While there is broad support for diamond open access publishing on political and management levels, this support rarely comes with financial backing. Recently, the literary budget of the university library at UiT The Arctic University of Norway was restructured following the cancellation of the Wiley publish-and-read (PAR) deal and a 25% cost reduction in the Elsevier PAR deal. Consequently, money has been freed up to financially support diamond open access publishing (Aspaas 2025) and in April 2026 the multi-year “Diamond Program” was launched at UiT The Arctic University of Norway. Briefly, the Diamond Program consists of four main pillars with the first focusing on supporting international diamond open access initiatives and infrastructures. Secondly, a portion of the budget is allocated to strengthening and developing UiT’s diamond open access publishing service, Septentrio Academic Publishing. The third pillar is providing funding to diamond open access journals and series, whether published by Septentrio Academic Publishing or other publishers, as long as the journals are affiliated with UiT. Finally, a large portion of the budget is allocated to flipping larger UiT-affiliated journals from their current publishing model to the diamond open access model.

As a central tenet of diamond open access is that it should be scholar-led, a steering committee of researchers and student representatives at UiT oversees the Diamond Program and can restructure the Diamond Program’s budget. The steering committee was established by asking the faculty deans to propose a researcher from their faculty to serve in the steering committee. Further, the steering committee includes three student representatives. In addition to being responsible for the Diamond Program as a whole, the steering committee will also be responsible for deciding which applications are funded in the third pillar of the Diamond Program (i.e. funding diamond open access journals and series affiliated with UiT). Furthermore, in line with the goal of making the Diamond Program scholar-led, we are establishing a user council consisting of editors of journals and series published by Septentrio Academic Publishing to advise and guide the usage of the money in the second pillar of the Diamond Program, namely the budget going to Septentrio Academic Publishing. We have asked some editors to serve on an interim user council until the formal user council will be elected at a general meeting for all Septentrio-editors in June 2026. At PUBMET 2026 I will present the Diamond Program—with a particular focus on the involvement of scholars and our initial experiences of this process.