Background

Ireland’s National Action Plan for Open Research 2022–2030 commits the State to 100% open access to research publications by 2030, with implementation led by the National Open Research Forum (NORF). Phase 1 of that work, the PublishOA project (2022–2025, co-led by the Royal Irish Academy and the Trinity), produced a Landscape Report on scholarly publishing across the island of Ireland (Brennan et al., 2025). It found that Irish scholarly publishing is dominated by very small publishers; 57.1% of those who responded to the underlying survey reported annual turnover under €250,000. The report identified 56 Irish open access journals, most of these were department-level titles run on goodwill, with no staff time officially allocated to them. The report recommended the following:

• Build a national OJS/OMP platform.
• Staff it properly.
• Fund it on a multi-year basis.
• Create a micro-grants programme for OA books (to support bibliodiversity and inclusion),

Phase 2, Diamond Ireland (2025 \- 2026, co-led by the Technological University of the Shannon and the Atlantic Technological University, with team members at Trinity College Dublin and the Institute of Art, Design and Technology Dún Laoghaire, and SETU), was set up to implement these recommendations.

Aim

This paper introduces Diamond Ireland to the PUBMET community as a working case of community-led governance and shared infrastructure. Our argument is that in a small state like Ireland, Diamond Open Access will not be sustainable if every publisher has to do it on its own, and the most workable way to make it durable is to involve two existing national bodies as stakeholders \- a library-collective procurement vehicle and an open-research policy body \- and to plug the result into the European Diamond OA capacity network.

Approach

Diamond Ireland is not a publisher. It is a national, publicly funded, non-profit service made up of two distinct components on different domains. The Diamond Ireland Press is the technical platform: a PKP-hosted OJS instance for journals, paired with Open Monograph Press for books, providing hosting, accessibility, Crossref DOI registration, supporting indexing in DOAJ and DOAB, and long-term digital preservation. Editorial independence and brand identity stay with the publisher. Six established Irish OA journals have already migrated to the Press, with further titles in the pipeline. The Diamond Ireland Hub is the support-services component, giving publishers advice on governance and editorial policy, support for standards, preservation, copyright and licensing, help with discoverability and impact, and alignment with international policy. We see the Hub as Ireland’s national node within the European Diamond Capacity Hub (EDCH). In practice that means adopting the Diamond Open Access Standard (DOAS) as the quality framework for participating publishers, listing Press journals in the Diamond Discovery Hub, joining the EDCH Registry and Forum, and channelling editor training through EDCH’s Training Platform. Alongside this we run a Bibliodiversity and Inclusion programme, including a Bibliodiversity Toolkit, an OA Book Publishing Microgrant Scheme, and the Diamond Ireland Summit in June 2026\. We plant to appoint supporting staff to make this sustainable. Diamond Ireland’s governance is aligned with the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI), the FAIR Principles, the FOREST Framework for institutional publishing, and the Helsinki Initiative on Multilingualism in Scholarly Communication.

Sustainability model

We describe Diamond Ireland’s funding as a Tiered Partnership Model nested inside a Shared Stewardship Model, in which libraries and academics act as co-stewards of Irish scholarly communications. Participating publishers pay tiered hosting and setup fees. That keeps us accountable to the people who use the platform. The larger share comes from collective subventions from Irish academic and research libraries, channelled through IReL \- the Irish Research eLibrary \- which already aggregates library spend on licensed content and which hosts NORF. The effect is to redirect a small fraction of existing Irish library spend on closed international scholarship to support the open scholarship Ireland actually produces, and to do so without charging authors or readers anything.

Implications

For small-language, small-market jurisdictions, sustainable Diamond OA at scale appears to require a community-governed, properly staffed shared infrastructure rather than per-publisher arrangements. Aligning that infrastructure with an existing library procurement body and an open-research policy body, as we have done in Ireland with IReL and NORF, and plugging it into the European Diamond capacity network through EDCH, is a model we believe transfers to comparable contexts elsewhere. We treat bibliodiversity as a design constraint at the start of the work, not as an outcome we hope to measure later. That choice shows up in the Press’s features, in the composition of the Hub’s governance, and in the priorities of the grants programme.

Conclusion

Diamond Ireland is intended to provide what the Landscape Report identified as missing \- a community-owned, properly resourced national infrastructure for Irish Diamond Open Access publishing, made up of a publishing platform (the Press) and a National Capacity Centre (the Hub) that brings the European Diamond OA network within reach of Irish publishers. If it works, it will turn hosting from a recurring institutional liability into a shared national capability, help Ireland reach its 2030 open access target, and broaden the diversity and resilience of the country’s scholarly communications. There is plenty of work ahead. We think this is the right way to do it.