The selection of diamond journals in the DDH is based on the following Diamond Criteria:
- Persistent identification
- Scholarly journal
- Open Access with open licences
- No fees
- Open to all authors
- Community-owned
In order to be visible in the list of journals on the DDH, a journal must
fulfill diamond criteria 1-4 and at least one of criteria 5-6. If all of the diamond criteria are fulfilled, the journal will be shown as “fully diamond”. If fewer than five criteria in total are fulfilled, the journal will be added to a provisional subset of the DDH, but it will NOT be visible to the users of the DDH.
Why do we do this? We maintain that all six criteria must be jointly met for a journal to be qualified as Diamond OA. However, if a journal lacks publicly available information to assess the “open to all authors” or “community-owned” criteria, that criterion is marked as “No.” This does not necessarily mean the journal fails to meet the standard, but simply that its compliance cannot be publicly verified. Thus, journals that do not verifiably comply with these two criteria can be listed in the DDH, but are not marked as “fully diamond.” We encourage these journals to improving their public information about authorship and ownership to become eligible for full Diamond Open Access status.