https://doi.org/10.25547/ZCKH-HE61
This observation was written by Alan Colin-Arce and Kyle Dase with thanks to INKE Partner Tanja Niemann for her comments and review.
At a Glance
| Topic / Titre | Recap of the 3rd Global Summit on Diamond Open Access and the Bengaluru Roadmap for Diamond Open Access (2026) |
| Key Participants / Participants clés | ICAR Indian Institute of Horticultural Research, Érudit, PKP, United Nations |
| Date / Période | 2026 |
| Keywords / Mots-clés | open science / science ouverte, open social scholarship / approches sociales des savoirs ouverts, open access / libre accès, diamond open access / le libre accès diamant, credibility / crédibilité, events and gatherings / événements et rassemblements, Multilingualism / Multilinguisme |
Summary
This report provides a summary of the Third Global Summit on Diamond Open Access, which took place from February 2-6, 2024 in Bengaluru, India. The gathering included presenters from Canadian, regional, and international open access organizations, as well as governments and universities from around the world. There were 168 in-person attendees from 28 countries and 179 online participants from 33 countries. One outcome of the summit was the Bengaluru Roadmap for Diamond Open Access, which offers directions for promoting diamond OA among multiple stakeholder groups.
Overview
The Third Global Summit on Diamond OA was streamed live and recorded on YouTube, with select sessions including live interpretation into Spanish, French, and Portuguese to promote multilingual participation. The OSPO also published a recap of the 2nd Summit from 2024. This year, some participants even created a series of comics based on the meeting. The summit had the goal of developing the Bengaluru Roadmap for Diamond OA and both Regional and Global Action plans. The Bengaluru Roadmap is a living framework identifying shared objectives and actions of the DOA community meant to evolve over time with community input and align (but not dictate) regional OA movements. More information about the Roadmap can be found in the last section of this post. Apart from these major developments, the sessions and presentations that took place during the summit covered topics of interest to open scholarship, such as policy needs for diamond OA, research assessment, infrastructure, inclusivity, and broader research outputs.
Day 1
The first day featured pre-conference workshops on publishing platforms and services for diamond OA; metadata standards, interoperability and persistent identifiers for diamond OA; repositories and preprints; and diamond OA for early career researchers. INKE member Juan Pablo Alperin (Public Knowledge Project) was one of the speakers in the workshop on platforms and services for diamond OA.
Day 2
The conference formally began with an inaugural panel composed of members of the organizing committee welcoming attendees and highlighting the importance of the development of a roadmap at the end of the conference. Following the welcome, representatives of UNESCO and the governments of Angola, France, Mexico, and Quebec (represented by Rémi Quirion, Chief Scientist of Québec) shared opening statements highlighting respectively the importance of equitable access to information, international cooperation, bibliodiversity, national open access policies, and science as a public good. To wrap up the opening panels, representatives from open access organizations (Science Europe, the Commonwealth Educational Media Centre for Asia, the Latin American Council of Social Sciences, and Redalyc) discussed their different approaches to supporting diamond open access. Mari Sundli Tveit (President of Science Europe) highlighted the DIAMAS project and emphasized the need to strengthen policies and governance systems that support diamond OA to shape a fairer model for scholarly communication. Arianna Becerril-García (Director, Redalyc) discussed how Mexican law has recognized science as a right, which implies that open access is now a duty and a responsibility in the country that requires national and institutional support. The Plenary Session 1, organized by UNESCO, focused on Global Policy Convergence and Capacity Needs. Representatives of government organizations worldwide (including Mylène Deschênes, Director of Ethics and Legal Affairs at the Fonds de Recherche du Québec) discussed their policies for promoting open knowledge ecosystems and identifying the enabling conditions for diamond OA. The speakers converged in the clear policy commitment to equitable access to publicly funded knowledge. They also agreed on the enabling conditions needed for diamond OA, such as sustainable funding, public interest, and interoperable digital infrastructure. However, research assessment remains a challenge and a critical leverage point that prevents the adoption of diamond OA. As Mari Sundil Tvelt argued:
policies, mandates, and frameworks for diamond OA only work when they align with the values, infrastructures, and practices developed by researchers and communities.
The final panel of the day, the Plenary Session 2, addressed the issue of reimagining scholarly publishing for equity and inclusion. The speakers discussed the values of diamond open access and the importance of supporting and recognizing the participation of researchers from different regions in knowledge production. For example, Luciana Balboa (member of the Global Young Academy) described the funding cuts in Argentina’s higher education system and called for a scholarly communication ecosystem that transcends the volatility of political cycles. In this context, she argued that building a diamond OA ecosystem is a political act that defends the autonomy of science. Later in the plenary session, Leslie Chan (professor at the University of Toronto) emphasized that diamond OA risks becoming a technical reform to the publishing system that maintains existing power structures in science, unless there is also a more equitable redistribution of capacity and decision-making power. Therefore, Chan suggested a C3 model for open access that is community governed, commons-based, and care-centered. In a similar vein, Arianna Becerril stressed that the different institutions that maintain scholarly communication can put the concept of the commons into practice. In the Latin American model, research institutions create and maintain diamond OA journals in their strongest knowledge areas, and they benefit from other institutions doing the same thing, building reciprocity in the system. However, Becerril warned that diamond OA is not thought from a commons perspective in all parts of the world, which prevents treating knowledge as a common good.
Day 3
The first panel of the day, Plenary 3, focused on building, supporting, and sustaining diamond OA infrastructure. Panelists represented different OA infrastructures from Europe, Africa, Asia, and Canada. Francis Gingras (Quebec Diamond OA) discussed the creation of the Circé Network to support the transition to diamond OA for journals in Quebec (more information about this project is available on our post on bilingual publishing in Canada). In this same panel, Laurence El Khouri (Deputy Director of the French National Centre for Scientific Research [CNRS]) highlighted how the CNRS is diverting money flows from subscriptions to for-profit publishers and services to sustaining open science infrastructures that meet trusted criteria. For example, in 2025 the CNRS ended its subscription to Web of Science to instead support OpenAlex. Two recent developments in the field of diamond OA were also mentioned in this panel: the Landscape Report on Diamond Open Access Publishing in Africa, Europe, and Latin America, which describes the systemic conditions and public policies on diamond OA publishing in 45 countries; and the Scoping Report on Non-for-profit Publishing Ecosystems, which provides an overview of the governance, funding, and services of diamond OA platforms in Africa, Latin America, and Europe. Plenary 4 emphasized the need for a fuller appreciation of the many ways in which researchers publish research, including documenting the research process, supplying code, and creating multiple translations of research outputs. The session’s focus on research assessment directed attention to how DOA feeds into and challenges the presumptions of a larger research environment.
Day 4
Plenary 5 highlighted the key traits of DOA and their importance, while familiarizing the audience with important platforms such as Diamond Discovery Hub (the authoritative list of DOA journals), INFLIBNET, an autonomous inter-university centre based in India that facilitates many OA resources, and Canada’s own Érudit (one of INKE’s partners). Tanja Niemann, director of Érudit, introduced Érudit to the conference attendees and highlighted how the medium- and long-term goal of Érudit and its Canadian partners is to progressively shift funds from commercial publishers to open models. Of particular note in this session was a reiteration of the important role multilingualism plays in equity, diversity, inclusion, and belonging and the proliferation of DOA standards more generally. Plenary 6 consisted of a panel of early career researchers sharing their experiences and understanding of how a global publishing system influences perceptions of what we consider valuable knowledge, underlining the need for a more fair and equitable standard of publishing and research assessment informed by DOA that can in turn allow researchers (especially ECRs) to focus on the impact of their research rather than the prestige of their publications. Finally, the last plenary of the conference entailed both a recap of the conference and contemplation of the next steps for DOA, and presenters reemphasized access to knowledge as more than a technical or institutional issue but a matter of human rights and that DOA is a digital public good that reasserts those rights and breaks down inequities by treating knowledge as a commons. This can only happen through collaboration in government policies, editorial communities, and the international community at large all working within networks of cooperation. Some key takeaways from these sessions include the reciprocal relationship between research assessment and DOA, DOA’s ability to help shift scholarly impact to scholars’ larger communities rather than merely aiming for prestige, and the need to overcome commercial metrics and international rankings in favour of quality and context as indicators.
Bengaluru Roadmap and Action Plan on Diamond Open Access
The Bengaluru Roadmap and Action Plan on Diamond Open Access was one of the outcomes of the Summit. The Roadmap was published on May 13, 2026 and it offers directions for promoting diamond OA among multiple stakeholder groups. Its main themes are Reimagining Scholarly Publishing for Equity and Inclusion, Global Governance and Shared Responsibility, Diamond Open Access Infrastructure, Research Assessment, Early Career Researchers, Responsible Use of Artificial Intelligence, and Monitoring and Continuity.
The Roadmap also recognizes six action areas and provides recommendations for stakeholders in these areas. Overall, the Roadmap calls for structural reform, sustained public investment, and aligned incentives throughout the research ecosystem. The recommendations for each action area are the following:
Figure created by the authors based on the Bengaluru Roadmap and Action Plan on Diamond Open Access.
Overall, the Roadmap and the recommended key actions call for increasing capacity building, ensuring the sustainability of the diamond OA ecosystem, promoting multilingualism, and reducing the reliance on volunteer or precarious labor. Governments, researchers, community-led infrastructure providers, funders, and universities all have roles to play in implementing these recommended actions to support and strengthen diamond OA. The Roadmap also recognizes that a successful implementation requires aligning policy, funding, and evaluation systems, as well as collaboration across regions and appropriate governance models so that diamond OA can become the primary model for disseminating publicly-funded knowledge.
The next Global Summit on Diamond Open Access, taking place in Bali, Indonesia in 2027, will examine and refine the implementation of the Roadmap and the action plan.
Responses from the INKE Partnership
Tanja Niemann (Executive Director, Érudit):
I participated in the Global Summit on Diamond Open Access in Bengaluru in India, on behalf of Érudit and Coalition Publica, and found the experience both energizing and affirming. Listening to colleagues from across the world was a powerful reminder that Diamond Open Access is not a marginal or regional model, but a global infrastructure project with shared values of equity, community governance, and public investment. I was especially glad to see Québec represented at the summit through its publishing communities and funders. Looking ahead, I hope future editions will also offer an opportunity for broader Canadian participation at the federal level, particularly as Diamond Open Access continues to be strongly encouraged through programs supported by SSHRC and the Canadian academic library community.