The Portal of Croatian Scientific and Professional Journals – HRČAK has been operating for nearly two decades as the central national platform for Open Access (OA) journals. With over 550 journals, HRČAK plays a key role in enhancing the visibility, accessibility, and credibility of Croatian scholarly publishing by offering editors a comprehensive infrastructure for managing modern publishing workflows.

In late 2023, a pre-evaluation of journals on HRČAK was conducted, focusing on their alignment with the technical indexing criteria of the Scopus database. The insights gained from this process serve as a foundation for the development of a certification scheme for journals, based on both HRČAK’s criteria for inclusion and recommendations (HRČAK, 2024), as well as emerging European standards for Diamond OA publishing.

Of particular relevance are the Diamond OA Standard (DOAS), developed through the DIAMAS project (Consortium of the DIAMAS project, 2024), and the criteria of the Diamond Discovery Hub (DDH), developed within the CRAFT-OA project (Armengou et al., 2024). While DOAS offers a broad and detailed framework for assessing Diamond OA publishers across multiple dimensions—including governance, editorial quality, and infrastructure—DDH provides a more focused set of entry-level criteria aimed at identifying genuine community-owned, fee-free, and Open Access journals. Both initiatives share a common goal: to promote transparency, quality, and sustainability in non-commercial scholarly publishing.

These standards and frameworks will be considered whenever feasible in the development of the certification process, with the goal of encouraging improved editorial and technical practices, greater transparency, and facilitating the potential indexing of Croatian journals in global databases.

This short talk will analyse the outcomes, challenges, and opportunities arising from these evaluation procedures, with particular emphasis on the technical and editorial aspects of meeting the defined standards and criteria.