Episciences is a platform to publish diamond open access overlay journals.

It offers an alternative to the monolithic system of scientific publication dominated by private publishers. The ambition is to provide the scientific communities with the technical means to produce high quality journals, at an efficient cost, compliant by design with FAIR principles, by relying on open archives and repositories in general (arXiv ; Zenodo ; HAL ; CWI). The mechanism implemented is simple: the submission of an article to a journal is done by a prior deposit in an open archive. The article is freely accessible and therefore consultable by all, whether or not it is accepted by the journal.

Episciences contributes to the development of bibliodiversity by supporting an alternative path to the conventional model of scientific publication. The editorial process is based on a convergence of the stages of qualification, certification and dissemination and a system for recording the different versions of a document (the preprint reviewed, revised, accepted for publication, the new version, the published article are all "record of version"). Thus the value chain is no longer limited to the only reference version which is the published article ("version of record").

The platform is currently being integrated in the OpenAIRE service catalogue and the EOSC portal thanks to the OpenAIRE Nexus project.

Episciences is tightly coupled with open repositories and will soon leverage the COAR Notify project to enhance overlay journals’s interoperability with open repositories. Based on recommendations of Notify Project, the journals will be able to exchange notifications with open repositories. For instance authors will be able to submit their preprint to a journal right after their submission on a preprint server ; the preprint servers will be able to be notified when a preprint has been endorsed and published by a journal.