Recent studies show that, despite multilingualism being inherent to SSH research, multilingual scholarly output is increasingly being displaced by indexing databases and research assessment systems (OPERAS et al. 2025), as is the case with longform publications (Bandura- Morgan et al. 2024). Our goal as a publisher creating an OA publication platform for books is to serve a multilingual research community, with a focus on the Central European region. The broad community dealing with OA book publishing consists of researchers, research institutions, libraries, infrastructure providers, publishers and funding organizations. As a member of this community, our role entails catering to the needs of the other stakeholders and to share our expertise in manuscript preparation, print and online representation, and dissemination.

L’Harmattan Publishing House (Budapest), a charitable for-profit organization launched its open access book publishing platform in 2022, publishing mainly Hungarian, English, German and French monographs, edited books and scholarly editions. Currently, over 180 OA volumes are available on openaccess.hu / openacces.pub under a free license with detailed metadata. Our project aims to publish and distribute OA books in accordance with international policies. We are the only publisher in Hungary engaged in this activity, operating within the framework of state-funded research and development project. While some university libraries are experimenting with OA book publishing in an OMP environment, these efforts are in the early stages as they focus on journals and research data instead.

Although the definition of diamond open access rightly emphasizes community ownership and being academically driven (see for example Ancion et al. 2022), we believe that traditional small publishers (either non-profit or charitable for-profit operating at a low profit margin) also have an important role to play in the diamond OA transition. The poster details our shared workflow with the OA book publishing community, ensuring that scholars and universities retain control over research quality and content. It also introduces the infrastructure ecosystem that we use and maintain for publishing, distributing and archiving.

Here are a few examples of the operational aspects detailed on the poster. Editorial boards are independent of the press, they decide which manuscripts to accept and manage the peer review process. All books in series are co-publications, so research institutions also represented as publishers in the imprint. If a university press can take over manuscript preparation tasks, we only get involved during the OA publication and distribution phase. The distribution to research databases is mostly handled by Thoth Open Metadata. Archiving is managed by the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, university libraries, and the Thoth Archiving Network. Under the cooperation agreements with universities and libraries, publication costs are not borne by the authors but by their institutions. Since we are sharing the workload, this also leads to a reduction in costs. Further details will be presented in the poster and on our website.