Experts from SRCE participated in the final conference of the project Creating a Robust Accessible Federated Technology for Open Access (CRAFT-OA) and in the project consortium meeting held in Göttingen from 6 to 9 October 2025.
During the conference, the production version of the Diamond Discovery Hub (DDH) was officially launched. DDH is a comprehensive registry of Diamond Open Access journals and one of the project’s key results. Its goal is to increase the visibility of Diamond OA journals. The initial content of the DDH includes journals that have undergone evaluation based on the six community-defined criteria for Diamond OA journals. The SRCE team is involved in creating and populating the DDH by evaluating and adding journals from Hrčak.
Hrčak is one of the first trusted sources for populating the DDH. So far, SRCE experts have validated and included more than 150 Hrčak journals in the DDH, and work continues on evaluating the remaining journals. Including Croatian journals in the DDH will increase their visibility to funders, authors, readers, and other services such as aggregators and indexes. Both the DDH and the criteria for Diamond Open Access are available on the Diamond Discovery Hub website. On this topic, SRCE is organising the event Conversations at SRCE: Certification in Hrčak – Diamond Journals, which will take place on Wednesday, 22 October 2025 at 11:00 as part of the international Open Access Week initiative.
On the second day of the conference, a meeting was held with representatives of established and emerging National Competence Centres (NCC) for Diamond Open Access, attended also by representatives from Croatia. OPERAS representatives presented tools and support mechanisms planned for NCCs during their setup and networking.
