# Eposciences, a Platform for Publishing Diamond Open Access Overlay Journals

Céline Barthonnat, Raphaël Tournoy

<figure><img src="image_1.png" /></figure>

To cite this version:

Céline Barthonnat, Raphaël Tournoy. Eposciences, a Platform for Publishing Diamond Open Access Overlay Journals. 2024. hal-05168193

HAL Id: hal-05168193

https://hal.science/hal-05168193v1

Preprint submitted on 17 Jul 2025

HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access
archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci-
entific research documents, whether they are pub-
lished or not. The documents may come from
teaching and research institutions in France or
abroad, or from public or private research centers.

L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est
destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents
scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non,
émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de
recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires
publics ou privés.

<figure><img src="image_2.png" /></figure>

Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
Episciences, a Platform for Publishing
Diamond Open Access Overlay
Journals

Note: The paper is the extended version of the presentation given at the OPERAS Conference "Opening collaboration for community-driven scholarly communication" held in Zadar in April 2024.

Abstract

Purpose

Episciences is a platform for publishing overlay diamond open access scientific journals. It publishes 36 overlay journals from several disciplines—mostly mathematics, informatics, applied mathematics, social sciences, and humanities— and, for this purpose, leverages open science infrastructures.

Approach

The content of the publications is hosted on open repositories (such as HAL, arXiv, Zenodo, bioRxiv, medRxiv), Data repositories for datasets and Software Heritage for software. It allows Episciences to benefit from the FAIR principles supported by these infrastructures while also adding value and services. The platform offers a complete publishing solution for researchers who can peer-review and publish articles, datasets and software. All these components may also be linked to each other in order to promote the FAIR principles and the reproducibility of science.

Findings

Relying on existing infrastructures allows publishing to be cost-efficient. Academic-
led, the platform is supported by French academic funding (Ministry of Higher
Education and Research, CNRS, Inria, and INRAE).
**Originality**

The platform listens to the scientific communities, through scientific committees. It offers solutions for copy-editing, communication and advice about the best practices in open science publishing.

Episciences is also open to new projects and collaborations on a European and international scale. The platform is available on the OpenAIRE catalogue of services and on the EOSC marketplace. Relying on open infrastructures, the overlay model and a dedicated support and editorial team, Episciences increases the transparency of the editorial workflow and allows researchers to regain control of their publishing means and processes.

**Keywords:** diamond open access, overlay journals, overlay platform, academic publishing, scientific journals

**Introduction**

Launched in 2013, Episciences is a platform for publishing overlay diamond open access scientific journals, open to all countries and languages. Supported by French academic funding, Episciences publishes overlay journals and, for this purpose, leverages open science infrastructures. The content of the publications is hosted on open repositories. It allows Episciences to benefit from the FAIR principles supported by these infrastructures while also adding value and services. To date, the platform offers a complete publishing solution for researchers who can peer-review and publish articles but also datasets and software.

A brief history of the platform will show how deeply anchored Episciences is in the academic community (1). Then we would like to highlight how Episciences is creating an innovative diamond open access publishing solution based on the overlay model (2) and how the technical and editorial services offered have evolved in recent years, to meet the needs of users as closely as possible (3).
# 1. A project for the benefit of the scientific community

The origin of the project is an original idea of a French mathematician, Jean-Pierre Demailly (1957-2022). Then professor at the Institut Fourier (University of Grenoble I), member of the Institut Universitaire de France and editor-in-chief of the *Annales de l'Institut Fourier*, in 2002-2003 he devised a way for the scientific community to reclaim scientific publication. The aim of this project, initially called 'Open Science and online evaluation of Open Archives', was to break away from the large private publishers who were capturing an increasing share of scientific publications and charging substantial fees for publication and access to these publications. Jean-Pierre Demailly aims to set up a mechanism for the online evaluation of scientific pre-publications, then allow open consultation of the article's content and its evaluation on a single tool. To achieve this, he plans to rely on recognised open archives in the field of mathematics, primarily arXiv and mp-arc (Mathematical Physics Preprint Archive). It will take about ten years to refine the project.

Jean-Pierre Demailly began discussions with Greg Kuperberg, Professor of Mathematics at the University of California, Davis, and Chair of the Mathematics Department at arXiv, and with Franck Laloë, the French physicist who was behind the creation of the national open archive HAL in 2001,<fnref n="1" /> and then Director of the Center for Direct Scientific Communication (Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe, CCSD).<fnref n="2" /> He brought together a number of internationally renowned mathematicians to support his project, including Timothy Gowers from England, who won the Fields Medal in 1998 for his research in functional analysis and combinatorics, and Terence Tao from Australia, a professor at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and himself a Fields Medal winner in 2006. In 2012, these two leading figures joined the Mathematics scientific committee of Episciences, which had just been set up by Jean-Pierre Demailly to evaluate mathematical works previously deposited in open archives.

Thanks to institutional support, initially from the CCSD and the Institut Fourier, combined with the involvement of internationally recognised mathematicians,

<footnote n="1">¹ HAL multidisciplinary open archive: https://hal.science/</footnote>

<footnote n="2">² See 2001-2021: a HAL Odyssey/L'odyssée de HAL, 2001-2021 (in French): https://www.ccsd.cnrs.fr/en/reference-documents/</footnote>
Episciences was launched in April 2013 (Gowers, 2013; Van Noorden, 2013). The following year, the National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology (Institut national de recherche en informatique et en automatique, now Institut national de recherche en sciences et technologies du numérique, Inria) became a trustee of the CCSD and joined the project.<fnref n="3" /> Episciences now benefits from a technical infrastructure operated by the CCSD and provides dedicated support for the journals that join the platform. Since the beginning, hosting and support for the journals are provided free of charge.

The first journals to appear were in computer science and applied mathematics: *Journal of Data Mining and Digital Humanities* (JDMDH) and *Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science* (DMTCS).<fnref n="4" /> The former was created ex nihilo by Inria. As for the latter, it has been in existence since 1997 and has chosen to migrate to Episciences (Berthaud *et al.*, 2014; Riverieux *et al.*, 2014).

Ten years after its launch,<fnref n="5" /> the platform now has 36 publications covering a range of disciplines, mainly mathematics, computer science and applied mathematics, as well as the humanities and social sciences. More recently, Episciences has opened up to new disciplines such as physics, biomechanics and health sciences.<fnref n="6" />

Now developed by the CCSD with the support of the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research, the CNRS, Inria and the National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and the Environment (Institut national de recherche pour l'agriculture, l'alimentation et l'environnement, INRAE), Episciences is one of the three technological and service platforms of the HAL+ research infrastructure, along with HAL and Sciencesconf.<fnref n="7" />

The platform's governance is composed of the steering committee of the CCSD, a new Scientific Orientation Committee to be announced in 2024, and three scientific disciplinary committees. The scientific disciplinary committees, in Mathematics,

<footnote n="3">³ "2014: CCSD becomes a combined service unit (UMS3668) with CNRS, INRIA and Lyon University", https://www.ccsd.cnrs.fr/en/highlights/</footnote>

<footnote n="4">⁴ JDMDH: https://jdmdh.episciences.org/; DMTCS: https://dmtcs.episciences.org/</footnote>

<footnote n="5">⁵ The platform celebrated its tenth anniversary in 2023. See the event website: https://episciences2023.sciencesconf.org/</footnote>

<footnote n="6">⁶ Journals catalogue: https://www.episciences.org/journals/</footnote>

<footnote n="7">⁷ The CCSD: https://www.ccsd.cnrs.fr/en/ccsd-the-unit/</footnote>
Informatics and Applied Mathematics and Social Sciences and Humanities, are in
charge of the scientific reviews of the journal applying to join the platform. They are
also responsible for promoting the overlay model among their peers.

In ten years, the Episciences team has stabilised and now comprises eight people: the platform manager (CNRS-CCSD), two developers (INRAE-CCSD and CNRS-CCSD), and five people in charge of editorial and documentary support: one from Institut Fourier, Scientific and Technical Information Department, another one from CNRS-CCSD, and three from Inria, Scientific Publishing Division of the Scientific Information and Publishing Department.

## 2. An innovative Diamond Open Access publishing model based on the overlay principle

### 2.1. How the overlay model works

Episciences is a platform specifically designed from the ground up for publishing overlay journals. Providing a different approach with the overlay model, Episciences contributes to the bibliodiversity among other academic diamond open access initiatives. One of the core and singular aspects of overlay journals is that their publications are hosted on preprint servers. Overlay journals are not responsible for hosting their content, they are designed as a layer of services, on top of open repositories, leveraging the content hosted and published by these open infrastructures. In this sense, Episciences offers a model aligned with the Publish, Review, Curate (PRC) model.

The publishing workflow starts with a preprint put online by their authors. Once the document is online, the contributors will simply use the identifier and version number of the preprint server to initiate a submission on the journal's website. The review process is then operated by the board, with appointed editors and invited reviewers. The review process may lead to publishing an open peer review report, depending on the habits of the journal, its community, or the wishes of the reviewers and authors. If open peer review is not selected by the journal, the only other available option is single blind peer review. The authors cannot be anonymous, for the preprint has to be put online before starting the review process.
Several versions may be submitted to the journal, each time with a new public
submission on the preprint server. This process allows the reader to trace the history
of a document from the preprint to the published version.

When an Episciences journal rejects a reviewed preprint, nothing is mentioned online. The authors are free to revise and resubmit to a different journal. Accepted articles are subject to a copy-editing phase, the final version is published on the website of the journal and a persistent identifier—a Digital Object Identifier, DOI—is added (Figure 1).

<figure><img src="image_3.png" /><figcaption>**Figure 1** – A publishing workflow on top of open infrastructures
(credits: Marion Gaigeot and Agnès Magron, CCSD, CC-BY 4.0)</figcaption></figure>
Only one specific version endorsed by the journal is published with a DOI.
Nevertheless, the authors are free to submit revised versions of their published
article on the preprint server. Eventually, they might also consider submitting the
revised version to the journal again, so that the editors may update the published
version for the benefits of the readers and authors. One of the advantages of this
model is that it automatically creates a "record of versions" instead of only a "version
of record". The metadata of the latest published version, always references the
previous versions available on the preprint servers, all the versions are linked
together.

The publication workflow supported by Episciences and the preprint servers can be
compared to a conversion flow with milestones, or reusing the metaphor of Jean-
Claude Guédon, to “crystals of knowledge” (Stern, Guédon and Jensen 2015).
Episciences can be considered as a publishing hub, allowing the academic
communities to self organise, to publish, to review and to curate content hosted in
several different open infrastructures. Each new linked component (dataset,
software, open peer review, etc.) adds value to the previous one and to the whole
publication workflow.

## 2.2. Advantages of the overlay model

Besides the record of versions, Episciences' overlay model offers several
advantages.

One of the most important is not technical. It allows journal boards to operate
journals on their own, by re-introducing an academic publishing model where
researchers own the title of their journal. Episciences is an academic publishing
platform, not a publisher. Thus the researchers are owners of their journals, as much
as authors retain the rights to their publications. All the more so since the content is
not actually hosted by the platform.

Not hosting the content also provides a cost efficient publishing model, leveraging
the preprint servers and their long term preservation policy. Even if the Episciences
platform disappeared, the content published by the journals would remain online,
accessible, and could be updated by the researchers. The metadata of the
publications would also still be available, since it is harvested by several open
science infrastructures, in addition to the preprint servers themselves.
The overlay model, based on open archives, is by design, compliant with open access mandates. For every submitted version is open access from the very beginning of the publication workflow. Another advantage of early preprint submissions is that authors can time stamp and protect their findings. On the contrary to traditional journals, the preprints can be cited all along the publishing process, without waiting for a final published version. The platform builds on top of the green open access model, to create a diamond open access model, achieving immediate full open access, without any possible embargo or paywall. Eposciences' model is also compliant with the Rights Retention Strategy<fnref n="8" />: authors submit their documents online with a Creative Commons licence (usually CC-BY) and journals have a non-exclusive distribution right.

### 3. Technical and editorial services

Eposciences has been designed with the researchers in mind. The goal is to provide a complete platform to allow the academic community to operate diamond open access journals. The core services were obviously the submission and peer review system, but over time, the software solution has evolved to offer all the tools to operate modern overlay journals. The platform provides its software components as open source software<fnref n="9" /> and its metadata with a CC0 licence. The first preprint servers supported by Eposciences were arXiv and HAL, but more recently Zenodo, BioRxiv and MedRxiv were added. The goal is to open the platform to institutional repositories to foster collaborations and encourage researchers to publish in overlay journals using their repository of choice. Any data repository powered by the Dataverse software can also be used to submit datasets. A new journal has just been accepted in 2024, that will conduct the scientific evaluation and curation of datasets.

Eposciences is also interconnected with open science infrastructures managed and supported by OpenAIRE<fnref n="10" />. OpenAIRE is a non-profit organisation supporting Open

<footnote n="8">⁸ "Rights Retention Strategy", cOAlition S: https://www.coalition-s.org/resources/rights-retention-strategy/</footnote>

<footnote n="9">⁹ https://archive.softwareheritage.org/swh:1:dir:309043823a5dd0f53bd0b05b19c94f68e2a389f7;origin=https://github.com/CCSDForge/eposciences;visit=swh:1:snp:4a3c0b105e08da2f8348cbfe1145c0270f5fc80f;anchor=swh:1:rev:dd7b51889f2d2ec5e1a25c1fbd935adaf14662f6</footnote>

<footnote n="10">¹⁰ OpenAIRE: https://www.openaire.eu/about</footnote>
Science through a diverse set of public services. Thanks to the OpenAIRE Nexus<fnref n="11" /> project, Episciences has been integrated into the OpenAIRE Catalogue of services and connected to many services promoted by this Open Science Infrastructure. The support of OpenAIRE and its services has allowed Episciences to propose a platform to publish diamond open access journals to the OpenAIRE users and at the same time enrich the FAIRness of the whole platform. For instance OpenAIRE Graph is used to automatically find and add new ORCID for the authors, new funding information for the articles published, discover datasets linked to its publications, etc. We also used services such as OpenCitations to discover which articles are citing our own publications. Episciences has established a complete workflow based on those services to continuously enrich its publications metadata and FAIRness. All the information gathered by the platform is available with a REST API and an OAI-PMH endpoint. All the produced metadata is available with a CC0 licence.

Episciences is also a use case contributor to the COAR Notify protocol<fnref n="12" /> and one of the first platforms to implement it. The COAR Notify protocol is proposed by the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR). It has been developed to increase interoperability across repositories and other services, such as overlay journals. Episcience leverages the protocol to exchange information with the HAL open repository. For instance it allows authors to submit a preprint to HAL, and at the same time propose it to an overlay journal<fnref n="13" />. For this work a new software library has been created thanks to funding from the French National Fund for Open Science (FNSO) in the framework of the HALOWIN project<fnref n="14" />. The library<fnref n="15" /> is a free software used by Episciences and HAL. Implementing the protocol and proposing this workflow is an effective way to promote the submission of preprints and the usage of overlay journals on the HAL open archive. Our ambition, in the future, is to use the

<footnote n="11">¹¹ OpenAIRE-Nexus Scholarly Communication Services for EOSC users: https://doi.org/10.3030/101017452</footnote>

<footnote n="12">¹² COAR Notify: https://notify.coar-repositories.org/</footnote>

<footnote n="13">¹³ Agnès Magron, “Submitting a preprint to an Episciences journal: a new feature in the HAL deposit form”, CCSD’s blog, 12/12/2023: https://www.ccsd.cnrs.fr/en/2023/12/submitting-a-preprint-to-an-episciences-journal-a-new-feature-in-the-hal-deposit-form/</footnote>

<footnote n="14">¹⁴ “HALOWIN. HAL Open Workflows and Interoperability”, Ouvrir la science: https://www.ouvrirlascience.fr/hal-open-workflows-and-interoperability-2/</footnote>

<footnote n="15">¹⁵ COAR Notification Manager https://archive.softwareheritage.org/swh:1:dir:7d97130ca56711c28b2fadfac6cc4549b51318cf;origin=h tps://github.com/CottageLabs/coar-notifications;visit=swh:1:snp:afd0bd6afb73810c2d48b9c119001488f77a24e6;anchor=swh:1:rev:6a4e 9decf99f54881de566e88ed59e8e0c1389aa</footnote>
protocol to ease the interactions between Episciences and other compatible open infrastructures. The COAR Notify protocol is a unique opportunity to offer next generation services to users of preprints or datasets servers, for instance by connecting with peer-review services such as overlay journals.

Recent additions to the platform feature improved links between publications, datasets and software<fnref n="16" />. Any data-repository can be used to reference datasets used by the publications. This is an efficient way to acknowledge the value of the work achieved by the researchers on datasets and to the importance of the datasets themselves for reproducibility.

For software, Episciences leverage Software Heritage in order to archive and cite research codes used or referenced by publications (Di Cosmo 2022). This integration has been achieved in the frame of the FAIRCORE4EOSC<fnref n="17" /> project.

Another recent addition is a tool to manage and extract the bibliographical references of the published articles<fnref n="18" />. Most of the work is automated and based on the GROBID software that works on PDF files to extract relevant information (Romary, Lopez 2015). This effort is aligned with the Initiative for Open Citations<fnref n="19" />. Since we are building services on top of the tools provided by OpenCitations, it is important to share our citations in the same way as any other metadata.

The Episciences team also works closely with the journals' technical and scientific committees. This proximity allows to develop a technical offer and to tailor editorial services as closely as possible to the needs of users. Among the current projects, two in particular are being developed with users. These are the project to overhaul the public interfaces of the journals' websites and the development of an editorial service.

The web interface of the journals have changed very little since it was created in 2013. Admittedly, a number of technical changes have been made over time in response to user feedback. However, the visual aspect has never undergone any in-

<footnote n="16">¹⁶ “Linking publications/data/software”, *Episciences* - *Documentation*: https://doc.episciences.org/software/; Agnès Magron, “Linking your article with a dataset or software: it’s now easier on Episciences”, CCSD’s blog, 30/11/2023: https://www.ccsd.cnrs.fr/en/2023/11/linking-your-article-with-a-dataset-or-software-its-now-easier-on-episciences/</footnote>

<footnote n="17">¹⁷ https://faircore4eosc.eu/</footnote>

<footnote n="18">¹⁸ “Managing bibliographical references”, *Episciences* - *Documentation*: https://doc.episciences.org/citations/</footnote>

<footnote n="19">¹⁹ https://i4oc.org/</footnote>
depth development. The significant increase in the number of journals in recent years, from 14 by the end of 2019 to 25 by the end of 2022 (Figure 2, Table 1), has led to a need for a redesign of the platform's interfaces (point 12 of the 2023 Action Plan).<fnref n="20" />

<figure><img src="image_4.png" /><figcaption>**Figure 2** – Number of Episciences journals per year and breakdown by discipline
(credits: the authors, CC-BY 4.0)</figcaption></figure>

<table><caption>**Table 1** – Number of Episciences journals per year and discipline</caption><thead><tr><th>Year</th><th>Informatics and Applied Mathematics</th><th>Mathematics</th><th>Social Sciences and Humanities</th><th>Others</th><th>Total</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>2013</td><td>1</td><td>0</td><td>0</td><td>0</td><td>1</td></tr><tr><td>2014</td><td>3</td><td>1</td><td>0</td><td>0</td><td>4</td></tr><tr><td>2015</td><td>4</td><td>1</td><td>1</td><td>0</td><td>6</td></tr><tr><td>2016</td><td>5</td><td>2</td><td>1</td><td>0</td><td>8</td></tr><tr><td>2017</td><td>5</td><td>2</td><td>4</td><td>0</td><td>11</td></tr><tr><td>2018</td><td>5</td><td>2</td><td>5</td><td>0</td><td>12</td></tr><tr><td>2019</td><td>5</td><td>4</td><td>5</td><td>0</td><td>14</td></tr><tr><td>2020</td><td>8</td><td>5</td><td>6</td><td>0</td><td>19</td></tr></tbody></table>

<footnote n="20">²⁰ “The CCSD publishes its 2023 action plan”: https://www.ccsd.cnrs.fr/en/2023/02/the-ccsd-publishes-its-2023-action-plan/</footnote>
<table><thead><tr><th>Year</th><th>Informatics and Applied Mathematics</th><th>Mathematics</th><th>Social Sciences and Humanities</th><th>Others</th><th>Total</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>2021</td><td>9</td><td>7</td><td>7</td><td>1</td><td>24</td></tr><tr><td>2022</td><td>9</td><td>7</td><td>8</td><td>1</td><td>25</td></tr><tr><td>2023</td><td>10</td><td>8</td><td>9</td><td>2</td><td>29</td></tr><tr><td>2024</td><td>12</td><td>9</td><td>10</td><td>5</td><td>36</td></tr></tbody></table>

Others: Biomechanics, Health Sciences and Physics... for the moment.

(credits: the authors, CC-BY 4.0)

For this major project, we called on a design agency with extensive experience in the field of scientific publications.<fnref n="21" /> The User eXperience (UX) design methodology proposed required the involvement of the journal editors. The Episciences meeting held in Lyon on the occasion of the platform's tenth anniversary provided an opportunity to get to know the users and to strengthen the link with them. As a result, several editorial board members from different journals are participating in one or another phase of the project with great interest and enthusiasm. Two small-group workshops will be held to gather information about users' needs, which can vary greatly from one discipline to another (and from one journal to another). Individual interviews on specific points complete the process. At each stage, users are asked to help ensure that the final product meets not only their needs but also their expectations.

The project is currently being finalised. One of the final stages will be to adapt the content of the sites (presentation of the journal, drafting of an ethics charter where one does not exist, updating of the publication policy, etc.) in order to integrate them seamlessly into the new interfaces, but also to make the operation of the journals public and transparent. In this respect, the new sites will meet the editorial criteria required by several indexing databases, in particular DOAJ, which will allow all the journals on the platform to be added in this open access reference tool.<fnref n="22" />

In addition to indexing in international and disciplinary reference databases, editorial teams are increasingly looking for long-term solutions for editing. The analysis of the different needs of editorial teams was formalised in the presentation of the Édisciences project, which aims to facilitate the editorial preparation of articles and to

<footnote n="21">²¹ The CCSD has already worked with the Atelier Universel's designers, who are responsible for the new look and feel of HAL, which has been unveiled for its 20th anniversary in 2021.</footnote>

<footnote n="22">²² “Guide to applying”, DOAJ: https://doaj.org/apply/guide/</footnote>
produce structured publications in accordance with editorial quality standards (FAIR principles).

Édisciences is one of the winners of the third call for projects launched by the French National Fund for Open Science in 2023.<fnref n="23" /> The project will be carried out with three partner journals: *Recherche en didactique des mathématiques* (RDM), *Cahiers Scientifiques du Transport/Scientific Papers in Transportation* (CST) and *Journal of Theoretical, Computational and Applied Mechanics* (JTCAM),<fnref n="24" /> thus meeting the needs of three of the platform's main disciplinary areas: mathematics, humanities and computer sciences, and applied mathematics through mechanics.

In practice, the project is divided into two parts. The first part consists of designing two generic templates, in LaTeX for journals containing a large number of mathematical formulae, and in InDesign for other journals (mainly humanities and social sciences journals). These layouts are adapted to the graphic charter of the journals so that the publication can be easily identified, while maintaining the coherence of the Episciences platform. They also include the essential elements for referencing articles in international databases. The second aspect concerns the editorial work on the texts. Depending on the needs and wishes of each publication, specifications are drawn up so that publishing professionals can be called in to prepare the text, proofread, style and layout. This stage includes the establishment of a proofreading protocol specific to each publication, in accordance with the standards in the discipline, the implementation of a page layout procedure, and support in the use of Episciences for all those involved in the editorial process.

These few examples show that Episciences' services are constantly being enriched in response to user requests. This co-design approach with users allows us to have a platform with a high level of technical expertise, while remaining close to the needs of the communities.

## Conclusion

Over the course of a bit more than ten years of history, Episciences has evolved into a full featured platform for publishing diamond open access overlay journals. Its

<footnote n="23">²³ “Édisciences. Éditorialiser les contenus publiés sur Episciences”, *Ouvrir la science*: https://www.ouvrirlascience.fr/edisciences/</footnote>

<footnote n="24">²⁴ RDM: https://rdm.episciences.org/; CST: https://cst.episciences.org/; JTCAM: https://jtcam.episciences.org/</footnote>
focus is on establishing partnerships and developing innovative publishing solutions based on open infrastructures. New solutions for peer-review of publications, datasets and software will soon be developed and proposed to the community within the framework of the nEpHAL+ project.<fnref n="25" /> This project, funded by the French National Fund for Open Science, will include several partners such as Inria, Software Heritage and DARIAH—who has opened its overlay journal, *Transformations*, on the Episciences platform in 2024.<fnref n="26" /> The NepHAL+ project will also serve as the basis to an updated version of the Episciences platform, with a new UI/UX for the back-office used to manage the journals.

There is a momentum building around diamond open access journals, driven by a desire for more equitable, inclusive and accessible academic publishing. The model gained support in recent years from both governments and academic communities. It will also be supported by UNESCO, with the Global Diamond Open Access Alliance announced in July 2024.<fnref n="27" /> Episciences intends to seize this opportunity and contribute to the diamond open access model with overlay journals.

The overlay model met the expectations of several journal teams, but efforts in the next coming years need to be focused on obtaining more diverse and innovative funding sources for the journals and the platform itself. The goal is to be able to support journals that would like to flip to academic publishing with a diamond open access model, or to support journals that would like to start with an overlay model. To achieve this goal, we intend to develop a special effort on outreach and engagement towards the academic communities. This will also be an opportunity to ensure that Episciences and the overlay journals meet the needs of the academic community, and confirm their place in the bibliodiversity of diamond open access.

<footnote n="25">²⁵ “nEpHAL+. next Episciences for HAL+”, Ouvrir la science: https://www.ouvrirlascience.fr/nephal/</footnote>

<footnote n="26">²⁶ *Transformations: A DARIAH Journal* is a multilingual journal created in 2024 by the European research infrastructure DARIAH ERIC: https://transformations.episciences.org/</footnote>

<footnote n="27">²⁷ “Announcing the Global Diamond Open Access Alliance”, UNESCO: https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/announcing-global-diamond-open-access-alliance</footnote>
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