Academic books continue to play an important role in scholarly production and research communication, particularly in the social sciences and humanities. As an important output of scholarly production, academic books must be included in open science/open access policies and strategies developed by research funders and institutions, to ensure that open science becomes the modus operandi of modern science across all disciplines. However, contrary to article publishing in journals (especially in the areas of Science, Technology, and Medicine) academic books have not been a focus point for open access (OA) policymakers. Consequently books are only rarely mandated to be published OA by research funders and institutions. PALOMERA will investigate the reasons for this situation across geographies, languages, economies, and disciplines within the European Research Area (ERA). Through desk studies, surveys, in-depth interviews, and use cases, PALOMERA will collect, structure, analyse, and make available knowledge that can explain the challenges and bottlenecks that prevent OA to academic books. Based on this evidence PALOMERA will provide actionable recommendations and concrete resources to support and coordinate aligned funder and institutional policies for OA books, with the overall objective of speeding up the transition to open access for books to further promote open science. The recommendations will address all relevant stakeholders (research funders and institutions, researchers, publishers, infrastructure providers, libraries, and national policymakers). The PALOMERA consortium broadly represents all relevant stakeholders for OA academic books, but will facilitate co-creation and validation events throughout the project to ensure that the views and voices of all relevant stakeholders are represented, promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion.This will assure maximal consensus and take-up of the recommendations.

The objective of ALMASI is to provide the research community with an aligned, nonprofit, high-quality, and sustainable scholarly communication ecosystem across three world regions: Africa, Europe, and Latin America. This will enable scholarly communities to take full responsibility for innovative, valid, reliable and accessible publishing services and solutions that do not charge fees to readers or authors, commonly known as Diamond Open Access. This aligned nonprofit publishing ecosystem will take into account specific needs across the diversity of disciplines, global regions, and languages. The project will achieve this goal by concentrating on measures that will harmonise and strengthen existing nonprofit publishing services and solutions. ALMASI will establish a framework for knowledge transfer, coordination, and alignment of non-technological publishing skills, services, and solutions. The project will focus on (1) mapping nonprofit publishing services and solutions across the 3 regions; (2) aligned quality support instruments for publishing services; (3) shared training materials and curricula for publishing services, journal editors, and publishing staff; and (4) long-term financial sustainability and OS policies for scholarly publishing. The project will be carried out in the context of the nascent Global Diamond Federation, which is supported by UNESCO.

In the transition towards Open Access (OA), institutional publishing is challenged by fragmentation and varying service quality, visibility, and sustainability. To address this issue, DIAMAS gathers 23 organisations from 12 European countries, well-versed in OA academic publishing and scholarly communication. The project will: 1. Map the current landscape of Institutional Publishing Service Providers (IPSPs) in 25 countries of the ERA with special attention for IPSPs that do not charge fees for publishing or reading. This will yield a taxonomy of IPSPs and an IPSP landscape report, a basis for the rest of the project. 2. Coordinate and improve the efficiency and quality of IPSPs by developing a European Quality Standard for Institutional Publishing (EQSIP). This quality seal will professionalise, strengthen and reduce the fragmentation of institutional publishing in Europe. EQSIP will serve as a benchmark for a gap analysis of the data in (1). Buy-in and capacity-building is ensured by co-creation with the relevant IPSP communities of practice, creating a Common Access Point for IPSPs, an IPSP registry with 80% of IPSPs in the ERA, publishing guidelines, training materials, self-assessment tools, financial models, and shared cost frameworks. DIAMAS embraces diversity, equity, and inclusion by addressing gender equity in OA publishing and multilingualism in 15 European languages. Special attention is paid to building and enabling the financial sustainability of IPSPs. 3. Formulate community-led, actionable recommendations and strategies for institutional leaders, funders/sponsors/donors, and policymakers in the European Research Area (ERA). Workshops and targeted networking actions will reach and engage institutional decision-makers. In 36 months, DIAMAS will deliver an aligned, high-quality, and sustainable institutional OA scholarly publication ecosystem for the ERA, setting a new standard for OA publishing, shared and co-designed with all stakeholders.