EIFL - Diamond OA financial sustainability template

This Excel template helps Diamond Open Access journal teams build a three-year financial picture of their journal. It was developed by Research Consulting for the EIFL Diamond OA sustainability planning programme, which supports African Diamond OA journals with funding from Wellcome. It is designed for use alongside the Financial sustainability planning toolkit for Diamond Open Access journals.

The template has five tabs, completed in order:

• Start here. Journal details, instructions, key principles and a colour guide. Yellow cells are for data entry and blue cells calculate automatically.
• Team time. Records the unpaid and in-kind time given to the journal by editors, reviewers, IT and administrative staff, and calculates its annual value using local hourly rates. It includes indicative guidance on typical working hours and hourly rates.
• Our costs. A three-year projection of cash costs across eleven expense categories, from people and per-article production to platform, identifiers and preservation, visibility, training and memberships. Each cost is marked fixed or variable. In-kind values from the Team time tab are added automatically, so the tab shows the full cost of running the journal.
• Our funding. Lists each source of income or support over three years. Each source is classed as committed, probable or possible and matched to a reference list of 14 Diamond-compatible funding types. The tab also checks whether the journal depends too heavily on a single source.
• Summary. Shows the three-year position: total costs (cash and in-kind), total funding and surplus or deficit. It includes a contingency test of what happens if the largest funder stops, a diversification check against a 60–70% maximum share for any single source, and space to record next steps.

Approximate figures are fine. The aim is to make a journal's real costs visible and to test how resilient its funding is, not to produce audited accounts. A completed worked example for a fictional journal is published alongside the template.