Alma Diamond is the name that brings together the institutional services for open access scientific publication. The name is an explicit reference to the Diamond Open Access model, a model that distinguishes the member services and publications.
The services are addressed to serial publishing initiatives – journals and series – of Departments, Centres or Other University Structures, as well as to individual publishing projects – monographic books or editions – of professors, researchers, PhD students, research collaborators and technical-administrative staff of the University of Bologna who are their authors or co-authors.
Currently, the active services are:
- AlmaDL Journals for the publication of scientific journals: description and procedure for joining the service.
- AMS Acta, the institutional open repository for digital and unpublished research content, including books, series and conference proceedings: description and procedure for joining the service.
- Work is in progress to activate AlmaDL Books, a service for publishing books and series on a dedicated platform.
What Diamond Open Access means
Formerly considered a mere variant of the Gold Open Access model, Diamond OA - sometimes called Platinum - is not simply an open access publication model without costs for authors and readers, but is something more.
We propose below an agreed definition of Diamond OA:
- Diamond Open Access refers to a scholarly publication model in which journals and platforms do not charge fees to either authors or readers.
- Diamond Open Access journals are community-driven, academic-led, and academic-owned publishing initiatives. Serving a fine-grained variety of generally small-scale, multilingual, and multicultural scholarly communities, these journals and platforms embody the concept of bibliodiversity.
- For all these reasons, Diamond Open Access journals and platforms are equitable by nature and design.