Diamond Open Access is the latest big thing in academic publishing, promising salvation from a rigged system. But a flashy label alone will not save us if we are not willing to address deep-rooted and newly emerging problems of a system that has largely failed in terms of quality, power, and trust.

Enough money in the publishing system?

The serials crisis was a first symptom of a failing system. Prices were too high, and libraries could no longer afford access to all relevant journals. Open Access is a child of the internet, because it allowed easier dissemination of literature and therefore promised lower costs. For some time, it appeared as the solution to the serials crisis (Kingsley 2006).

The first definition of Open Access (BOAI) already makes clear that Open Access is more than free access to articles. Back in 2002, the idea was to build a publishing system without any financial or legal barriers, to recognise scientific literature as a public good and to overcome inequalities created by artificial access barriers.

Regarding costs, Open Access promised improvements:

“While the peer-reviewed journal literature should be accessible online without cost to readers, it is not costless to produce. However, experiments show that the overall costs of providing open access to this literature are far lower than the costs of traditional forms of dissemination.”
(ephasis by the author)

And already in 2002, many forms of financing were mentioned to cover the costs for Open Access:

“Because price is a barrier to access, these new [Open Access] journals will not charge subscription or access fees and will turn to other methods for covering their expenses. There are many alternative sources of funds for this purpose, including the foundations and governments that fund research, the universities and laboratories that employ researchers, endowments set up by discipline or institution, friends of the cause of open access, profits from the sale of add-ons to the basic texts, funds freed up by the demise or cancellation of journals charging traditional subscription or access fees, or even contributions from the researchers themselves. There is no need to favor one of these solutions over the others for all disciplines or nations, and no need to stop looking for other, creative alternatives.”
(emphasis by the author)

As fair costs were considered a defining feature of Open Access, it seemed unnecessary, at the beginning of the movement, to favour one form of funding over another. But now, in 2025, we have learned from Gold Open Access and Transformative Agreements that Open Access, too, can lead to inequality if its idea is reduced to access to literature free of charge.

In a White Paper the Max Planck Digital Library suggested that “[t]here is currently already enough money in the system. A large-scale transformation from subscription to open access publishing is possible without added expense” (p. 7). Based on this idea, the DEAL consortium was founded in 2014. Since then, it has negotiated agreements with major publishers that should transform Germany’s access to research from closed to open. This transition failed. While many articles from researchers in Germany were published Open Access, these transformative Agreements do not sufficiently promote the “flipping” of subscription journals into Open Access journals. The result is double dipping on a global scale: Single articles are published Open Access, universities still have to pay for subscriptions because the journals are not.

Community paid = community-owned?

After the (failed) Gold Open Access approach to transform the publishing system, Diamond Open Access aims to build a more collective system that relies on not-for-profit publishing. For defining Diamond Open Access, the difference between profit-oriented and not-for-profit publishing is central and a response to the vulnerability of price developments within the academic publishing system. Since authors do not have to pay for their Open Access publication, the German DEAL consortium appears to be Diamond Open Access – but it is not. For big publishers it is merely a more effective way of charging libraries. As long as they own the rights to some of the most important journals, their risk is very low because they know that universities depend on access to or publishing options for these journals. Compared to the huge amount of title rights of publishing companies, small Diamond OA publishers are more vulnerable to cancellations and fluctuations in library budgets. and they try to cooperate rather than drive competitors out of the market.

Big commercial publishers like Elsevier, Wiley, and Springer are the gatekeepers of scientific knowledge. They own the rights to some of the most established journals which are central to scientific research and therefore researchers are dependent on access to the literature they contain.

This not only puts publishers in a position to basically charge any price they want for access to these journals but by owning a significant proportion of scientific literature they can shape norms of what is being considered scientifically valuable. With databases like Scopus they are increasing their ownership not just of the literature but also of the infrastructure, thereby collecting data and opening up yet another source of revenue.

Within the debate about Diamond Open Access the focus therefore shifts from financing structures for Open Access to questions of ownership, shaped by initiatives like the Radical Open Access Collective, ScholarLed, the COPIM project or the focus group Scholar-led Publishing in Germany.

The scientific community still has a limited understanding of issues related to interdependencies and monopolistic structures. This is because researchers depend on rapid access to literature and feel compelled to publish in well-established journals in order to advance their careers. Therefore, it is those who have the power to change this system that are, in fact, enabling it.

Defining Diamond Open Access… and how the publishing system should workDiamond Open Access is still a vague term and its definition varies (Dellmann et al. 2022). However, two characteristics are mentioned in (almost) all definitions: The publication should be free of charge for both readers and authors and the journal or publisher should be community-driven, scholar-led, or academic-owned.

Defining Diamond Open Access is crucial because it determines how the scientific publishing system should work. A definition that emphasizes the importance of scientific literature and infrastructure being in the hands of the research community makes clear that it is not merely about money but about the question of “who owns scientific knowledge”.

The APC-based Gold Open Access model was criticized for turning the serials crisis into a publishing crisis since authors who lack the funds are excluded from publishing Open Access. But with Diamond Open Access seemingly freeing authors and institutions from paying for the publication, the burden shifts from libraries (subscription-based model) and authors (APCs) to the (Diamond) publisher itself. In order to build a sustainable Diamond Open Access landscape, institutions have to make sure that funding is available and stable. And as Richard Stallmann explained about free software: “Think free as in free speech, not free beer.”

How to transform the publishing system – this time, seriously

As much as the German “Einfach mal machen” approach suggested by Bernhard Mittermaier is important to take first steps towards more Diamond Open Access funding, the community has to confront the devil that is mostly in the detail.

Malavika Legge asked many important questions about the Open Access transformation process and pointed out that waivers to APCs are not sufficient to balance the inequalities between scholars from high and low income countries. Diamond Open Access is therefore important to enable scholars to read scientific content and publish in all relevant journals without limits.

But if we truly want Diamond Open Access publishing to succeed, handing out the crumbs from library budgets at the end of the year after all big publishers have been paid can just be the beginning of a broader transformation. Otherwise this approach runs the risk of becoming a second DEAL awakening. Instead, we could ask Diamond Open Access publishers the following question: How much do you need? If we think from the point of view of a non-profit publisher, there is no gain in overcharging, because all the profit goes back to where it should go: enabling and promoting the scientific literature that they publish.

Another question could be: Who pays what? This is not a trivial question in an international publishing system. When libraries are considering which Diamond Open Access publications they should support, different scenarios are possible. Coming from the Gold Open Access logic, one option could be to support Diamond Open Access publications publishing works from authors of their institution. This option could have negative effects for Diamond Open Access publishing platforms that have many authors in countries that cannot or will not offer financial support for Diamond Open Access. If 50 % of the authors of a German Diamond Open Access publisher are outside the European Union, the affiliation of authors will not be helpful for German libraries to decide which Diamond Open Access publisher should be supported.

Another option for deciding which Diamond Open Access platforms to support was suggested by Bernhard Mittermaier. German universities and other research organizations could support Diamond Open Access organizations registered in Germany. Beside this focus on German Diamond Open Access publishers he suggests relevance of the content or the service as other factors that could be considered in a funding decision.

Calculating the financial needs of German Diamond Open Access publishers could be a first step towards calculating how much should be paid by research organizations to support Diamond Open Access. The next step for research organizations would be to have a more personalized look on Diamond Open Access and which initiatives are relevant and important and should be financially supported from their library budgets.

These questions are certainly not the only ones to consider when thinking about how to promote Diamond Open Access. A defining feature of Diamond Open Access is still the payment, which raises other problems. What influence will a shift towards Diamond have on Open Access publishing in countries that do not offer financial support for Diamond Open Access? It does not seem to make sense to quit paying APCs to small non-profit Open Access Journals (for example in low income countries) because they still depend on these payments and do not have government funding available that supports the publishing system. Voluntary payments could lead to a lack of funding for these publishers and would lead from serials crisis to publishing crisis to publisher crisis.

While working on the shift towards Diamond OA, the OA community has to remain cautious of new injustices that could arise within this new structure, like an unsustainable funding structure for Diamond Open Access publishers that will be the first ones suffering from budget cuts.

The Diamond Open Access model also changes relationships between publisher, researcher and library. Who decides, for example, which publication is fundable, and which is not? Compared to the subscription and APC model, a researcher does not necessarily have to be involved in the funding decisions. A Diamond Open Access Journal which is being consumed by researchers of a university and in which they publish regularly does not necessarily have to be funded by the library of their university. If publications or access is not the factor, the decision shifts from researchers to libraries.

How do we define quality and what a “journal” is, if actors like the Directory of Open Access Journals or the new European Diamond OA Capacity Hub define science publishing independent from existing databases like Scopus? Are we using the same standards to measure quality regarding Open Access and closed content? How can we assure the same standards when we make funding decisions regarding quality if we use different tools and mechanisms to make our choices?

When we talk about misconduct in science, when we talk about quality of publications and the review process, we should be clear about the fact that these issues apply to all publishing forms and are not connected to the financing structure. A journal with APCs can be valuable and contain high quality content, so can a closed access journal.

In the end, concepts like Diamond Open Access will (yet again) not change the publishing system if they are understood as additional projects within a traditional publishing system and not as the core of how science publishing should be done.