In February 2026, 347 participants from 36 countries met in Bengaluru, India for the 3rd Global Summit on Diamond Open Access. Its outcome document, the Bengaluru Roadmap and Action Plan on Diamond Open Access, is now the closest thing the diamond open access movement has to a shared global implementation plan — naming six priority action areas that funders, universities, and research offices are expected to act on over the next several years. This piece summarises what the Roadmap actually says, how it differs from the 2022 Action Plan for Diamond Open Access that preceded it, and what it means in practice for institutions already tracking cOAlition S’s 2026-2030 strategy and adjacent open-access policy shifts.
What happened, where, and when
The 3rd Global Summit on Diamond Open Access was held in Bengaluru, India, from 2 to 6 February 2026, under the theme “Collaboration for Equitable Digital Infrastructures and Knowledge Commons in Agriculture and Broader Scientific Research Systems.” It followed the 2nd Global Summit, held in Toluca, México in October 2023 and co-organised by Science Europe, Redalyc, UAEMéx, AmeliCA, UNESCO, CLACSO, cOAlition S, and OPERAS, among others — the same broad coalition of funders, regional publishing networks, and open-science bodies that has driven the diamond OA agenda since the first summit. A dedicated International Oversight Committee drew on the Bengaluru discussions to draft the Roadmap, which is published on Zenodo (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20168763) and hosted on the summit’s own site. A 4th Global Summit is already planned for Bali, Indonesia in 2027, where implementation progress against the Bengaluru commitments will be reviewed.
What “diamond open access” means, briefly
Diamond open access refers to publishing models with no fee charged to either authors or readers — distinct from gold OA (author-facing article processing charges), green OA (self-archived accepted manuscripts), and hybrid OA (subscription journals offering a paid open option). Diamond venues are typically run by universities, learned societies, library consortia, or national/regional networks rather than commercial publishers, and are financed through institutional subsidy, public grants, or shared consortial infrastructure instead of per-article charges. For a side-by-side comparison of how the four models differ on cost, governance, and typical publisher type, see CASRAI’s Gold vs Green vs Diamond vs Hybrid Open Access comparison.
From the 2022 Action Plan to the 2026 Roadmap
The Bengaluru Roadmap builds on, rather than replaces, the original Action Plan for Diamond Open Access published in 2022 by cOAlition S, Science Europe, and the French National Research Agency (ANR), which set out early principles for coordinating diamond OA investment and has since drawn endorsement from well over a hundred organisations worldwide. Where the 2022 plan was a founding statement of intent, the Bengaluru Roadmap is more operational: it translates three summits’ worth of accumulated discussion — on governance, financial sustainability, infrastructure, and evaluation — into six named action areas with an explicit expectation that governments, funders, universities, evaluation bodies, and scholarly communities each take ownership of specific parts of the agenda.
The six priority action areas
The Roadmap organises its recommendations under six pillars:
- Integrating Diamond OA into national policy and legal frameworks — embedding diamond OA explicitly into national open-science and research-funding policy, rather than treating it as a niche alternative to gold/green OA.
- Redirecting publishing expenditure toward community-governed infrastructure — shifting a portion of the money currently spent on subscriptions and article processing charges toward funding diamond venues and the shared platforms (repositories, journal-hosting systems, persistent-identifier infrastructure) that support them.
- Reforming research evaluation — ensuring that publishing in a diamond OA venue, and producing multilingual scholarship, is not penalised in hiring, tenure, and grant-review processes that still implicitly reward publication in high-APC or high-prestige subscription titles.
- Strengthening shared infrastructure and interoperability — investing in the technical backbone (hosting platforms, metadata standards, persistent identifiers) that lets small, distributed diamond journals operate at professional standard without each having to build its own stack.
- Recognising and supporting labour in scholarly communication — addressing the often-uncompensated editorial, copyediting, and technical work that keeps diamond venues running, much of it currently absorbed by academic staff and library personnel as unpaid or underpaid service.
- Promoting linguistic diversity and marginalised knowledge systems — supporting publication in languages other than English and in knowledge traditions underrepresented in the dominant commercial publishing infrastructure, consistent with the summit’s explicit knowledge-equity framing.
Why this matters for research offices and publishing-support staff
The Roadmap itself creates no binding legal obligation — it is a coalition consensus document, not a funder mandate like Plan S. Its practical relevance to a research administrator is threefold:
- Signalling for future funder policy. cOAlition S and national funders that already treat diamond OA as a compliant route under their open-access policies were among the summit’s co-organising bodies; a policy document this specific, with named evaluation-reform and infrastructure-investment commitments, is a reasonable leading indicator of where funder OA policy language moves next, not a change that has already taken effect.
- A reference point for evaluation-reform conversations. Institutions revising promotion and tenure criteria, or responding to DORA/CoARA-aligned responsible-assessment commitments, now have a named, internationally-endorsed document explicitly calling out publication-venue bias against diamond and multilingual outputs as something evaluation frameworks should correct.
- A budget-planning signal for library and publishing-support teams. The Roadmap’s expenditure-redirection pillar is a direct argument, made at global-coalition level, for treating diamond OA infrastructure funding as a line item alongside (not instead of) transformative agreements and APC budgets — useful context when that conversation comes up internally.
None of this changes what any individual researcher needs to do to comply with an existing funder mandate today — for that, the underlying Plan S requirements and each funder’s own policy remain the operative reference. The Roadmap is a direction-of-travel document, and its stated review point is the 4th Global Summit in Bali in 2027.
Frequently asked questions
Is the Bengaluru Roadmap a mandate?
No. It is a consensus outcome document from an international summit, endorsed by the organisations that participated in drafting and discussing it. It does not itself require any funder, institution, or researcher to do anything; its effect, if any, will come through the individual policies that funders and institutions adopt in response to it over time.
How is the Bengaluru Roadmap different from the 2022 Action Plan for Diamond Open Access?
The 2022 Action Plan, published by cOAlition S, Science Europe, and the French ANR, was the founding statement of intent behind the coordinated diamond OA movement. The Bengaluru Roadmap is the outcome of the third summit in that same process and is more operational, organising commitments into six specific pillars covering policy, funding, evaluation, infrastructure, labour, and linguistic diversity.
Where can I read the full text?
The Roadmap is published on Zenodo (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20168763) and on the 3rd Global Summit’s own website, diamondoasummit.org, alongside summit programme materials and translations.
What comes next?
Implementation progress against the six action areas is expected to be reviewed at the 4th Global Summit on Diamond Open Access, planned for Bali, Indonesia in 2027.
