About the Press

Who we are

Alma Diamond Books is the publishing service for books and series by Alma Diamond, the open access institutional publishing office of the University of Bologna. It hosts open access scientific series, free of charge for both readers and authors, according to the Diamond Open Access model.

Alma Diamond Books is a service aimed at publishing editorial initiatives from the academic community of the University of Bologna. It aims to promote a fair and sustainable publishing model that supports diversity within scientific communities.

What we publish

At present, Alma Diamond Books is addressed to book series. Please consult the list of active or upcoming series.

It is currently not possible to submit individual books outside of the series.

To propose the creation of a new books series and present your editorial project, see the service page.

Peer Review

Alma Diamond Books provides for the following peer review procedures, carried out under the supervision and responsibility of the editorial board (steering committee) of each series. Full details are provided in the policy pages for each series:

  • double-blind peer review: a review process in which both the author and the reviewer remain anonymous, do not know each other’s identities, and cannot communicate directly.

  • single-blind peer review: a review process in which the reviewer remains anonymous. In this case, the reviewer is aware of the author’s identity; direct communication between reviewer and author is not possible;

  • non-anonymous peer review (open peer review): the identities of the author and reviewer are known to each other, and the parties involved can communicate directly; with the consent of all parties, the peer review materials may be made public.

In all cases, the peer review process is binding for acceptance for publication. This process covers individual books in each series or, in the case of collective works, individual essays.

Each series determines whether the reviewers, who are experts in the field, are external, part of the editorial staff or members of the steering committee or members of the series’ scientific committee.

The specific procedures for the review process are indicated in the information pages of each series or within each book.

As part of its preliminary checks, the series’ steering committee also uses the anti-plagiarism system iThenticate.

Open Access Policy

Alma Diamond Books is a service for Diamond Open Access initiatives and publishes all its content in open access, in the belief that free access to research ensures greater exchange of knowledge.

The participating series are published under one of the Creative Commons licenses. By submitting a proposal to one of the series, the author agrees to its publication under the specific license, while retaining their copyright.

The specific licenses adopted are indicated on the information pages for each series.

Metadata

CC0

All the metadata of the published material — including references and abstracts — is released in the public domain and may be used by anyone free of charge.

We kindly ask users to provide a link to the original metadata record.

Self-archiving

Authors may disseminate previous versions prior to submission, the submitted manuscript version (preprint), and the final revised draft (postprint) on a personal website, collaborative wiki, department website, social media, institutional repository, or non-commercial thematic repository.

In the case of peer-reviewed series with anonymous authors, this may only be done after the proposal has been accepted.

In any case, we ask that you indicate, when possible, the final publication location, including the DOI and an indication of the status of the deposited version.

Publication Fees

Alma Diamond Books and its series have neither article processing charges nor submission processing fees.

Ethics

Participating series adopts the Alma Diamond Books Code of Ethics.

The code is inspired by the guidelines from the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), in particular to the COPE Core Practices and its Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing.

All parties involved in the editorial process, editorial staff members, authors, reviewers must know and apply the ethical principles of that document.

Data Policy

When relevant, authors are encouraged to follow Open Science and FAIR principles by publishing the research data associated to their articles in trusted data repositories, according to the international best practices and data management guidelines.

Detailed information is reported in the Alma Diamond Books Data Policy.

Authors who are affiliated to the University of Bologna can publish their data in AMSActa, the institutional research data repository.

Archiving Policy

Alma Diamond Books is committed to implementing actions and strategies for long-term digital preservation of journal content published through its platform.

The University of Bologna has an archival arrangement with the National Central Libraries of Florence and Rome within the national project Magazzini Digitali.

AlmaDL is committed to uploading individual published issue on the platform to Internet Archive, a nonprofit digital library that has provided a permanent digital space for archiving digital content since 1996.

Publisher

Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna
Alma Diamond – open scholarly communication

Via Zamboni 33,
40126 - Bologna (Italy)