One of the main goals for the German “Service Center Diamond Open Access” (SeDOA) (https://diamond-open-access.de) is to improve collaboration and exchange between scientific communities, researchers and other Diamond Open Access stakeholders. Therefore, the work package “networking services” focuses on community engagement on both national and international level, in order to strengthen and enhance the Diamond landscape. It is one of six work packages within the SeDOA consortium, which itself is composed of 15 partners across disciplines and infrastructures.

Due to its federal structures, Germany has a rather special heterogenic landscape of scientific communities and infrastructures, many of which doubling or overlapping each other. Thus, mapping, engaging, and coordinating these many different communities can be a challenging endeavour.

To achieve its goal of improving the Diamond OA community landscape nonetheless, SeDOA can rely on a mid-level community structure first established by the “Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft” (DFG) in 2014: The so called “Fachinformationsdienste” (FID). These discipline specific information services aim to support their communities with easily accessible literature and relevant information on their respective field of research.

The presentation first introduces SeDOA and the structure of the FIDs very briefly, to then discuss how SeDOA as a National Capacity Center of the European Diamond Capacity Hub can benefit from already existing mid-level structures to engage communities more effectively and with less effort.

As the over 40 FIDs are set up in between particular scientific communities on one side and national or international organisations on the other side, they function as an elemental link between different institutional levels. In addition, they have a deep understanding of their discipline, its specific demands and characteristics, and therefore can provide services and tools tailored to the needs of one particular community in a way that a national level institution like SeDOA cannot. The other way round the FIDs can benefit from SeDOAs strong expertise on Diamond Open Access, as one of their main purposes is to supply easy access to scientific literature for researchers and communities and support them in OA-publishing.

To establish a beneficial exchange between SeDOA and the FIDs the work package “networking services” has first made a mapping of all existing FIDs, gathering information on their OA-publication services, hosting institutions, points of contact etc. This data can already provide valuable hints on the diverse communities’ publication practices, that will be discussed in the presentation. Where certain FIDs don’t (yet) offer Open Access services to their communities at all, it can be assumed that OApublications currently don’t play a major role in that respective discipline. On the other hand, it becomes obvious which communities might benefit from additional support from SeDOA to establish Diamond Open Access structures within their field.

We will end the presentation with an outlook on future steps in terms of community engagement. The SeDOA team just recently started approaching the FIDs directly with the final aim to identify specific demands and establish a stronger connection to a vast variety of scientific communities in Germany. The information gathered this way, such as the FIDs respective disciplines, contact points and of course Open Access services, will help SeDOA to better support researchers and offer workshops and teachings according to their specific needs.