Building a Diamond OA Journal Ecosystem: A Community-Driven Approach to Journal Production and Dissemination at INRAE

The French National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment (INRAE) is the leading research organization dedicated to these three scientific fields. INRAE addresses these challenges through an interdisciplinary approach. The institute brings to-gether the largest French-speaking community in the social sciences applied to agriculture, food, and the environment. INRAE is a major player in scholarly publishing, with a portfolio of around twenty journals (https://science-ouverte.inrae.fr/fr/inrae-editeur). It is a founding member of the publishing house Quæ (https://www.quae.com/), and of the Alliance of French Public Scientific Publishers (https://www.ouvrirlascience.fr/the-creation-of-the-alliance-of-french-public-scientific-publishers- alef/), established at the end of 2024. INRAE joined OPERAS as a new supporting member in 2026. It shares with OPERAS a commons-based approach, which conceives of science as a common good and promotes free and equitable access to reading and publishing for all audiences, particularly in the Global South. Both organizations align with the vision of the Diamond OA model, considered the most relevant framework to support this approach and to enable scientific communities to regain ownership of the means of scholarly communication. In recent months, we have been working to improve the open science practices of one of our diamond open access digital journals, Innovations agronomiques (https://ddh.diamas.org/en/journals/22640), which has existed for nearly twenty years. We brought together several stakeholders to build a strong and open ecosystem for the production and dissemination of the journal’s articles, using infrastructures managed by scholars and/or institutional providers. The journal is produced with the Métopes tool suite, supported by a national research infrastructure affiliated with the University of Caen (https://mrsh.unicaen.fr/metopes/). Based on a single-source publishing model, Métopes enables the editorial team to produce all dissemination formats from a single manuscript: PDF, EPUB, and HTML for Open Journal Systems. Since this year, we have used the Quæ publishing house distribution channels to supply numerous platforms, including library providers as well as generalist platforms (Amazon, Google Play, etc.), to which we deliver each issue of the journal as a book, with its own ISBN. Because we believe that open science is open to all, the EPUB version is fully accessible to people with disabilities. We have partnered with the University of Paris-Saclay, which is developing an OJS platform interoperable with our editorial production pipeline. We aim to use OJS to manage both the manuscript workflow and the publication of journal articles in plain-text HTML and PDF formats. To address international needs for open scholarly resources, especially in the Global South, the journal has also partnered with the EU-FarmBook platform (https://eufarmbook.eu/en), a Horizon Europe project developing an online platform to gather and share knowledge in agriculture and forestry.