model, whether they are published by public or private publishers. Given the national prominence of CNRS, this shift is a critical factor providing structural support to the diamond model in France.

However, as far as policies are concerned, support for institutional publishing and the diamond model has emerged more recently and faces certain limitations due to the specific national context, resulting in what could be referred to as the ‘French paradox.’ On the one hand, supporting diamond is an explicit objective of the Second Open Science National Plan,, and several important regional and national institutions, such as CNRS, have adopted firm policies in favour of the diamond model, naturally subscribing to the Action Plan for Diamond Open Access (The French research funding agency, ANR, is one of the four organisations that co-authored the Action Plan). On the other hand, the involvement of public institutions in publishing is restricted and closely monitored at the governmental level to prevent ‘unfair competition’ with the commercial sector and safeguard the interests of private publishers. This situation inadvertently imposes strong constraints and paradoxical directives on IPSPs, hampering the potential development of the diamond model in France.

In France, the diamond model is widely perceived as having a strong connection with the promotion of cultural diversity and bibliodiversity. This perspective is outlined in the Jussieu call for Open Science and Bibliodiversity, which has been endorsed by numerous French institutions and integrated into their open science charters. This connection is particularly significant due to the emphasis on SSH in diamond OA, where publications in the national language have a particular position. It is also influenced by the historical significance of the French language as a dominant language for scientific publications before it was overtaken by English in many disciplines.

The survey received 60 responses from French IPSPs, making France the fourth most significant contributor in terms of the number of respondents. The responses from French IPSPs closely reflect the situation described above, especially the deep integration of diamond publishing in the public institutional landscape. In particular, 71% of French IPSPs declared being part of a parent institution, compared to 56% for all respondents. Almost half of the respondents in the French IPSP panel represent the publication services or presses of traditional universities and research institutions, many of which are either part of institutions or operate independently while being governed by the institution. The types and sizes of IPSPs represented in the French sample are highly diverse, ranging from long-established institutions to brand new initiatives. They vary in size from isolated journals with fewer than one FTE staff to national infrastructures hosting over 600 journals and employing more than 50 FTEs. However, despite some exceptions, the medium size of French IPSPs is similar to that of other countries, with the majority relying on one to five FTEs.

Surprisingly, compared to other countries, French IPSPs offer a broader spectrum of services to their users. Specifically, 71.7% provide administrative, legal, and financial services, 70% offer communication services, 81.7% provide editorial services, 63.3% handle IT services, 91.7% are engaged in production, and 71.7% offer training, support, and advice. An impressive 85% of them report using external services, which possibly explains their ability to provide a wide range of services despite the relatively small size of their teams.

In terms of production size, it is noteworthy that the production of books is relatively low, with 54% of IPSPs reporting the publication of one to 10 books per year. In contrast, 35% of IPSPs state that they manage the production of 6 to 20 journals.

The strong integration of French IPSPs in the public sector results in several characteristic features confirmed by the survey. A sizable 81% of them have a formally administered budget, while 68% have an approved annual budget. Almost all of them benefit from in-kind support from their parent institution, particularly in terms of IT (95%), administrative and financial management (93%), and seconded personnel (83%). Therefore, they consider the resources they receive from their parent institutions to be more stable compared to other countries. For instance, 76% of them believe that the permanent subsidies provided by their parent institution have remained stable or very stable over the last three years.

Relative to other countries, the governance of French IPSPs is less formalised, with only 53% of them having a governing board, and merely 9% undergoing external audits of their accounts. This less formalised governance structure can be explained by their integration into the administrative framework of their parent institution. Many of them do not have a distinct legal existence and are fully merged into the institution's organisational chart, often as a ‘department’, a ‘service’, or a subsection of larger departments. On the other hand, the academic ethos of institutions implies that activities are continually monitored by the larger scientific community through involvement in scientific committees. This applies to a larger proportion of French IPSPs (60%) compared to other countries (38%).

The integration of French IPSPs into national policies via their parent institutions is striking. For journals, 70% of them report following a national policy, while 44% adhere to the policy of their parent institution. Given the network of relatively robust public infrastructures at their disposal, French IPSPs deliver content that is technically up-to- date. A sizable 60% of them use Lodel, a CMS software capable of managing SSP (Single Source Publishing). Furthermore, a larger proportion of them are able to deliver content in various formats, including Epub (32%), HTML (78%), and XML (35%). An impressive 87% of them use Crossref DOIs, which is 10 percentage points above the survey average. French IPSPs are also more actively involved in managing or monitoring the editorial quality of journals (98%) as compared to their counterparts in other countries (74%).

The engagement of French IPSPs in international and European professional networks and organisations, such as COPE, OASPA, AEUP, EASE, and others, is relatively limited. However, this trend is not unique to France and consistent with the situation in other countries. Notably, there is one critical area in which French IPSPs significantly lag behind their European counterparts: the realm of EDIB.

When it comes to EDIB policies, French IPSPs generally score significantly below the European average on various dimensions. For instance, only 12% of them have implemented a policy addressing issues related to ethnicity and culture, whereas the European average stands at 24%. Similarly, 17% have policies addressing gender bias compared to the European average of 32%. In the context of religious background, only 7% have established policies (compared to 21% in Europe), and for sexual identity, a mere 10% have policies (versus 22% in Europe), among other dimensions.

Moreover, when asked about their consideration or progress on these EDI topics, French IPSPs also exhibit significantly low scores. In fact, a considerable number of them view most EDIB dimensions as ‘not applicable" or do not consider them worthy of attention. The sole exception to this pattern is multilingualism, particularly in alignment with the earlier mentioned Jussieu call for bibliodiversity in open science.

Strikingly, 54% of French IPSPs report that they do not have a published accessibility policy, a situation that could potentially lead to legal issues in France, especially since 2019, when it became mandatory for public websites to adhere to accessibility standards. Their actual compliance with accessibility standards, including WCAG, ATAG, UAAG, is remarkably low. This is particularly concerning, given that French IPSPs will be legally required to achieve 75% compliance by December 2023 and full compliance by 2027.

Open Access and, in particular, diamond OA publishing are increasingly becoming the focus of politicians, research institutions and scientists in Germany. The Gold OA figures of the commercial publishers Springer and Wiley with DEAL contracts (since September 2023 also Elsevier) show a large penetration of Open Access generally. In the years 2020 to 2022 authors in Germany published more than 75,000 publications in the journals of DEAL publishers. However, the concept and the associated costs of DEAL contracts are not suitable for implementing a sustainable OA transformation. To counter the rising costs of commercial publishers for OA publications, funders such as the German Research Foundation (DFG), which most recently signed the Action Plan for Diamond Open Access, are therefore increasingly focusing on institutional publishing.

The German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the Standing Conference of the Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs of the Federal States (KMK) call in their joint guidelines for the federal and state governments for OA to become the standard for publicly funded research and explicitly support the strengthening of diamond OA.

In order to obtain a better overview of the complex OA and diamond OA publication landscape and its needs, there are various initiatives and surveys in Germany which, like DIAMAS, are dedicated to this topic. A current example in Germany is the comprehensive study ‘Mapping the German diamond open access journal landscape’ (Taubert, Sterzik et al., 2023), which addresses, amongst others, the problem of the sustainability of small and medium-sized diamond journals.

But what are the current numbers for diamond OA and institutional publishing found by DIAMAS research? According to the diamond OA List Germany (DOAG) (Bruns et al., 2022), there are 298 diamond OA journals in Germany. The DOAJ lists 370 OA journals in Germany, 90 of which have the DOAJ seal. 286 of the journals let the authors retain all rights and 236 are diamond OA journals. Furthermore, Germany has 98 institutional publishers (via GOA8) in DOAJ, 90 of which publish diamond journals. Regarding the software in use as of August 2023, there are 34 institutions in German-speaking countries that offer OJS hosting for local and regional researchers (https://ojs-de.net).

A tool that displays open access services at German universities and research institutions is the oa.atlas. Currently, it lists 396 institutions that have journal publication funds and 179 that have monograph publication funds.

The KOALA project (Konsortiale Open Access Lösungen aufbauen) approaches the cost issue from a different angle and has developed a consortial model in which participating institutions (university libraries) jointly fund OA journals and book series. The 30 university presses that are members of the non-profit AG Universitätsverlage, which is the central interest representation of numerous university presses in Germany, Austria and South Tyrol/Alto Adige, primarily publish scientific publications, monographs and journals, from their own institutions.

43 responses were received from German IPSPs, of which 34 (79.1%) identified themselves as IPs and nine (20.9%) as SPs. This composition almost completely matches the numbers from all survey respondents, of which 79.7% identified themselves as IPs and 20.3% as SPs, which is also a prerequisite for the comparability of the national numbers with the responses from all survey participants. The survey invitation was sent out via Qualtrics to previously identified IPSPs. In addition individual invitations were sent to thematically suitable mailing lists, as well as IPSP contacts personally known to project members, for example, the members of the AG Universitätsverlage.

Regarding the organisational form, participating German IPSPs are slightly more affiliated with a parent organisation compared to all survey respondents (67.4% compared to the survey total 56.2%). A clear difference to the total survey respondents is that institutional publishing in Germany is significantly more often linked to the library of the parent organisation (44.8% vs. 19.6% in the survey total). The organisational form of IPSPs as a department of the parent organisation, on the other hand, occurs significantly less frequently in Germany (3.4% compared to 24.8% ).

The most frequently published language in Germany is English (97.7%), which matches the international response numbers for publishing in English (95.7%) and confirms English as the still established academic lingua franca in Europe. Regarding the disciplines covered by the participating IPSPs the proportion for the natural sciences is in Germany around 10% higher compared to the international numbers (37.2% compared to 26.9% in the survey total). At the same time the figures for the humanities and the social sciences in Germany (44.2% and 48.8% respectively) are lower when compared to the full survey responses (54.2% and 55.2% respectively).

The engagement of German IPSPs in organisations and networks is rather low, which is consistent with the survey total. The only special feature of the German responses compared to the overall international figures is the higher number of members in the AEUP, the Association of European University Presses (12.5% compared to 6.1% for the survey total).

In terms of the services provided in comparison to the survey total, IPSPs in Germany offer more frequent IT support (81.4% compared to 69.3% in the survey total), production support (90.7% compared to 72.3% in the survey total) and training, support and/or advice (65.1% compared to 44.7% in the survey total) to users, while editorial services are somewhat less provided (69.8% compared to 79.4% in the survey total).

In the context of the services provided for different publication outputs and the roles assumed by the IPSPs, one further finding for the German IPSPs is that while the IPSPs in the full survey responses tend to only publish academic books or journals with a smaller number of IPSPs, which provide only services for both, a larger proportion of the German IPSPs publish and provide services at the same time (academic books: publish and service 48.1% compared to 28.9% in the survey total; academic journals: publish and service 43.9% compared to 27.6% in the survey total).

The financial situation and the feedback on challenges from German IPSPs is, on the whole, very similar to the full survey feedback. 47.5% of German IPSPs confirm a high or very high reliance on funding from their parent organisation. Contrary to the international feedback, even fewer IPSPs in Germany have an approved annual budget than the international survey participants (No approved annual budget GER 60.5% vs. 33.6% in the survey total).

Consideration of collaborative working with other IPSPs is similar for Germany and the full responses. However, differences emerge regarding the areas in which a collaboration would be considered. The German participants are especially interested in working together within production services (50% compared to 42,4% in the survey total), whereas the total of the IPSPs considers cooperation for communication services (37.5% compared to 23.8% from German IPSPs) and training, support and/or advice on publishing policies and best practice (44.9% vs. 26.2%) as particularly important.

The advanced transformation towards Open Access and Open Science is also reflected in the small number of IPSPs (both in Germany and the survey total) that do not follow a national, institutional or individual Open Access/Open Science policy for journals (7.7% in Germany and 4.1% for the survey total) or books (10.3% for Germany and 12% for the survey total).

For a small country such as Luxembourg, it is not possible to paint a realistic and reliable picture using the single response to the DIAMAS survey. That does not mean that there is no relevant institutional publishing and diamond OA activity in Luxembourg.

Luxembourg has one university (University of Luxembourg), it has the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology, the Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research, the Luxembourg Institute of Health, a National Research Fund and a National Library. The national library is the host institution for the national consortium in Luxembourg, for instance in negotiating a small number of national read and publish deals.

Luxemburg has two diamond journals in DOAJ, one of which is published by a research centre at the university of Luxembourg. That university has a preference for green OA using its repository Orbilux. However, one of the university's faculties also launched Melusania Press that tries to bridge traditional and innovative publishing, preferring diamond OA and using Manifold to power its publishing. Melusina has ongoing institutional support which does not make it necessary to levy APCs. It does generate some revenue selling print versions of the digital-born publications.

The organisation of higher education and research in the Netherlands is characterised by relative stability, high concentration, and a fairly level playing field. There are 14 universities and 36 universities of applied sciences. Both subsectors are well organised in respectively Universiteiten van Nederland (UNL) and the Vereniging Hogescholen.

The Netherlands also has a Royal Academy (KNAW) and a university library organisation (UKB). In terms of funding, status and research size and output, most universities are comparable. Research funding is either basic funding from universities themselves or grant based funding from national funding organisations (NWO and ZonMW) and EC funding programmes, as the main funders, next to private and charitable funders and commercial contract income.

Publishing by researchers at Dutch institutions is in most fields geared towards publishing in journals, mainly in English language journals, and conference proceedings. In some fields (notably humanities, parts of the social sciences, and for instance for policy studies), the Dutch language is still crucial and other publication types (books, reports) are used.

There has been a strong push for OA in the Netherlands since 2015, with a national target of 100% OA for scholarly journal articles, set by the government and agreed upon by all stakeholders. For open access of journal articles there was and is a preference for gold open access. This is supported by a strong investment in read and publish agreements, often negotiated and organised nationally for all universities. All universities have institutional repositories. For short scholarly works (articles, chapters) there is a legal possibility to share the full text after a reasonable amount of time. In 2022, 89% of articles were open access.

Traditionally there were few institutions with a full blown university press, but institutions and libraries specifically have become more active in OA publishing and in recent years more institutions have created OA publishing units. Six university presses (Delft, Radboud-Nijmegen, Groningen, Leiden, Maastricht, Tilburg) are loosely cooperating in the New University Presses working group.

DIAMAS research found that the Netherlands has 415 journals in DOAJ, 11 with the DOAJ seal, 98 let the authors retain all rights, 116 are diamond journals. The Netherlands has 34 institutional publishers in DOAJ (as reported in GOA8), 29 of which publish diamond journals.

The DIAMAS survey received 17 valid responses from the Netherlands, 11 of which self- identify as IPs and six as SPs. These are modest numbers, but they represent a fair share of institutional publishing activity.

Respondents in the DIAMAS survey indicated they publish in a range of languages, with the majority publishing in English and German, but also some working with for example German and French.

Membership of organisations and signing of charters is very low, with just a couple being members of publisher organisations or signing DORA. There are two exceptions: eight of the 17 IPSPs say they are OASPA members and six are members of a national publisher organisation. More than half of the IPSPS are part of a parent organisation, with five being part of a library in that organisation. In terms of legal status, about half are public organisations and about half again are private but not-for-profit. Most are quite small in terms of paid staff, with over half reporting to have no or less than two FTE in paid staff.

Regarding portfolios: 15 IPSPs state that they publish and/or service journals, nine mention that they publish and/or service books, with a further eight involved in conference output and four (not necessarily the same) working on grey literature, non- academic outputs or other output formats. Only six IPSPs publish and/or service only a single publication type while the others have a more mixed portfolio, with most covering 3-4 publication types.

In terms of the size of journal portfolios, IPSPs in the Dutch subset are spread out: half of them are quite small, with five or fewer journals, the other half medium to large, with one claiming to serve over 100 journals.

The funding picture is very scattered, with all types of funding sources used, but no clear pattern or reliance on a specific type. The funding picture is diverse, as is the assessment respondents provide about the stability of funding. For all types of funding, some say that in their case it is stable while others say it is unstable. A clear majority also state that their reliance on non-monetary or in kind support is very high, regardless of whether they see that as problematic or not.

Significantly, many organisations state that they would consider collaboration with other organisations: out of the 17, for all activities except administrative/financial/legal ones 11 or more would consider collaborating: IT services, production, editorial services, communication, training.

All organisations have OA policies for journal publishing: they either follow a national policy, and may also have a policy of their own or in their parent organisation. Issues addressed in the policies followed are mostly copyright and licences, and also in a majority of cases self-archiving, identifiers and embargoes.

There are only a few organisations not accepting pre-printed submissions, and none that do not allow self-archiving. And also, only very few impose embargoes (one for journals and two for books).

All Dutch IPSPs responding provide at least one type of technical service, with metadata and quality control, user interfaces, and software and hosting being the most common. OJS is by far the most often used publishing system, with 11 installations among the 17 IPSPs answering.

In terms of challenges faced it appears that in general, for most sorts of activities, the majority of IPSPs do face some challenges. They are mostly varied though, with different organisations experiencing different types of constraints (human resources, financial resources, expertise etc.) for the same challenge (e.g., indexing, providing metadata, guaranteeing interoperability). Some challenges stand out. For instance, there are often financial constraints to providing adequate infrastructure and services, and also there is often a lack of human resources available to provide sufficient metadata and achieve interoperability with other services.

Though most IPSPs have a privacy policy, only half have a data protection policy. Only a small to a very small minority have implemented measures or policies addressing EDIB issues. Language and gender issues are addressed by five IPSPS, but caring, disability, ethnicity and sexual identity issues only by three at most.

The funding system of OA publications in Switzerland is insufficiently designed to support diamond journals; it is largely based on APCs and hybrid OA. While the IPSPs mostly receive stable funding from their parent organisations, funding is the biggest concern for Swiss diamond journals.

Almost half of the diamond journals in Switzerland are hosted by HEIs (higher education institutions), a further 20% by academic societies.

Switzerland has 666 journals in DOAJ, 252 with the DOAJ seal, 617 let the authors retain all rights, 73 are diamond journals. The Swiss landscape study counts 186 diamond journals, Hahn, Hehn et al. (2023a, p. 6). Switzerland has 25 institutional publishers in DOAJ (via GOA8), 20 of which publish diamond journals.

19 Swiss IPSPs participated in the DIAMAS survey. 11 of the 19 respondents identified themselves as IPs, eight as SPs. The majority of IPSPs describe themselves as a private not-for-profit organisation (10/19). Another seven are public organisations.

In addition to hosting, most IPSPs provide full editorial workflow, software and metadata control.

OJS is the most widely used system for publishing diamond journals. All IPSPs make content available in PDF. 13 out of 18 make content available in HTML and only three in XML while seven provide image or video formats and 6 sound files.

Creative Commons licences or other open licences are common for Swiss IPSPs. Eight out of 16 recommend CC BY, seven CC BY-SA, four CC BY-NC and CC BY-NC-ND, three CC BY-NC-SA. PIDs are assigned by most of the Swiss IPSPs with DOIs, ISSN and ISBN provided most often.

The result on indexing is rather modest considering the importance of indexing for the visibility of the journals. Half of the Swiss IPSPs consider their content to be very well indexed, the other half would like to see better indexing. Unfortunately, the number and distribution of the few responses to corresponding questions in the DIAMAS survey do not allow any conclusions to be drawn about the obstacles to better indexing.

Swiss IPSPs allow self-archiving in open repositories and no IPSP imposes embargo periods for self-archiving.

The majority of the Swiss IPSPs consider multilingualism implemented or in progress. All IPSPs publish in English and the majority in French and in German. Some publish in Italian and Spanish, one in Romansch, the smallest national language.

One response received. Tunisia has five journals in DOAJ, one with the DOAJ seal, three that let authors retain all rights, all five are diamond journals. Tunisia has five institutional publishers in DOAJ (via GOA8), five of which publish diamond journals.

Three responses received. Morocco has 31 journals in DOAJ, none with the DOAJ seal, 12 that let the authors retain all rights, 30 of the 31 are diamond journals. Morocco has 23 institutional publishers in DOAJ (via GOA8), 23 of which publish diamond journals.

One response received. Armenia has 12 journals in DOAJ, none with the DOAJ seal, 12 that let the authors retain all rights, all 12 are diamond journals. Armenia has seven institutional publishers in DOAJ (via GOA8), seven of which publish diamond journals.

One response received. Georgia has four journals in DOAJ, one with the DOAJ seal, two that let the authors retain all rights, all four are diamond journals. Georgia has four institutional publishers in DOAJ (via GOA8), four of which publish diamond journals.

No survey responses were received from Israel. Israel has nine journals in DOAJ, one with the DOAJ seal, seven that let the authors retain all rights, eight of the nine are diamond journals. Israel has three institutional publishers in DOAJ (via GOA8), three of which publish Diamond journals.

Due to the earthquake in Türkiye, it was decided to postpone the surveying of possible Turkish respondents. The survey will be distributed to Turkish respondents during autumn 2023, and a separate report will be prepared. The intention is to include the Turkish survey data with the main survey data to be published in an anonymised data set.

Türkiye ranks 11th in DOAJ's list of countries as to the number of journals listed there, with 466. Two of these journals hold the DOAJ seal, 205 let the authors retain all rights, and 437 are diamond journals. This indicates that institutional publishing is a major part of Turkish OA publishing. Türkiye has 171 institutional publishers in DOAJ (via GOA8), 166 of which publish diamond journals.