Diamond open access
Diamond open access is a scholarly publishing model in which peer-reviewed journals and platforms provide free, immediate, and permanent online access to research articles without charging authors article processing charges or readers subscription or paywall fees.[1][2] This approach, often termed no-APC open access, relies on alternative funding mechanisms such as institutional subsidies, government grants, or learned society memberships to cover operational costs.[3][4] Distinct from gold open access, which typically involves author fees to offset lost subscription revenue, diamond open access emphasizes community governance and non-commercial priorities, fostering equitable knowledge dissemination particularly in resource-constrained regions.[5] The model has gained prominence within the open science movement, endorsed by organizations like UNESCO as a paradigm shift toward inclusive global scholarship.[6] Empirical surveys indicate diamond journals publish approximately 356,000 articles annually, accounting for a substantial share of open access output with strong representation in Europe (45%), Latin America, and Africa.[7] These outlets, frequently academic-led and institutionally supported, mitigate financial barriers that can disadvantage early-career or non-Western researchers in APC-based systems.[8] Despite its advantages in accessibility and reduced profit motives, diamond open access faces sustainability hurdles, including dependence on volatile funding and potential underrepresentation in prestige-driven indexes, which may limit visibility for contributors.[9][10] Ongoing initiatives, such as standardized principles from cOAlition S, aim to enhance infrastructure and recognition, positioning diamond open access as a viable alternative amid broader debates on scholarly communication economics.[8][11]
Definition and Terminology
Core Characteristics
Diamond open access refers to a model of scholarly publishing in which neither authors pay article processing charges (APCs) nor readers incur subscription or access fees, thereby eliminating direct financial barriers to both production and dissemination of research.[2][12] This fee-free structure distinguishes it from gold open access, which typically relies on APCs paid by authors or their institutions, and from subscription-based models that restrict reader access.[2] Funding instead derives from alternative sources such as institutional support, learned societies, public grants, or volunteer efforts, ensuring sustainability without market-driven pricing.[12][13] At its core, diamond open access emphasizes community ownership and governance, where journals and platforms are typically led, owned, and operated by academic communities, research-performing organizations, or non-profit entities rather than commercial publishers.[12][2] This academic-led approach fosters scholarly control over editorial processes, peer review, and content decisions, often resulting in nonprofit operations that prioritize knowledge dissemination over profit.[12] Peer review remains a standard requirement, with explicit evaluation criteria documented, alongside persistent identifiers like ISSNs for traceability.[12] Additional defining traits include immediate and permanent open access to content under open licenses (such as Creative Commons), with no embargoes or paywalls, and openness to submissions from any qualified author regardless of affiliation, provided the work fits the journal's scope.[12] This model supports bibliodiversity by accommodating small-scale, multilingual, and multidisciplinary initiatives that serve niche or regional scholarly communities, often enhancing equity in global knowledge production.[2][13] While voluntary contributions may occur, they cannot be mandatory for publication, preserving the no-fee principle.[12]Distinctions from Gold, Green, and Hybrid Models
Diamond open access, also known as platinum open access, provides immediate and unrestricted access to scholarly publications without charging article processing charges (APCs) to authors or subscription fees to readers.[2] [5] This model contrasts with gold open access, which similarly offers immediate publication in fully open access journals but typically requires authors or their institutions to pay APCs, often ranging from $1,000 to $5,000 per article, to cover publishing costs.[5] [14] In diamond open access, funding derives from alternative sources such as institutional subsidies, learned societies, or government support, eliminating financial barriers for both producers and consumers of research.[2] Unlike green open access, which involves authors self-archiving versions of their work—such as preprints or accepted manuscripts—in institutional or subject repositories, often after an embargo period of 6 to 24 months, diamond open access occurs through peer-reviewed journals or platforms that publish the final version directly in open access form without intermediary archiving steps.[5] [15] Green open access does not inherently guarantee the version-of-record and may coexist with subscription-based journal access, whereas diamond ensures the authoritative published article is freely available from the outset via the publisher's platform.[5] Hybrid open access models operate within subscription journals, where the default is paywalled access, but authors can opt to make individual articles open access by paying APCs, leading to criticisms of "double dipping" as institutions pay both subscriptions and fees for the same content.[16] In contrast, diamond open access journals forgo subscriptions entirely, providing all content openly without per-article fees, thus avoiding such hybrid inefficiencies and ensuring equitable access independent of author funding availability.[2] [5] This distinction highlights diamond's commitment to non-commercial, community-driven sustainability over market-dependent mechanisms prevalent in hybrid arrangements.[12]Terminology Evolution and Debates
The concept of open access publishing without fees to authors or readers predates the term "diamond open access," with early designations such as "platinum open access" emerging in the mid-2000s to describe journals funded by institutions, societies, or grants rather than article processing charges (APCs).[17][18] This terminology emphasized "pure" openness, distinguishing it from gold open access models reliant on APCs and green self-archiving routes.[19] In 2012, French mathematician and open access advocate Marie Farge coined "diamond open access" to reframe this third pathway, proposing it as a superior alternative to "platinum" by evoking the gem's intrinsic value and unalloyed composition, symbolizing equitable, community-sustained scholarly communication.[20][21] Farge's introduction occurred amid growing critiques of APC-driven models, positioning diamond OA as a non-commercial bulwark against commodification in academia.[22] The term rapidly proliferated in policy discussions and studies, supplanting platinum in many contexts by the late 2010s, though the two remain occasionally interchangeable.[23][24] Debates over terminology persist, particularly regarding definitional precision: while core attributes include zero fees for authors and readers, proponents argue for additional hallmarks like nonprofit governance, transparent operations, and long-term viability to differentiate sustainable diamond journals from predatory or unstable alternatives.[25] Critics of loose usage contend that equating diamond OA solely with APC absence overlooks variances in quality control and equity, potentially inflating its perceived scale in bibliometric analyses.[25] In response, initiatives like the 2023 cOAlition S draft principles formalized diamond OA as a scholarly model eschewing fees entirely, prioritizing community-led platforms over commercial intermediaries, though adoption varies amid concerns over enforceability.[8][5] These discussions reflect broader tensions in open access evolution, balancing accessibility with institutional realism.[9]Historical Development
Pre-1990 Roots in Scholarly Commons and Knowledge Clubs
The roots of diamond open access models trace back to early modern intellectual networks like the Republic of Letters, a transnational community of scholars active from the late 16th to the 18th century that facilitated the free exchange of ideas through correspondence and manuscript sharing.[26] This system operated as an informal scholarly commons, where knowledge was disseminated without financial barriers among participants, relying on mutual reciprocity rather than market mechanisms.[27] Participants, including figures like Voltaire and Leibniz, prioritized open communication to advance collective understanding, prefiguring later communal approaches to knowledge production.[28] By the 17th century, these practices formalized within learned societies, such as the Royal Society founded in 1660, which launched Philosophical Transactions in 1665 as the world's first scientific journal to broadly circulate research findings.[29] Society publications avoided author fees, funding operations through membership subscriptions, philanthropic support, and institutional subsidies, ensuring accessibility for members while maintaining non-commercial ethos.[30] This model exemplified knowledge clubs, where communities jointly produced and consumed scholarly output, with journals serving as mechanisms for internal dissemination rather than profit-driven enterprises.[31] Through the 19th and early 20th centuries, numerous learned societies adopted similar structures; for instance, the American Philosophical Society, established in 1743, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1848, published proceedings and journals subsidized by dues and grants without imposing publication charges on contributors.[29] Until the mid-20th century, such societies dominated scholarly publishing, preserving a commons-like framework where knowledge was treated as a shared resource, insulated from full commercialization.[32] This pre-1990 tradition underscored causal linkages between community governance and sustainable, barrier-free knowledge sharing, laying groundwork for modern diamond initiatives.[30]Grassroots Initiatives and Early Repositories (1990–2003)
The grassroots open access movement in the 1990s was propelled by individual scientists leveraging emerging internet technologies to share preprints and articles without financial barriers, challenging the subscription-based publishing monopolies of the time. A pivotal example was the creation of arXiv in August 1991 by physicist Paul Ginsparg at Los Alamos National Laboratory, initially as an automated system for distributing high-energy physics preprints via email, which transitioned to a public web repository by 1993 and expanded to related fields like mathematics and computer science.[33][34] This initiative operated on a diamond model—free for authors and readers, sustained by institutional hosting and volunteer moderation—facilitating rapid dissemination that accelerated research cycles in physics, with over 600,000 submissions by 2003.[34] Cognitive scientist Stevan Harnad advanced these efforts through advocacy and infrastructure. In 1989, he launched Psycoloquy, an interdisciplinary journal featuring peer commentary on psychology and cognitive science topics, distributed freely online and becoming fully peer-reviewed by January 1990, exemplifying early diamond open access via electronic means without charges.[35] On June 27, 1994, Harnad posted his "Subversive Proposal" to academic mailing lists, explicitly calling for researchers to self-archive preprints and refereed postprints on personal or departmental servers to achieve immediate, toll-free access, arguing that this would generate sufficient demand to pressure publishers toward open models.[36] This proposal catalyzed the self-archiving strand of open access, emphasizing author-driven dissemination over commercial intermediaries.[36] Building on this, Harnad founded CogPrints in 1997 at the University of Southampton, a discipline-specific repository for self-archived documents in cognitive science, philosophy of mind, linguistics, and neuroscience, which adopted open GNU EPrints software precursors and enforced no-fee policies funded by university resources.[37][38] Similar repositories proliferated, such as RePEc for economics in 1997, enabling economists to share working papers freely. In parallel, regional initiatives emerged; SciELO (Scientific Electronic Library Online) was conceived in 1997 in Brazil as a platform aggregating peer-reviewed journals from Latin America, launching operations in 1998 with public funding to ensure diamond access—no author fees, full-text availability—prioritizing visibility for non-English scholarship amid global inequities.[39] By 2003, these repositories collectively hosted tens of thousands of documents, demonstrating scalable, low-cost alternatives reliant on academic labor and institutional support rather than market-driven charges, though adoption remained uneven due to disciplinary silos and technical hurdles.[34]Maturation and Naming of Diamond Model (2003–2012)
During the period following the Budapest Open Access Initiative of 2002, open access publishing models without article processing charges (APCs) gained traction through institutional support, society-backed journals, and regional networks such as SciELO, which expanded its coverage of no-fee journals across Latin America and beyond starting in the early 2000s.[22] These initiatives emphasized community-driven dissemination, leveraging subsidies from universities, governments, and nonprofits to cover operational costs rather than shifting expenses to authors. The launch of the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) in 2003 played a pivotal role in cataloging and promoting such outlets, initially listing hundreds of predominantly no-fee titles that prioritized accessibility over revenue from APCs. By the mid-2000s, awareness grew of the sustainability challenges in APC-based "gold" open access, prompting discussions on alternatives where neither authors nor readers paid fees, often termed "platinum open access" after Tom Wilson's 2007 proposal to distinguish it from subscription and author-pays models.[40] This era saw empirical growth in no-APC journals, with platforms like Redalyc (established 2002) and expansions in Europe and Asia fostering nonprofit ecosystems; for instance, by 2009, peer-reviewed articles in open access journals—many no-fee—numbered around 190,000 annually, expanding at approximately 30% per year amid broader adoption.[41] Institutional repositories and overlay journals further matured the landscape, enabling gratis access without commercial intermediaries, though quality control and indexing remained inconsistent concerns raised in scholarly forums.[22] The maturation culminated in formal nomenclature in 2012, when French mathematician and open access advocate Marie Farge coined the term "diamond open access" to describe this non-commercial pathway—free at point of publication and readership—as a "third way" superior to gold (APCs) and green (self-archiving) routes, emphasizing its alignment with public funding principles and resistance to market-driven pricing.[20] Farge's framing highlighted the model's prevalence in society and university presses, where operational efficiencies from volunteer labor and institutional hosting kept costs low, though she critiqued emerging APC dominance for potentially entrenching inequities. This naming reflected accumulated evidence from the decade's initiatives, setting the stage for systematic analyses, such as Fuchs and Sandoval's 2013 definition distinguishing diamond by its absence of both subscription and publication fees.[22]Recent Institutionalization and Global Advocacy (2012–Present)
In March 2021, cOAlition S commissioned and Science Europe published the Open Access Diamond Journals Study, a comprehensive analysis that identified approximately 17,000 to 29,000 diamond open access journals globally, representing about 73% of journals in the Directory of Open Access Journals.[42] The study emphasized their concentration in Europe and Latin America, multilingual operations, and low median costs of around €200 per article, advocating for targeted funding and infrastructure support to enhance sustainability without introducing author fees.[1] This report marked a pivotal step in institutionalizing diamond OA by providing empirical data to inform policy and revealing operational efficiencies compared to commercial models.[43] Subsequent advocacy efforts coalesced around international summits and frameworks. The inaugural Diamond Open Access Conference, held in Zadar, Croatia, on September 19–20, 2022, convened over 300 participants to address equity, quality, and preservation in diamond publishing.[44] This was followed by the first Global Summit on Diamond Open Access in Toluca, Mexico, from October 23–27, 2023, which united diverse stakeholders from the Global South and North to promote collective action on visibility, interoperability, and non-commercial governance.[45] These events facilitated the development of action plans, including enhanced indexing in databases like OpenAlex to counter underrepresentation in commercial indices such as Web of Science.[46] UNESCO advanced global institutionalization through its 2021 Recommendation on Open Science, which prioritizes non-profit, community-controlled OA models.[13] On July 10, 2024, UNESCO announced the Global Diamond Open Access Alliance to foster federated support, visibility, and capacity-building for diamond initiatives worldwide.[47] Complementing this, a UNESCO-led global consultation survey launched in July 2024 collected responses from about 2,900 individuals across 92 countries, informing recommendations for funding mechanisms, legal frameworks, and technological infrastructures tailored to diamond OA's diverse ecosystems.[48] In November 2024, proposals emerged for a Global Diamond Forum to coordinate ongoing advocacy, emphasizing causal links between institutional subsidies and long-term viability over market-driven alternatives.[49] These initiatives reflect a shift toward recognizing diamond OA's role in equitable knowledge dissemination, particularly in underrepresented regions, though challenges persist in securing recurrent public funding amid biases favoring APC-based gold models in some academic policies.[2]Prevalence and Empirical Scale
Global Geographic Distribution
The global geographic distribution of diamond open access journals reveals concentrations in regions with strong institutional and public funding support for non-commercial scholarly publishing. According to the 2021 cOAlition S Diamond Study, which analyzed data from the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and broader estimates, diamond journals comprise an estimated 17,000 to 29,000 titles worldwide, representing a significant portion of open access publishing. Europe hosts the largest share, approximately 45% of DOAJ-registered diamond journals (around 4,950 titles as of February 2021), driven by university presses, learned societies, and national initiatives in countries like France, Italy, and Spain.[42][7] Latin America accounts for about 25% of these journals (roughly 2,750 in DOAJ), where diamond models predominate due to publicly funded platforms like SciELO, which originated in Brazil in 1997 and expanded regionally, enabling fee-free access and publication supported by governments and institutions.[42] In relative terms, over 95% of open access journals in Latin America operate on diamond principles, reflecting a commitment to equitable knowledge dissemination without reliance on author fees.[50] Asia represents 16% of diamond journals, with notable activity in countries like Japan, Indonesia, and the Philippines, often tied to academic institutions, while North America (US and Canada) holds only 5%, where article processing charge (APC)-based gold open access models are more entrenched among commercial and society publishers.[42] Africa features a smaller but growing presence, particularly in low-cost operations, though diamond adoption lags behind other regions except in specific fields like medicine; overall, the Global South publishes a high proportion of diamond journals, emphasizing community-driven models over market-oriented ones.[42] The distribution underscores how diamond open access thrives in contexts prioritizing public goods over profit, though indexing biases in databases like DOAJ may underrepresent journals from less-resourced areas.[51]| Region | Percentage of DOAJ Diamond Journals | Key Factors |
|---|---|---|
| Europe | 45% | University presses, societies |
| Latin America | 25% | SciELO, public funding |
| Asia | 16% | Institutional support |
| North America | 5% | Preference for APC models |