The project "Creating a Robust Accessible Federated Technology for Open Access" (CRAFT-OA), carried out by 23 experienced partners from 14 European countries, coordinated by the University of Göttingen, Germany will start in January 2023 and run for 36 months. Funded within the Horizon Europe Framework Programme (HORIZON Europe), the project aims to equally evolve and strengthen the Diamond Open Access (Diamond OA, no fees towards authors or readers) institutional publishing landscape. By offering tangible services and tools for the entire life cycle of journal publishing CRAFT-OA empowers local and regional platforms and service providers to upscale, professionalise and reach stronger interoperability with other scientific information systems for content and platforms. These developments will help researchers and editors involved in publishing.

The project focuses on four strands of action to improve the Diamond OA model: (1) Provide technical improvements for journal platforms and journal software (2) Build communities of practice to foster overall infrastructure improvement (3) Increase visibility, discoverability and recognition for Diamond OA publishing (4) Integrate Diamond OA publishing with the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) and other large-scale data aggregators. Consortium partners in CRAFT-OA bring their long-standing engagement in institutional publishing and infrastructure and are committed to sustaining and developing capacities in the field. CRAFTOA will deliver technical tools, training events, training materials, information, and services for the Diamond OA institutional publishing environment. It will foster communities of practice with the capacity to sustain the project improvements over time.

"There are countless dedicated OA journals striving to provide Diamond Open Access options to their communities. With our project, they will benefit from shared developments and services, but more importantly from shared knowledge around professional institutional publishing and stronger networks to achieve greater resilience within their own operations. " Margo Bargheer, CRAFT-OA Coordinator, University of Göttingen

The consortium partners bring a wide variety of skills and expertise to the project: University of Göttingen as coordinator, the OPERAS Research Infrastructure, the Federation of Finnish Learned Societies, the Max Weber Foundation, the Technische Informationsbibliothek, the University of Zagreb Computing Centre, the University of Coimbra, the Masaryk University, the European Science Foundation, the Scientific Research Centre of Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, OpenAIRE, the University Bern, the University Turin, EGI, the University Zadar, IBL PAN and the State and University Library Hamburg (Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg), the University Warsaw, the Aix-Marseille Université and DOAJ.

CRAFT-OA is linked with other European projects supporting Diamond Open Access, especially the 3-years DIAMAS project (Developing Institutional Open Access Publishing Models to Advance Scholarly Communication). As CRAFT-OA mainly supports Diamond Open Access publishing by providing a technology update, the DIAMAS project supports Diamond Open Access on a non-technical level by building up a capacity centre and a community. The PALOMERA project (Policy Alignment of Open Access Monographs in the European Research Area) investigates institutional scholarly communication as well but concentrates on contrary to journals on books and especially policies for books. It launches in January 2023 and will run for two years.

About OPERAS

OPERAS is the Research Infrastructure supporting open scholarly communication in the social sciences and humanities (SSH) in the European Research Area. Its mission is to coordinate and federate resources in Europe to efficiently address the scholarly communication needs of European researchers in the field of SSH. By fulfilling its mission, OPERAS provides the research community with the missing brick it needs to find, access, create, edit, disseminate and easily and efficiently validate SSH outputs across Europe and enables the whole field to reinvent itself in the new Open Science paradigm. In building up a scholarly communication community in SSH abroad Europe OPERAS has already given evidence of its competences in community building.

About University of Göttingen/Göttingen State and University Library

Göttingen State and University Library (SUB) is one of the largest libraries in Germany and a leader in the development of digital libraries. Georg-August-University Göttingen is one of the leading open access institutions and e-Infrastructure innovators in Germany and internationally. UGOE establishes dedicated research environments for the humanities in national, European and ESFRI activities.