If you are looking for a community-driven scholarly publication model, Diamond Open Access is a reliable option with many advantages. Namely, the model charges no fees to either authors or readers, treating scientific knowledge as a public good rather than a commercial commodity. What is more, the Diamond model draws on the work of Institutional Publishing Service Providers (IPSPs) that provide institutional support for journals (Armengou et al. 2023). In the perspective of global engagement, this approach makes multilingual scientific knowledge openly available, accessible and reusable for scholars, practitioners as well as for non-affiliated scholars, easing its adoption in lesser-resourced countries (Raju & Nkrumah Kuagbedzi 2025).

These practical and ethical considerations were seminal in the choice of a publication venue for DARIAH’s journal Transformations. The newly published overlay journal is hosted by the French publishing platform Episciences and includes contributions based on a variety of digital approaches in the arts and humanities. Concretely, the publication process is backed by public Open Access repositories (Pinfield 2009, Rousi & Laakso 2022). The journal has developed a demanding editorial process (Transformations Editorial Board 2025) giving way to high quality publications (Baillot 2025). The dialogue between authors, reviewers and editors is a key component (Gouzi 2025), and Transformations benefits from the community-building work conducted by DARIAH over the past decades.

Technology alone is insufficient to sustain the Diamond-OA ecosystem across Europe, and research infrastructures can empower actors to address the related challenges collaboratively. In 2025, OPERAS launched the European Diamond Capacity Hub (EDCH) programme to provide support and bridge the competence gap between editors and IPSPs. The EDCH empowers the community with a dedicated Training Platform and a Registry & Forum as well as with specialized guidelines (Maryl et al. 2024).

National and disciplinary specificities play a key role in the adoption of community-driven publication practices. In a country like Germany where a rigid publishing culture has long been dominant, the digital transformation is now facilitating the adoption of more open practices. Open Science has become part of national funding strategies (DFG 2025a; DFG 2025b). The national funding for the service centre for Diamond-OA (SeDOA, Stäcker et al. 2025) has now established a digital research infrastructure to support Diamond-OA across all disciplines. Through the integration of the review database infrastructure zbMATH Open (Deb et al. 2025), the example of a field marked by a long history in preprint-based open-access publishing paves the way for other disciplines. The mathematical community strives to create a public, non-proprietary, global digital mathematical library. The role of open publication structures is key here: for both the mathematics community and the arts and humanities, Episciences is a major provider of a Diamond-OA technical infrastructure, used across borders, consortia, and communities.

Interdisciplinary and international approaches foster innovative dialogues and open the horizons of long-time enclosed publication practices. In this paper, we will show how infrastructures play a key role in providing the backbone to sustain this development – both at a technical level and in terms of community-building.