Charting the landscape of Italian Diamond Open Access publishing

Diamond Open Access (DOA) is a non-commercial model of scholarly publishing that removes financial barriers for authors and readers. While international studies have outlined the global uptake of DOA, this paper investigates the presence and characteristics of the DOA landscape in Italy. We conducted a quantitative analysis on the 168 Italian journals classified as Diamond by EZB, and we studied their publishing volume, disciplinary distribution and citation impact by integrating information from the following open resources: DOAJ, OpenAIRE, ROAD, SCImago Journal Rank, and the ANVUR classification used in the Italian Research Assessment Framework (VQR). Key findings include the significant growth of DOA journals, particularly in the social sciences and humanities, as well as the high level of international citations, indicating strong global relevance. The study also highlights challenges such as the need for better indexing and comprehensive data to fully capture the DOA landscape.