The AEGIS-OA project is a Horizon Europe–funded project which launched in March 2026 to strengthen a transparent, sustainable, and high-quality Diamond Open Access (OA) publishing ecosystem across Europe. The project aims to address the fragmented landscape of OA journals and books into a cohesive, sustainable, and high-quality Diamond OA ecosystem. This poster demonstrates how AEGIS-OA operationalises, scales, and integrates community-led services operated within the European Diamond Capacity Hub (EDCH) to solve these exact capacity challenges without duplicating existing efforts.
The AEGIS-OA consortium is powered by 24 partners from 16 European countries, bringing in expertise in Diamond OA and scholarly publishing, including research-performing organisations, infrastructure providers, and National Capacity Centres, reflecting the diversity and collaborative nature of the Diamond OA community.

Diamond OA is an equitable model of scholarly publication that charges no fees to authors or readers based on distributed, community-driven models that often face challenges related to fragmentation, limited resources, uneven capacity and levels of maturity across regions. The AEGIS-OA project responds to these challenges by leveraging and extending the quality standards, services, tools, and frameworks developed through earlier European projects, including DIAMAS, CRAFT-OA, and PALOMERA and currently operated via the EDCH. Rather than creating new services and tools from scratch, the project focuses on operationalising, integrating and refining the existing EDCH services and tools to ensure alignment, interoperability, and long-term sustainability across the services offerings.

A major aim of AEGIS-OA is to support the coordination of a growing and motivated network of European National Capacity Centres (NCCs), which act as regional centres for Diamond OA expertise, training, and service provision and are all coordinated via the EDCH. These centres play a key role in aligning national initiatives, fostering collaboration across stakeholders, and ensuring that community needs are reflected in the development of shared services, tools and practices for Diamond OA.

The project is structured around key pillars including extending the EDCH services, establishing quality assurance and certification and building robust training programmes and resources for publishing professionals. Specifically, it extends the scope of EDCH services to include Diamond OA books, recognising the importance of monographs and edited volumes, particularly in the social sciences and humanities. Second, it strengthens quality assurance and standardisation efforts by extending frameworks such as the Diamond Open Access Standard (DOAS) and developing certification mechanisms. Finally, it focuses on capacity building through targeted training programmes for publishing professionals and the development of skills across regions. It also aims to enhance technical infrastructure by improving discovery services and providing ready-to-use publishing tools aligned with the EDCH.

AEGIS-OA also emphasises the long-term sustainability of Diamond OA services and the NCCs. It strives to align national funding approaches, support resource sharing, and enable long-term planning for Diamond OA communities. By connecting institutional publishers, service providers, and infrastructures across countries, it contributes to a more resilient and cohesive ecosystem across borders and disciplines.

This poster introduces the vision, structure, and early activities of AEGIS-OA, highlighting its role in advancing community-led scholarly publishing in Europe. It showcases how the project contributes to strengthening shared infrastructures, improving publishing practices via training, and ensuring the long-term sustainability and uptake of Diamond OA services and tools.