Diamond open access


Diamond open access refers to academic texts published/distributed/preserved with no fees to either reader or author. Alternative labels include platinum open access, non-commercial open access, cooperative open access or, more recently, open access commons. While these terms were first coined in the 2000s and the 2010s, they have been retroactively applied to a variety of structures and forms of publishing, from subsidized university publishers to volunteer-run cooperatives that existed in prior decades.
In 2021, it is estimated that between 17,000 and 29,000 scientific journals rely on a diamond open access model. They make up 73% of the journals registered in the Directory of Open Access Journals and 44% of the articles, as their mean output is smaller than commercial journals. The diamond model has been especially successful in Latin America-based journals following the emergence of large publicly supported platforms, such as SciELO and Redalyc. However, Diamond OA journals are under-represented in the major scholarly databases, such as Web of Science and Scopus. It is also noteworthy, that high-income countries "have the highest share of authorship in every domain and type of journal, except for diamond journals in the social sciences and humanities".
In 2022, new national and international policies, such as the UNESCO recommendation on open science, and the Action Plan for Diamond Open Access promoted by the cOAlition S aim to support the development of non-commercial or community-driven forms of open access publishing.

Context and definition

Historical roots of diamond models: knowledge clubs and commons

Until the Second World War, academic publishing was mostly characterized by a wide range of community-driven scholarly structures with little concern for profitability. Most journals of the 19th century and the first part of the 20th century were collective initiatives led by a scientific movement or institution that largely relied on informal community norms rather than commercial regulations. These historical practices have been described as a form of knowledge commons, or, more specifically, as a knowledge club that holds an intermediary status between a knowledge commons and a private company: while managed by a community, journals are mostly used to the benefit of a selected set of authors and readers.
In Western Europe and North America, direct ownership of journals by academic communities and institutions started to wane in the 1950s. The expansion of scientific publishing in the context of big science led to a perceived "crisis" of the historical model of scientific periodicals. Between 1950 and 1980, the new model of large commercial publishers came to dominate numerous fields of scientific publishing in western countries:
This transformation had wide-ranging consequences over the way scientific journals were managed, not only at the economic but also at the editorial level with an increased standardization of publishing norms, peer-review process, or copyrights. Yet it was neither global nor general, and communal forms of journal ownership and management remained significant in large geographic areas and in several disciplines, especially in the humanities and the social sciences.

Development of "grassroots" open access (1990–2010)

The open access movement emerged both as a consequence of the unprecedented access afforded by online publishing and as a reaction against the large corporate model that has come to dominate scientific publishing since the Second World War and the hyper-inflation of subscription prices. The early pioneers of open access electronic publishing were non-commercial and community-driven initiatives that built up on a trend of grassroot publishing innovation in the social sciences and the humanities:
Specialized free software for scientific publishing like Open Journal Systems became available after 2000. This development entailed a significant expansion of non-commercial open access journals by facilitating the creation and the administration of journal websites and the digital conversion of existing journals. Among the journals registered in the Directory of Open Access Journals without an article processing charge, the number of annual creation has gone from 100 by the end of the 1990s to 800 around 2010, and has not evolved significantly since then.

Debates over the identity of the open access commons (2003–2012)

In the early debates over open access, the distinctions between commercial and non-commercial forms of scientific publishing and community-driven or corporate-owned structures seldom appear, possibly due to the lack of viable business model for open access. Open access publications were rather increasingly categorized into two different editorial forms: open access articles made immediately available by the publisher and pre-published articles hosted on an online archive. Starting in 2003, the ROMEO project started to devise a color-code system to better identify the policy of scientific publishers in regard to open sharing of scientific articles, from "yellow" to "green" : "the 'greenest' publishers are those that allow self-archiving not only of the author's accepted manuscript, but of the fully formatted and paginated publisher PDF". In 2004, Harnad et al. repurposed this classification scheme into a highly influential binary scale: articles directly made available by the publisher belong to "gold" open access and online archives are defined as "green" open access. With this breakdown of open access into "green" and "gold", there is no distinction between commercial and non-commercial publishers. For Peter Suber the "gold" model embraces both journals supported by APCs or by other means of funding, as well as volunteer-run journals: "In the jargon, OA delivered by journals is called gold OA, and OA delivered by repositories is called green OA."
Tom Wilson introduced the expression "Platinum Open Access" in 2007 following an heated debate with Stevan Harnad and other open access activists on the American Scientist Open Access Forum mailing list. On his blog, Wilson defended the necessity of enlarging the classification of open access publishing forms as well as stressed the danger of conflating commercial and non-commercial open access journals.
The term "diamond open access" was coined later in 2012 by Marie Farge, a French mathematician and physicist and open access activist. Farge was involved in the Cost of Knowledge campaign led by Timothy Gowers against the excessive cost of scientific publishing. The reference to "diamond" was a hyperbolic pun on the "gold" metaphor that aims to suggest that non-commercial/free model were ultimately the best: "I have proposed to call this third way 'Diamond OA' by outbidding the 'Gold OA' terminology chosen by the publishers". "Free OA" was also contemplated as an alternative name.
The Forum of Mathematics, an open access journals co-created by Timothy Gowers, was the first publication to explicitly claim to be a diamond journal: "For the first three years of the journal, Cambridge University Press will waive the publication charges. So for three years the journal will be what Marie Farge likes to call diamond open access, a quasi-miraculous model where neither author nor reader pays anything".

Defining the diamond model (2012–present)

In 2013, Fuchs and Sandoval published one of the first systematic definitions of diamond open access: "Diamond open access Model, not-for-profit, non-commercial organizations, associations or networks publish material that is made available online in digital format, is free of charge for readers and authors and does not allow commercial and for-profit re-use." This definition is associated with a controversial stance against the leading definition of gold open access: "We argue for differentiating the concept of Gold Open Access Publishing because Suber and others mesh together qualitatively different models, i.e. for-profit and not-for-profit ones, into the same category, whereas others, especially policy makers, simply forget or exclude not-for-profit models that do not use author fees or reader fees." The debate over the relationship between "diamond" or "platinum" open access publications versus "Gold" open access has never settled and remains a point of contention, even after the publication of the OA Diamond Study. While valuing this study, Martin Paul Eve still considers diamond open access to be a "category error".
Since 2013, the theoretical literature on the diamond model has been increasingly influenced by institutional analysis of the commons. Consequently, the "Open access commons" has recently emerged has an alternative label, although the term is used less as a descriptor and more as a programmatic ideal for the future of non-commercial open access. The conclusion of the OA Diamond study calls for the realization of The OA Commons as "a diverse, thriving, innovative and more interconnected and collaborative OA diamond journal ecosystem that supports bibliodiversity and serves many languages, cultures and domains in the future.". Similarly, Janneke Adema and Samuel Moore have proposed to "redefine the future of scholarly publishing in communal settings" through a "scaling small" that ensures the preservation and development of diverse editorial models.
Analysis of the diamond model has been significantly deepened by the commission of large scale empirical studies such as the OA Cooperative Study by the Public Knowledge Project and the OA Diamond Study by the cOAlition S. Noteworthy, the 2021 study found:
  1. The number of Diamond OA journals is very large, but only ~a third are registered in DOAJ, and only ~5% are indexed in either Scopus or Web of Science. Over half of these Diamond OA journals publish 25 or fewer articles per year.
  2. Between 2017 and 2019, paid-access journals published ~80% of all articles, paid-OA journals published ~11%, and Diamond OA journals published ~9%.
  3. The share of Diamond OA publications among all OA journal articles peaked in 2018 and has been declining since.
  4. Only 4.3% of Diamond OA journals are fully compliant with all Plan S criteria.
  5. Only 55% of Diamond OA journals provide DOI numbers for their articles.
  6. Only 25% of Diamond OA journals provide their content as XML or HTML.
  7. Only ~ half of Diamond OA journals provide download statistics for their content.
  8. 2/3 of Diamond OA journals use double-blind peer review, higher than subscription journals, which prefer single-blind peer review.
  9. 25% of Diamond OA journals operated at a loss, and just over 40% reported breaking even. The rest did not know their financial status.
  10. Although all Diamond OA journals rely heavily on volunteer work, they have some revenue sources, such as grants, collectively-organised funding, donations, shared infrastructure, membership fees, freemium services, etc.
  11. 70% of Diamond OA journals declared operating costs below $/€10,000 per year. In contrast, before cancelling its subscription in 2012, Harvard alone paid $40,000 per year for just one of Elsevier's journals.
  12. The most challenging area for Diamond OA journals is indexing and content visibility in the main research databases, such as Scopus, Web of Science, and SciFinder.