Funding the future: the role of diamond in sustainable, full and fair open access

In 2020, cOAlition S commissioned a study to gain insights into the OA publishing landscape of diamond journals and platforms, which are free to readers and authors. The research, conducted by a group of 10 organizations lead by OPERAS, aggregated data from an online survey that gathered around 1600 responses from journal editors across the globe, a quantitative analysis of data from bibliographical databases and a qualitative analysis based on focus groups of journal editors and interviews with infrastructure providers.

The findings of the study point to a wide archipelago of relatively small journals serving diverse communities, with a mix of scientific strengths and operational challenges (including compliance with funder mandates) and an economy that is characterized by a large dependency on volunteers, universities and governments, modest publishing costs and a variety of funding models.

In this presentation, we will discuss the various recommendations of the study to increase the capacity of community-driven/governed journals and platforms, connecting them and technically supporting them in a coordinated way. We call upon funders to consistently finance the operations of diamond journals and platforms and invest in the future of diamond OA.

We connect this plea for support for diamond open access to the bigger theme of the conference by suggesting some concrete ways towards full and fair open access based on a much larger role of diamond.