User:Alexander Doria/Diamond Open Access

Diamond open access, refers to scientific articles published without charging authors for article processing charges. Alternative labels include platinum open access, non-commercial 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 a variety of structure and forms of publishing from subsidized university publisher to volunteer-run cooperative that have existed for decades.

In 2021, it is estimatated that 29,000 scientific journals relied on a diamond open access model. Non-commercial journals make up for 73% of the journals registered in the Directory of Open Access Journals. The diamond model is especially dominant in Latin America (95% of journals) following the emergence of large publicly-supported platforms in the 2000s.

Despite their prevalence, diamond journals remain little acknowledged by academic policies and funders. This lack of recognition had negative consequences on a variety of issues such as economic support or content preservation.

Origins of non-commercial scientific publishing
Until the Second World War, academic publishing has been mostly characterized by a wide range community-driven scholarly structures with little concerns for profitability. The standard journal of the 19th century and the first part of the 20th century is to a large part a collective initiative led by a scientific movement or institution that largely relies on informal community norms rather than commercial regulations. Theses historical practices have been described as a form of knowledge common. In 2017, Potts et al. reframed the traditional scientific journal as a knowledge club: a knowledge club held an intermediary status between a knowledge commons and a private company and, while community-driven, they 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 most fields of scientific publishing in western countries beyond the humanities and the social sciences. :

This transformation had wide-range 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.

Identification of non-commercial open access: from gold to diamond (2000-2012)
The open access movement emerged both as a consequence of the unprecedented access afforded by online publishing and as reaction against the large corporate model that has come to dominate scientific publishing since the Second World War and has led to an inflation of subscription prices during the 1980s and the 1990s.

Most of the pionneering experiments of open access publishings like Surfaces were non-commercial and community-driven. Yet the distinction between commercial and non-commercial forms of scientific publishing was not deemed relevant. Open access publications were rather increasingly categorized into two different editorial models: open access articles made immediately available by the publisher and pre-published articles hosted on an online archive (either as a pre-print or post-print).

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" (pre-print only) to "green" (no restriction in place): "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 an highly influential binary scale: articles directly made available by the publisher belong to "gold" open access (instead of "yellow") 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 an 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 explicitely 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 (who has worked very hard for a more rational publication system) likes to call diamond open access, a quasi-miraculous model where neither author nor reader pays anything ".

Defining the diamond model (2012-…)
In 2013, Fuchs and Sandoval published one of the first systematic definition 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 to 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 with "Gold" open access has never settled and remains a point of contention in 2021, even after the publication of the OA Diamond Study. While valuing the study, Martin Paul Eve still consider diamond open access as a "category error".

Since 2013, the theoretical literature on the diamond model has been increasingly influenced by the institutional analysis of the commons. Consequently, the "Open access commons" has recently emerged has an alternative label, although it is less used in a descriptive way and more as a programmatic ideal of 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, Samuel Moore and Janneke Adama have proposed to "redefine the future of scholarly publishing in communal settings" through a "scaling small" that ensure 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 (2016) by the Public Knowledge Project or the OA Diamond Study (2021) by the cOAlition S.

Distribution of diamond open access journals
The OA Diamond Study gives an estimation of 29,000 Diamond open access in 2021 which represent a significant share of the total number of scholarly journals. Diamond journals make up for 73% of the open access journals registered on the Directory of Open Access Journals with 10,194 entries out of 14,020 in September 2020. In 2013, Fuchs and Sanderval already noted that, as a far as the number of individual journals is concerned, Diamond open access is the main form of open access publishing: "Diamond open access is not just an idea, but rather, as the empirical data provided in this paper shows, the dominant reality of open access ".

Diamond open access is less prevalent when looking at the volume of published articles rather than the number individual journals. The OA Diamond study finds that the 10,194 non-commercial journals registered on the Directory of Open Access Journals published 356,000 articles per year on the 2017-2019 instead of 453,000 articles published by 3,919 commercial journals with APC: "we see that OA Diamond publishes around 8-9% of the total number of scholarly articles, and APC-based OA journals around 10-11% ." This discrepancy can be mostly attributed to a consistently lower output of Diamond open access journal in comparison with commercial journals: "In DOAJ we find that the majority of OA diamond journals (54.4%) publish 24 or fewer articles per year; only 33.4% of APC-based journals have a similar size ." Diamond journals also have a more diverse editorial production which includes other forms of scholarly productions like book reviews or editorials which may contribute to decrease their share in the total number of research articles.

On the 2014-2019, the output of Diamond open access journal has continued to grow in absolute terms, but has decreased relatively to the output of commercial open access journals. The period showed a significant development of APC-based large publisher as well as an increasing conversion of legacy subscription-based publishers to the commercial open access model.

Any estimation of the number of Diamond journals or articles is challenging as most non-commercial journals do not identify as Diamond journals and this definition has to be deduced reconstructed from the lack of APC of any other commercial activity. Additionally, Diamond Journals more frequently struggle to perform the registration on academic indexes and remain largely uncharted.

Geographic distribution
The majority of Diamond open access journals in Latin America and in Europe: "about 45% are published in Europe and 25% in Latin America ". In relative terms, the Diamond model is especially prevalent in Latin America with 95% of Open Access journals registered in DOAJ, to a lesser extent, in Eastern Europe (81%). In contrast with Western European and North American countries, the open access movement in Latin America was largely structured around publicly-supported platforms like Redalyc, Latindex or Scielo rather than APC-based publishers:

The OA Diamond Study accounts these separated developments to the presence or the lack of large privately-owned publishers: "Most major, large commercial publishers are based in Western Europe or US/Canada, which explains some of the relative dominance of the APC-model in these regions. Without these publishers, Western Europe and US/Canada would be more similar to other regions ." Latin American journals have long been neglected in the main commercial indexes, which may have encouraged the development of local initiatives.

The diamond model has come to embody an ideal of social justice and cultural diversity in emerging and developing countries. Diamond open access journals are more likely to be multilingual (38%): "while English is the most common language, it is more important for APC-based journals than for OA diamond ones. Spanish, Portuguese and French play a much more important role for OA diamond journals than for APC-based ones. Generally, this holds for most languages other than English ."

Disciplines
While Diamond OA journals are available for most disciplines, they are more prevalent in the humanities and social science. The OA Diamond Study finds that, among the journals registered on the DOAJ, humanities and social science publications make up 60% of Diamond open access journals and only 23.9% of APC-based journals. This distribution may be due to the differentiated evolution of scientific publishing during the 20th century: "small HSS journals are often owned by universities and societies who often prefer OA diamond models, while many big science and medicine journals are owned by commercial publishers, more inclined to use APC models ."

Organization and economics
Most Diamond open access journals are managed by academic institutions, communities or platforms: "The majority of journals (42%) are owned by universities. The main alternatives are learned societies (14%) and, to a lesser extent, government agencies, university presses and individuals ." This integration ensure the autonomy of the journals: they "are inherently independent from commercial publishers as they are not created by them and do not rely on them at the management level ."

The running costs of Diamond open access Journals journal are low: half of the 1,600 journals surveyed by the OA Diamond Study "reported costs lower than 1000$/€" per year. The median cost per articles is around 200$, which is significantly lower than the standard prices of Article Processing charges in commercial open access journals. Theses low costs can be accounted by institutional support, limited expenses and reliance on volunteer work: 60% of the journals surveyed in the OA Diamond Study were at least partly run by volunteers. The governance model has a direct impact on the economic model of Diamond open access journals. Journals embedded in an academic institution are more like to benefit from direct fundings or supporrt whereas "journals owned by learned societies rely significantly more on membership fees".

Preservation
Long-term preservation of scholar publications is a major issue for Diamond open access journals. In 2020, a study highlighted that numerous non-commercial journals have already disappeared without any backup archive except in Internet Archive: “176 OA journals that, through lack of comprehensive and open archives, vanished from the web between 2000–2019. ”. The number of journals at risk is much higher. In the survey of the OA Diamond Study, 57% of the journals "state that, to the best of their knowledge, they have no preservation policy in place ".

The preservation problem has been framed as a "tragedy of the commons". While the libraries have an incentive to preserve articles published by subscription-based journals to make sure the investment has not been lost, there is no similar motivation for free online content: "Efforts around preservation and continued access are often aimed at securing postcancellation access to subscription journals ". Diamond open access journals do not have the material mean to ensure their own preservation and even lack the time to join a standard archiving program.

Recognition
While they make up for a large share of open access publications, Diamond open access journals are frequently overlooked by scientific policies and investments:

The launch of the cOAlition-S initiative in 2018 made the recognition issue of Diamond journals more pressing. Support to open access publishing would now be conditioned on the adherence of a series of editorial and economic standards which Diamond journals may struggle to conform to, given their limited means. The OA Diamond Study was commissioned in 2020 by the cOAlition-S. In its final recommendation, the study calls to fully integrate Diamond journals into the plan-S strategy:

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* Category:Academic publishing Category:Social movements Category:Electronic publishing Category:Scholarly communication Category:Free culture movement