Charting the landscape of Italian Diamond Open Access publishing

Charting the Landscape of Italian Diamond Open Access Publishing Simone Angioni1, [0000-0002-6682-3419], Miriam Baglioni1, [0000-0002-2273-9004], Alessia Bardi1, [0000-0002-1112-1292], Paolo Manghi1,2, [0000-0001-7291-3210], Andrea Mannocci1, [0000-0002-5193-7851], and Gina Pavone1, [0000-0003-0087-2151] 1CNR-ISTI — National Research Council, Institute of Information Science and Technologies “Alessandro Faedo”, 56124 Pisa, Italy 2OpenAIRE AMKE, Athens, Greece *Corresponding author: TDB ABSTRACT Diamond Open Access (DOA) is a publishing model gaining attention as a sustainable and equitable implementation of Open Access, free from commercial control and power dynamics. While international studies have outlined the global uptake of DOA, this paper investigates the presence and characteristics of the DOA landscape in Italy. We conduct a quantitative analysis of the Italian DOA journals and their production, examining disciplinary distribution, citation impact, and alignment with FAIR principles using openly available resources. Key findings include the significant growth of DOA journals, particularly in the social sciences and humanities, as well as the high level of international citations, indicating strong global relevance. The study also highlights challenges such as the need for better indexing and comprehensive data to capture the DOA landscape fully. Keywords: Diamond Open Access, Open Research Information, Open Scientometric, Open Science 1 INTRODUCTION In the early 2000s, scholarly communication still relied on a subscription-based model rooted in the constraints of print-era distribution, and continued to operate under a system that overprotected scientific literature through the established practice of transferring copyright to publishers. In the same years, the costs of scientific journals grew at such a rate that it caused the so-called “serial pricing crisis”: academic libraries could not afford the rising costs of journal subscriptions (Guédon, 2010). This situation led to the development of a new publishing model, described, among others, in the declarations of Budapest (“Budapest Open Access Initiative (2002)”, 2012), Bethesda (JLIS.it, 2012), and Berlin 1 , which advocated for free access to scientific literature—no longer the need to pay to read—thus initiating the so-called “access revolution”. These declarations emphasised the importance of free and unconditioned access to scientific literature, sparking reflection on the implications of digital technologies for the circulation of scientific knowledge (Suber, 2012). Since then, Open Access has experienced significant growth (Nazim & Bhardwaj, 2023), driven by the demand for faster dissemination of research and increased accessibility to reach a wider audience, thereby producing a greater impact (Demeter et al., 2021). Funding bodies also intercepted this opportunity and began mandating the publication of funded research in Open Access (Quaia et al., 2024). The OA paradigm has led to a radical transformation of the economic model for academic publishing, with commercial publishers developing business models that incorporate OA (e.g., transformative agreements2and Article Processing Charges (APCs) (Peruginelli & Faro, 2024)). The increasing cost of APCs, which has risen considerably in recent years, has led to these charges being regarded as a new paywall for researchers (Zhang et al., 2022). Hence, in addition to the economic models of “pay to read” (i.e., subscription) and “pay to publish” (i.e., Gold Open Access, where journals are 1https://openaccess.mpg.de/Berlin-Declaration 2 Transformative agreements are contracts between institutions and publishers that shift spending from subscription fees to Open Access publishing, aiming to gradually convert journals to full OA. 1 fully accessible), a third model (i.e., Hybrid) has emerged. In this model, journals sell both Open Access for individual publications and subscription access, with higher APCs (Asai, 2022). The evidence of double-dipping in this practice led, for example, the European Commission to exclude hybrid publications from eligible costs in projects funded by Horizon Europe3. Economic sustainability remains a central concern due to the adaptive strategies employed by commercial scientific publishers, who have frequently adopted APCs as an additional revenue stream alongside subscription fees, a combination that has been shown to generate substantial growth in publishers’ profits (LeMaster et al., 2024; Butler et al., 2023). The Open Access model, reliant on APCs, has intensified the financial overburden on university libraries, exacerbating the already unsustainable levels of journal expenditure. Furthermore, this approach has perpetuated significant inequalities, affecting both institutions and individual researchers, particularly those operating in less financially privileged environments (Berger, 2021)(Ayeni & Larivière, 2025). As if this were not enough, publishers have introduced new and increasingly inventive fees, such as submission charges, page fees and fees for self-archiving in repositories (so-called Green Open Access), which until recently had been regarded as a cost-free route to open access for authors4,5. All this raised significant concerns about the sustainability and fairness of the academic publication system 6 and led to initiatives like the Beyond Article-Based Charges working group 7 , which has developed the “How equitable is it” tool 8 . Several initiatives were launched to promote greater transparency on the costs incurred by universities and Research Performing Organisations for access to scientific literature, but achievements have so far been limited. For example, the PlanS Journal Comparison Service (JCS), launched in September 2022 to ensure that Open Access fees were transparent and commensurate with the publishers’ services, has only achieved partial results, to the extent that the JCS was closed in April 2025 due to low journal adherence and thus poor data availability 9 . A pressing need emerged to move beyond publishing models reliant on high costs for access, whether in the form of subscription fees or APCs. At the same time, there has been a growing interest in exploring innovative editorial models as well as well-established traditions that avoid these issues. In light of this scenario, the Diamond Open Access (DOA) model is receiving increasing attention as a way toward a fair, sustainable and equitable scholarly publishing system. DOA is a scholarly publishing model that ensures free access to research for both readers and authors, eliminating financial barriers derived from APCs or journal subscriptions and promoting equitable and inclusive dissemination of knowledge. For example, the Latin America approach to DOA is characterised by its commitment to equitable access to knowledge and its foundation in university-supported, non-commercial publishing practices (Mounier & Rooryck, 2023). While international quantitative analyses are essential to assess the uptake of DOA and to compare trends across countries and the world’s regions, a focused examination of a single national context can offer more granular insights. Therefore, such in-depth analyses are valuable for informing targeted policy measures and for strengthening the contribution of local stakeholders to broader initiatives, such as the European Diamond Capacity Hub (EDCH) 10 . In this perspective, investigating the specific situation in Italy responds to the need for context-sensitive evidence that can guide both institutional strategies and coordinated efforts to advance non-commercial publishing models. Accordingly, this article presents a study on the uptake of the DOA model in Italy, using a set of quantitative indicators about DOA journals and their published articles. More specifically, this study addresses the following research questions about the DOA landscape in Italy: (RQ1) What is the presence and uptake of Italian DOA journals? (RQ2) What is the article production of Italian DOA journals? 3https://ec.europa.eu/info/funding-tenders/opportunities/portal/screen/support/faq/ 19538?isExactMatch=true&status=0&frameworkProgramme=43108390&type=0,1&grantCategories= work_programme_calls&order=DESC&pageNumber=1&pageSize=50&sortBy=publicationDate 4https://open.ieee.org/repository-license-fee 5https://www.elsevier.com/researcher/author/policies-and-guidelines/submission-fees 6https://www.the-guild.eu/publications/statements/academic_publishing_2023.pdf 7https://www.coalition-s.org/beyond-article-based-charges-working-group-an-update-on -progress 8https://coalitions.typeform.com/Equity-Tool?typeform-source=theplosblog.plos.org 9https://web.archive.org/web/20250524103516/https://www.coalition-s.org/coalition-s -to-sunset-the-journal-comparison-service-in-april-2025 10https://diamas.org 2/16 (RQ3) What are the performances of Italian DOA articles in terms of impact and evaluation? (RQ4) What are the technical and legal characteristics of the Italian DOA journals? The remainder of this paper is structured as follows: Section 2frames the efforts and policy development in Italy and the broader landscape, Section 3presents other works focusing on the analysis of DOA, not necessarily in Italy. Section 4describes the methodology used to create and analyse the dataset, while results are presented in Section 5. Finally, Section 6discusses the results and outlines limitations, challenges, and future works. 2 CONTEXT In recent years, several initiatives have been dedicated to observing, understanding, and promoting the DOA model. Others, while pursuing broader goals of fostering a more collaborative and equitable scholarly ecosystem, have nonetheless contributed to advancing this model. This section offers a nonexhaustive overview of some of the main initiatives, first outlining the international context and then focusing on the specific situation in Italy, as this analysis aims to frame the phenomenon within this country. 2.1 Worldwide Efforts and Policy Developments in Diamond Open Access Numerous initiatives worldwide are actively engaging with this editorial model, reflecting its growing relevance in the academic publishing landscape. Significant efforts have also been undertaken both at the European level and globally. In 2021, the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science (UNESCO, 2021) emphasised the need for equitable access to scientific knowledge and promoted practices that increased transparency and inclusiveness in research. The document underlined the importance of diverse publishing models as a means to incorporate a variety of knowledge systems and practices, which are concepts connected to DOA. Based on an initial quantitative DOA Journals study (Bosman et al., 2021), the “Action Plan for Diamond Open Access” was published in March 2022 by Science Europe, cOAlition S, OPERAS, and ANR (Ancion et al., 2022) with the aim to foster a community-driven ecosystem for Diamond scholarly communication. Its primary objectives were to enhance efficiency, establish quality standards, build capacity, and ensure the sustainability of DOA journals and platforms. The need for equitable access and Open Science has been further emphasised by key policy developments. In its Conclusions on Research Assessment and Implementation of Open Science 11 , dated 10 June 2022, the Council of the European Union highlighted the importance of unrestricted access to publicly funded research outputs, including publications and datasets, for research purposes. Additionally, it underscored the benefits of multilingualism for the broader dissemination of scientific results and advocated for immediate Open Access to research outputs. More recently, on 23 May 2023, the Council approved conclusions promoting high-quality, transparent, open, trustworthy, and equitable scholarly publishing practices 12 . These documents further reinforce the call for systemic changes in the academic publishing landscape. Meanwhile, other initiatives have also explored ways to move beyond the APC-based Open Access model. For instance, cOAlition S – a group of national research funding and performing organisations, with support from the European Commission and the European Research Council – has supported efforts to make Open Access publishing more equitable13 and responsible (Stern et al., 2023). The Guild of European Research-Intensive Universities expressed concerns regarding the financial sustainability of the academic publishing system, urging policymakers to prioritise support for non-APCbased Open Access models and their underlying infrastructures14,15. 11https://www.consilium.europa.eu/media/56956/st10125-en22.pdf 12https://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-9616-2023-INIT/en/pdf 13https://www.coalition-s.org/equitable-open-access-publishing 14https://www.the-guild.eu/news-and-blog/news/2022/the-guild-statement_academic -publishing_17-may-2022.pdf 15https://www.the-guild.eu/publications/statements/academic_publishing_2023.pdf 3/16 In October 2023 16 and December 2024 17 , two Global Summits on Diamond Open Access were held, with a focus on fostering collaboration, discussing sustainable strategies to strengthen community-driven publishing infrastructures, and acknowledging the need for DOA journals, repositories, and platforms to reflect the diversity required by various research disciplines and epistemic traditions. In between the two events, in July 2024, UNESCO announced the launch of the Diamond Global Open Access Alliance 18 , an initiative aimed at fostering collaboration and advancing Diamond Open Access practices globally. In such a context where numerous initiatives and reflections were launched, another noteworthy effort appeared to bring the Open Research Europe (ORE) publishing platform 19 significantly closer to the DOA model. Since its launch in 2021, ORE has introduced several important innovations and processes that promote openness and transparency, such as open peer review and the management of editorial outputs from the preprint stage onward. However, during its initial years and until now, its availability has been limited exclusively to authors who are beneficiaries of European Commission funding. More recently, in January 2025, ten national research funding and performing organisations from eight European countries announced that they had signed a Statement of Intent to collectively support and fund ORE as a not-for-profit Open Access publishing service for an initial period of five years, starting in 2026 (of Norway et al., 2025) In parallel, the European Commission supported research activities on the topic of DOA. The DIAMAS 20 and CRAFT-OA 21 projects made significant contributions to the advancement of DOA publishing. DIAMAS focuses on improving the infrastructure for institutional publishing services, ensuring their sustainability and alignment with DOA principles, while CRAFT-OA aims to support DOA journals in adopting more efficient workflows and best practices. Among the key outputs of these initiatives is a comprehensive survey conducted by DIAMAS on DOA in Europe, which mapped its landscape and highlighted the challenges faced by DOA journals and platforms. Additionally, the Operational Diamond OA Criteria for Journals 22 , developed within these projects, represent a set of standards designed to assess and guide journals toward adherence to DOA practices. These criteria have been utilised in the present study to select the journal sample for analysis, and they are detailed in the methodology section. Building on the results of these projects and with the support of OPERAS, the European Diamond Capacity Hub (EDCH) was established in January 2025 to strengthen further the DOA model within Europe. The EDCH aims to regionally support a globally distributed, aligned, high-quality, and sustainable scholarly communication infrastructure that is both managed and owned by the scholarly community. Its primary role is to ensure the alignment of Diamond Capacity Centres (DCCs) across Europe. 2.2 Italian Efforts and Policy Developments of Diamond Open Access In Italy, 2022 marked the publication of the National Plan for Open Science (Piano Nazionale per la Scienza Aperta, PNSA) 23 , a programmatic document providing the country with a comprehensive vision for implementing open science. The document placed significant emphasis on the necessity of ensuring Open Access to publications and highlighted that the oligopolistic practices dominating scholarly communication have led to uncontrolled pricing policies for publications. Although the document does not explicitly mention the DOA model, it emphasises the importance of adopting non-commercial publishing systems. To address the challenges posed by the current publishing landscape, the PNSA advocates for immediate Open Access to scholarly journals. It stresses that the open access ecosystem should prioritise non-commercial publishing solutions, such as journals managed by universities and research organisations, national or European scientific associations, Open Access platforms, and open access archives. In addition to national policy efforts, several initiatives and organisations play an active role in promoting Open Access practices in Italy. These include AISA (Italian Association for the Promotion of Open Science) 24 , which engages in advocacy and works to raise awareness among decision makers 16https://globaldiamantoa.org/en/home-2 17https://doasummit.uct.ac.za 18https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/announcing-global-diamond-open-access-alliance 19https://open-research-europe.ec.europa.eu 20https://diamasproject.eu 21https://www.craft-oa.eu 22https://diamasproject.eu/operational-diamond-oa-criteria-for-journals 23https://www.mur.gov.it/sites/default/files/2023-01/PNSA_2021-27_ENG.pdf 24https://aisa.sp.unipi.it/about-aisa 4/16 to encourage the adoption of Open Science principles in research assessment and intellectual property policies, and ICDI (Italian Computing and Data Infrastructure) 25 , which supports synergies in national contributions to the European Open Science Cloud. Recently, stimulated by numerous European efforts to strengthen DOA, the Italian Diamond Capacity Hub was launched as part of the broader European Diamond Capacity Hub. Building on the Italian node of the OPERAS infrastructure, this initiative aims to establish effective channels for sharing good practices, initiate the assessment of journals against the Diamond Open Access Standard (DOAS) criteria, identify critical gaps in compliance with DOAS, propose shared solutions, and actively seek funding opportunities and projects to cover operational costs. 3 RELATED WORKS A trend in research involves positioning the DOA model - sometimes also referred to as Platinum OA - alongside other scholarly communication models, particularly within the various forms of Open Access. In these studies, DOA is basically defined from a cost perspective, characterised by the absence of fees for both reading and publishing (Laakso & Multas, 2023)(Berger, 2021), (Simard et al., 2022), (Fuchs & Sandoval, 2013)(Normand, 2018). These studies primarily focus on economic models, public expenditure, and sustainability, also in ethical terms, particularly in relation to the phenomenon of predatory publishing, which is increasingly perceived as more aggressive with the rise of Open Access publishing models (Quaia et al., 2024) Beyond economic definitions, additional studies have sought to map and examine the structural and operational features of DOA publishing. The first and most extensive study on DOA is the DOA Journals Study (Becerril et al., 2021; Bosman et al., 2021), commissioned by cOAlition S and conducted during 2020–2021. The study adopts both a quantitative approach – using several databases as sources (e.g., DOAJ 26 , ROAD 27 , and Crawford’s Gold Open Access Databases 28 ) – and a qualitative approach based on an extensive survey primarily targeting European non-commercial publishers. The findings confirm that DOA journals are numerous, with an estimated total of approximately 29,000 titles, although only about one-third are currently registered in DOAJ. In general, these journals publish fewer articles per year than their APC-based counterparts, and most are very small in scale, often issuing fewer than 25 articles annually. Despite their limited size, the overall publishing trend has been growing steadily, reflecting the growing interest in non-commercial open access models. According to the results of the study, DOA journals are geographically widespread, with 45% based in Europe (a significant share of which are located in Eastern European countries), 25% in Latin America, 16% in Asia, and 5% in the United States and Canada. The disciplinary distribution identified by the study shows that these journals are predominantly focused on the Humanities and Social Sciences (60%), while Science and Medicine account for 22% and 17% of the total output, respectively. From an organisational standpoint, the study finds that many journals are formally affiliated with research institutions or learned societies. The study also reveals that essential editorial tasks, such as copy-editing and typesetting, are commonly outsourced. Although most journals rely on OJS 29 (Open Journal Systems, an open source software for managing OA journals) as their main publishing platform, technical limitations and concerns regarding long-term sustainability are frequently reported. Furthermore, achieving adequate indexation and visibility in major international databases emerges as one of the most persistent obstacles. Regarding financial sustainability, the study describes a sector characterised by considerable fragility. The findings also emphasises that DOA journals rely especially heavily on volunteers: 60% depend on unpaid volunteers, with Italy, US, and Croatia standing out as countries where this is particularly common. The funding mechanisms identified by the study are varied, including in-kind support, grants, donations, shared infrastructures, and membership fees. Operational budgets remain very modest overall. Universities and research organisations are usually the main supporters, while contributions from research funders play only a limited role. 25https://www.icdi.it 26https://doaj.org 27https://road.issn.org 28https://waltcrawford.name/goaj.html 29https://pkp.sfu.ca/software/ojs 5/16 In 2023, the DIAMAS project carried out a survey aimed at exploring and supporting the Diamond publishing model while fostering engagement with the institutional publishing community. The survey gathers 685 responses from institutional publishers and service providers across the European Research Area and provides a detailed country-by-country overview. (Armengou et al., 2023). Overall, the findings reveal high editorial standards and strong Open Science practices but highlight persistent challenges like small-scale operations, financial limitations, and reliance on voluntary contributions. Italy participated actively, contributing 52 responses (7.6% of the total) and ranking among the top five countries by number of responses, alongside Serbia, Croatia, Spain, and France. The survey indicates that Italian DOA journals mainly cover the social sciences, humanities, engineering, and natural sciences, and are predominantly funded by local organisations such as universities, reflecting the lack of centralised policies for sustainable Open Access. Despite Open Access publishing is gaining traction, the report notes a risk of increasing dependence on the paid models of large commercial publishers. Our study focuses on the bibliometric landscape in Italy, and the figures we report differ significantly from those presented in the DIAMAS survey. The survey lists 455 Italian journals in DOAJ without APCs 30 , whereas our study identifies 168 Italian Open Access journals that are both APC-free and community-owned. This discrepancy is indeed notable and stems from differences in data construction methodology and the selection criteria used to define DOA journals (i.e., economic criteria alone vs. economic plus ownership criteria). Further details on how the dataset was built are provided in Section Data and methods. The DIAMAS survey also reports that providing standard metadata records for published articles is not a common practice, primarily due to limited resources and technical constraints. However, most survey respondents assign DOIs to their articles via Crossref, DataCite, and other DOI agencies, relying on these services to enhance the FAIRness of their resources. This situation affects any quantitative study on Italian DOA articles, including ours. To maximise the number of DOA articles in our dataset, we relied on data from the OpenAIRE Graph 31 (Manghi et al., 2025), which aggregates article metadata from DOAJ, Crossref, DataCite, and a broad international network of OpenAIRE-compliant repositories and archives. Other studies conducted more targeted comparisons based on different criteria. In Simard et al. (2022), the authors compared Gold and Diamond Open Access journals based on geographic distribution and country income, using data from DOAJ, the World Bank (for country income classification), and UNESCO’s regional electoral groups (for geographic classification). The study reports a remarkable 300% increase in both Gold and Diamond journals between 2015 and 2020, with Diamond journals leading the growth. The article (Pilatti et al., 2025) focuses on APC-based and Diamond OA journals in engineering, finding that APC-based journals have higher absolute citation counts, while DOA journals have a higher proportion of cited articles. Mahony (2024) presents the PublishOA.ie project 32 , which carried out a feasibility study and pilot to create a publicly owned Diamond Open Access publishing platform for journals and books, as part of Ireland’s National Action Plan for Open Research that targets 100% Open Access to publicly funded publications by 2030. Country-specific studies include the analysis of the DOA landscape in Norway (Frantsvåg, 2022) and Germany (Taubert et al., 2024). The Norway study is based on data from DOAJ and from the national CRIS system in the period 2017-2020. Results shows a decline in the percentage of articles published in subscription journals, while publishing in OA journals is growing, especially in APC-based journals in the domain of health sciences. DOA confirmes its importance in the social sciences and humanities. The authors also observe that DOA is growing in Norway, even though the national rewarding mechanism classifies as “top tier” journals only 6% of DOA journals. Along the same line, we studied the relationships among the Italian DOA production and the national rewarding mechanism (ANVUR), obtaining different and positive results: 76% of Italian DOA journals are in the ANVUR classification, 42% are classified as “top-tier” journals. 48% are indexed in the SCImago Journal Rank, 7% being in the top quartile (Q1) - as shown in Section Results. The German study (Taubert et al., 2024) distinguishes itself by the level of manual curation that the 30As of May 2025, DOAJ lists 466 Italian journals without APCs. 31https://graph.openaire.eu 32https://www.ria.ie/publishing-house/publishoa 6/16 authors put into the identification of DOA journals. They integrate information from DOAJ, ROAD, PubMed Central, and a list of German OJS platforms with information manually collected from OpenAPC and journals’ websites to confirm the journals’ publishing model and get the number of articles published in 2021. Authors found a substantial number of DOA journals in the social sciences and humanities, but limited adoption in other disciplines. 73.3% of the DOA journals are small journals with 20 or fewer articles in 2021. The bibliographic quantitative analysis is accompanied by a qualitative study about the funding paths and costs of running diamond journals conducted via a survey and interviews with editors of German DOA journals. To the best of our knowledge, a comprehensive quantitative analysis focused specifically on the Italian landscape is still needed. This study aims to build upon previous work by undertaking such an analysis. Importantly, inspired by the call for a more nuanced understanding (Simard et al., 2024) and drawing upon indicators explored in broader studies like DIAMAS (Armengou et al., 2023), our study seeks to capture multiple facets of the DOA model beyond merely counting journals that do not charge APCs, offering a detailed characterisation of the Italian DOA ecosystem. 4 DATA AND METHODS This study aims to understand the presence and impact of Diamond Open Access (DOA) in Italy, using a set of quantitative indicators about DOA journals and their published articles. It has already been highlighted that the absence of article processing charges alone is not a sufficient criterion to identify DOA journals. (Simard et al., 2024) Indeed, analyses and discussions on this model of open access have led to a growing awareness of the need to return control over the entire publishing process to the scholarly community itself. The starting point of our study was the observation that existing authoritative sources are not adequate to capture all the dimensions required to define DOA comprehensively. This led to the need to construct a dedicated dataset to identify Italian DOA journals meeting a broader set of characteristics. These were developed based on the Operational Diamond OA Criteria for Journals (Armengou et al., 2024) formulated by the DIAMAS and CRAFT-OA projects by retrieving information from multiple data sources and aggregating it into a new dataset. We analysed the landscape of DOA publishing in Italy through a set of quantitative metrics spanning multiple dimensions. These include presence, disciplinary coverage, institutional involvement, international reach, publication volume, scholarly impact, and technological infrastructure. To calculate such metrics, a rich and informative dataset is required. To build this dataset, we combined data from multiple sources, as detailed in the following section. 4.1 Selection of data sources The first phase of our work focused on identifying relevant data sources to accurately characterise DOA journals. We went beyond the mere absence of APCs to identify DOA journals and applied, as far as technically feasible, the operational definition of DOA journals specified by the CRAFT-OA and DIAMAS projects33 (Armengou et al., 2024), which we report below for convenience: 1. Persistent identification of the journal with an ISSN 2. Scholarly journal: involves an explicit selection process for articles and a formal peer review process 3. Open Access: all articles are universally accessible and free to read, using open licenses 4. No fees: authors do not have to pay any kind of fee for publication 5. Open to all authors: publication is not restricted to authors with a specific affiliation 6. Community-owned: the journal is published by public or not-for-profit organisations DOAJ, the most common source used in studies about Open Access journal publishing, covers the first four criteria. 33https://diamas.org/diamond-open-access 7/16 The Electronic Journals Library (EZB) officially introduced a “Diamond Open Access Journal” category in July 2024 that classifies journals as diamond based on criteria from 1 to 4 and 6 34 . We used the collection of journals in the DOA category of EZB as a starting point for the identification of the DOA journals in Italy. Then, we complemented the dataset with information from the following data sources: • The Directory of Open Access Scholarly Resources (ROAD) 35 , an international database developed and maintained by the ISSN International Centre with the support of UNESCO. Launched in 2013, ROAD provides free access to bibliographic records of open-access scholarly resources, including journals. In this analysis, ROAD has been used to get bibliographic information on the DOA journals in Italy and their disciplinary categorisation. • The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) 36 , an indexing platform for high-quality, peerreviewed OA journals. We leverage DOAJ to get information about license, copyright, preservation services, the inclusion of authors’ persistent identifiers in publications, and information about OA journals’ policies. • The OpenAIRE Graph 37 , a Scholarly Knowledge Graph (SKG) offering descriptive metadata about entities participating in the research life-cycle, including journals and research products. The OpenAIRE Graph aggregates information from several sources, including DOAJ, Crossref, OpenCitation, and OpenAPC. We used the OpenAIRE Graph to get the number of publications published in DOA journals and their citations. • The ANVUR lists of classified journals 38 , which are used in Italy to support the evaluation of researchers, academics, and Italian research performing organisations. We transformed the official lists into a machine-readable format using the open source software available at https:// github.com/TnTo/ANVUR-FasciaA. • SCImago Journal & Country Rank (SJR) 39 , an indicator for evaluating the impact and influence of academic journals. Based on data from the Scopus database, the SJR considers both the number of citations a journal receives and the rank of the journals where those citations come from. 4.2 Building the dataset We extracted the list of DOA journals from the Electronic Journals Library (EZB), obtaining 4953 journals. In EZB, each journal is identified by an internal identifier (EZB_ID), the ISSN (P_ISSN), and the electronic ISSN (E_ISSN). Consequently, from EZB we retrieved the following metadata for each journal: EZB_ID,P_ISSN,E_ISSN,Journal Title, and Publisher Name. EZB data lacks information about the publisher’s country, hence we took that information from ROAD using the ISSN and e-ISSN as linking keys. The intersection returned 4,065 journals. From ROAD, we also took information about the discipline(s) of the journals. We filtered out journals without an Italian publisher, obtaining a dataset of 168 Italian DOA journals. Next, we enriched the dataset with additional metadata from DOAJ, available for all 168 journals. These include: other organisation (when the journal is managed by multiple organisations), journal licensing,preservation services, and whether authors retain copyright without restriction. We manually annotated the dataset with the types of publishers based on the following categories: institutional, government, company, facility, non-profit, and for-profit. The categories “company” and “for-profit” are included because DOA journals may be managed by a non-commercial entity using services of a commercial publisher (we were able to determine those cases using the combination of publisher name and other organisation fields in our dataset). An example is the journal with ISSN 2282-2054 managed by the Academy of Emergency Medicine and Care and technically supported by the services of PAGEPress Publications. To perform bibliometric analyses and fully address RQ1 and RQ2, we included article-level metadata from the OpenAIRE Graph. We successfully retrieved metadata for 168 Italian DOA Journals indexed 34https://ezb.ur.de/categories.phtml?bibid=AAAAA&colors=7&lang=en 35https://road.issn.org 36https://doaj.org 37https://graph.openaire.eu 38https://www.anvur.it/en/research/scientific-journals/lists-classified-journals 39https://www.scimagojr.com 8/16 Figure 1. Number of DOA journals in Italy per year. (a) Overall (b) Per year Figure 2. Distribution of Italian DOA journals by discipline. in OpenAIRE, resulting in 57.5K articles published from 2000 to 2024. For our analysis, we use the metadata about persistent identifiers (e.g., DOI), author affiliations and countries, publication date, and citation count. We incorporated data from ANVUR (available for 128 journals) and from SCImago (available for 81 journals) to address RQ3. We addressed RQ4 leveraging on DOAJ and EZB data. 5 RESULTS In this section, we summarise the results of our analysis following the order of the suggested RQs. RQ1: What is the presence and uptake of Italian DOA journals? We identified 168 DOA journals in Italy (including quiescent or discontinued ones), of which 118 have published at least one article in 2024. This number represents a 12-fold increase in the observed period (i.e., 14 DOA journals in 2000), highlighting a substantial growth. As shown in Figure 1, the number of DOA journals has been on a rising trend from the early 2000s until the peak of 2018. We can observe a slight decline in recent years, which may be linked to challenges like sustainability and shifts in funding models. The disciplinary distribution of DOA journals in Italy (Figure 2a) shows a strong presence in “Social Sciences” and “Humanities and the Arts”. In contrast, “Engineering and Technology” has the lowest representation. A diachronic analysis (Figure 2b) reveals a consistent growth in the number of DOA journals, particularly in “Social Sciences” and “Humanities and the Arts”. This trend highlights the increasing adoption of the DOA model in these disciplines. In contrast, “Engineering and Technology” shows a moderately small growth, indicating a more limited shift toward this publishing model. This limited uptake in “Engineering and Technology” could be attributed to the field’s stronger alignment with commercial and hybrid publishing models, where funding mechanisms (e.g., from industry or grant agencies) may more readily support APC-based journals. RQ2: What is the article production of Italian DOA journals? Italian DOA journals are predominantly small-scale in terms of publishing volume. As shown in Figure 3a, most of these journals publish between 9/16 JLIS.it, R. (2012, December). Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing (2003). JLIS.it,3(2). Retrieved 2025-06-27, from https://www.jlis.it/index.php/jlis/article/view/ 294 doi: 10.4403/jlis.it-8628 Laakso, M., & Multas, A.-M. (2023, June). European scholarly journals from smalland mid-size publishers: mapping journals and public funding mechanisms. Science and Public Policy,50(3), 445–456. 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