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Reflections on Diamond Open Access and cOAlition S

25/10/2024

International Open Access week and this year’s theme “Community over Commercialization” provide me with an excellent opportunity to reflect on the many actions that cOAlition S has been involved in over the last few years in the journey towards Diamond Open Access (OA).

Diamond OA is often defined as an equitable model of scholarly communication where authors and readers are not charged fees for publishing or reading. But it’s more than a business model. What truly sets it apart is its community-driven nature: scholarly communities own and control all content-related elements of scholarly publishing. Diamond OA thus engages the scholarly community in all aspects of the creation and ownership of content-related elements[1], from journal and platform titles, publications, reviews, preprints, decisions, data, and correspondence to reviewer databases[2]. This content-related perimeter and scholarly independence ensure that academic interests – not commercial ones – guide publishing decisions.

From the Diamond Study to the Action Plan

In 2020, when cOAlition S published a call for proposals on Diamond OA with support from Science Europe, we knew we were onto something important, but we couldn’t have predicted the massive support that would follow.  The landmark Open Access Diamond Journals Study (OADJS) that resulted from the call in 2021[3] was a first major breakthrough. The study discovered a vibrant landscape of community-driven publishing initiatives that were nevertheless isolated, fragmented, and underfunded. This study in turn led to something even more important: it gave rise to the Action Plan for Diamond OA in 2022[4], an initiative of Science Europe, cOAlition S, OPERAS, and the French National Research Agency (ANR) to further develop and expand a sustainable, community-driven Diamond OA scholarly communication ecosystem. The Action Plan proposed to align and develop common resources for the entire Diamond OA ecosystem, including journals and platforms, while respecting the cultural, multilingual, and disciplinary diversity that constitutes its strength. Over 150 organisations endorsed the Action Plan, constituting a community for reflection and further action.

Building a sustainable future: DIAMAS and CRAFT-OA

In line with the Action Plan’s goals, Horizon Europe funded two strategic and complementary projects, with cOAlition S being a partner in both initiatives: the €3m DIAMAS project began mapping the institutional publishing in Europe, while the €5m CRAFT-OA project focused on activities to improve the technical and organisational infrastructure of Diamond OA. Together, they represent an €8m investment in reshaping scholarly communication.

As co-leader of the DIAMAS project, alongside Pierre Mounier from OPERAS, I am privileged to work together with 23 public service scholarly organisations from 12 European countries in raising academic publishing standards, and increasing institutional capacity for Diamond OA publishing while respecting the diverse needs of different disciplines, countries and languages in the European Research Area.

Similarly, the CRAFT-OA project, led by Margo Bargheer from the University of Göttingen library, with 23 partners from 14 European countries and in collaboration with EOSC, works to make the Open Access landscape more resilient by centralising expertise and creating a collaboration network.

The next big step: the European Diamond Capacity Hub (EDCH)

On the 15th of January 2025, we will reach another milestone with the launch of the European Diamond Capacity Hub (EDCH) in Madrid, at FECYT headquarters. With initial support from the French National Research Agency (ANR) and Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), the EDCH aims to strengthen the Diamond OA community in Europe by supporting European institutional, national and disciplinary capacity centres, Diamond publishers and service providers in their mission of Diamond OA scholarly publishing.

Integrating the results of the DIAMAS and CRAFT-OA projects, the EDCH will ensure synergies, align, and support Diamond OA Capacity Centers. Diamond OA Capacity Centers include Diamond publishers and service providers, who in turn provide publishing services to Diamond journals and preprint servers. The EDCH will help these Centers excel by providing technical services, quality alignment, training and skills, best practices and sustainability. In turn, the Capacity Centers will offer the essential infrastructure and expertise that journal, book, and preprint communities need to publish their work successfully under the Diamond OA model.

Growing global momentum and recognition of Diamond OA

The momentum around Diamond OA isn’t just European. In 2023, cOAlition S contributed actively to the First Global Diamond OA Summit in Toluca, Mexico. Together with ANR, Science Europe, and many other organisations, we launched the idea for a global network for Diamond OA. UNESCO embraced this idea and is now leading a worldwide consultation on its implementation. As we prepare for the Second Global Summit for Diamond OA in Cape Town, focusing on social justice in academic publishing, it is clear that Diamond OA has become a global movement. 

All of these activities are taking place against a background of increasing recognition of Diamond OA as an alternative to publishing models that are inherently inequitable and increasingly unsustainable. The UNESCO recommendation on Open Science (2021), the G7 Science and Technology Ministers declaration, and the Council of the European Union conclusions (2023) all call for a scholarly publishing ecosystem that is high-quality, transparent, open, trustworthy and equitable – the very essence of Diamond OA. This policy emphasis is well-founded as facilitating and aligning Diamond OA will achieve a number of desirable goals in OA publishing. First, it ensures equity by not charging fees to authors or readers. It also allows researchers to take back control of scholarly content. Diamond OA also allows Research Funding Organisations (RFOs) and Research Performing Organisations (RPOs) to control publication costs, creating a sustainable alternative to Gold OA fees that are spiralling out of control. Finally, Diamond OA ensures diversity and multilingualism, since it publishes outputs in a variety of languages and epistemic traditions.[5]

[1] Gatti, R,, Rooryck, J., & Mounier, P. (to appear) Beyond “No fee”: why Diamond Open Access is much more than a business model. Ledizioni-LEDIPublishing

[2] See also Rooryck, J. (2023). Principles of Diamond Open Access Publishing: a draft proposal. The diamond papers. https://thd.hypotheses.org/35 

[3] Becerril, A., Bosman, J., Bjørnshauge, L., Frantsvåg, J. E., Kramer, B., Langlais, P.-C., Mounier, P., Proudman, V., Redhead, C., & Torny, D. (2021). OA Diamond Journals Study. Part 2: Recommendations. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4562790 

[4] Ancion, Z., Borrell-Damián, L., Mounier, P., Rooryck, J., & Saenen, B. (2022). Action Plan for Diamond Open Access. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6282403 

[5] Pölönen, J. (2024) Diamond Open Access is fundamental for making multilingual scientific knowledge openly available, accessible and reusable for everyone. https://zenodo.org/records/11094709 


Johan Rooryck

Johan Rooryck is Executive Director of cOAlition S and a linguistics professor at Leiden University. He is the editor-in-chief of the Fair Open Access journal Glossa: a journal of general linguistics since 2016. From 1999 to 2015, he was the executive editor of Lingua (Elsevier), when its Editorial Team and Board, as well as its reader and author community, decided to leave Lingua to found Glossa. He also is a founding member and president of the Fair Open Access Alliance (FOAA) and Linguistics in Open Access (LingOA). He is a Member of the Academia Europaea.

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