This Excel template helps Diamond open access (OA) journal teams build a three-year financial picture of their journal. It comes with a fully worked example for a fictional journal and is designed for use alongside the Financial sustainability planning toolkit for Diamond OA journals. 

Diamond OA journals do not charge fees for authors or readers. 

The template has five tabs, to be completed in order:

• Start here. Journal details, instructions, key principles.
• 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 to platform, identifiers and preservation, visibility and training. 
• 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. 
• 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.

The aim of the template is to make a journal's real costs visible and to test how resilient its funding is. 

How to cite: Johnson, R. (2026). EIFL - Diamond OA financial sustainability template. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23728901 

EIFL commissioned Rob Johnson of Research Consulting to develop the Financial sustainability planning toolkit for Diamond OA journals and its related resources within the framework of the three-year ‘Collaboration for Sustainable Open Access Publishing in Africa’ project, implemented by EIFL, AJOL (African Journals Online) and WACREN (the West and Central African Research and Education Network), with funding from Wellcome. Through the project, EIFL awarded grants to 33 projects aiming to strengthen Diamond OA journals. Input from EIFL and EIFL grantees helped to ensure that the toolkit reflects the needs and experiences of the journals and publishing communities they aim to support. Although developed in the context of Africa, the toolkit can be used by journals and publishing organizations worldwide.