This is the DOAJ Annual Highlights from 2024, which outlines some of the key data, projects and work from 2024. We’re proud to share our 2024 highlights with our global community! It’s been a year of steady growth and progress as we continue to champion equitable open access publishing, raise the profile of trustworthy OA journals, and strengthen our organisation. Equity and diversity are at the core of DOAJ. Our Ambassador Programme has worked with journal editors and publishers worldwide to raise awareness of OA and advocate for best practices. In 2024, we reviewed the programme, ensuring it aligns with our mission and supports our globally distributed organisation. The review highlighted the programme’s positive impact and provided recommendations to enhance how we support the network, which we’re excited to implement in 2025. We’ve also collaborated on more equitable business models at European and global levels, for example through the CRAFT-OA and DIAMAS Horizon Europe projects, and with AJOL, EIFL and WACREN’s project in Africa reflecting our commitment to community-driven, fee-free publishing models that ensure equitable access to knowledge. This year, we were especially pleased to expand our outreach in Africa and Latin America, hosting a multilingual webinar series to strengthen regional journals and improve the visibility of regional research. All DOAJ-indexed journals meet our rigorous quality criteria, the gold standard in open access publishing. During 2024’s widespread concern about trust and standards in scholarly publishing, we’ve increased transparency about the people and processes involved in keeping questionable practices out of the index, enhancing the trust of our indexed journals. We remain focused on sustainability, resilience and transparency. We conducted a community consultation on how our metadata is used to guide our future priorities and ensure our services remain relevant and useful. We also published our strategic roadmap online. We’re excited for 2025 and to continue leading in the evolving global open access landscape. We are committed to fostering a more inclusive, equitable, and sustainable future for open access publishing. Our achievements represent the efforts of not only DOAJ’s core team, but also our 100+ volunteer editors and ambassadors, and the wider DOAJ family—publishers, researchers, libraries, funders and partners—who support our work. We are grateful to them all, and look forward to continuing this journey together.