Sharla Lair
Senior Strategist, Open Access & Scholarly Communication Initiatives
LYRASIS
Diamond open access (OA) refers to a scholarly publication system in which publishers do not charge fees to either authors or readers. Journals that adopt diamond OA as the financial mechanism in which they operate do not exclude authorship or readership on the basis of one’s geography or the wealth of a discipline or institution. Instead, the publishing infrastructure and operations are subsidized by third parties, i.e., academic departments, libraries, or funding agencies. Serving an array of mostly small-scale, multilingual, and multicultural scholarly communities, diamond OA journals embody the concept of bibliodiversity. Diamond OA is not new nor rare. The recent “Open Access Diamond Journals Study” (Science Europe and cOAlition S, 2021) reported that the estimated 17,000 to 29,000 diamond OA journals worldwide are an essential component of scholarly communication, publishing 8-9% of the total article publication volume and 45% of OA publishing. Despite its promise to provide a more equitable and diverse foundation for scholarly publishing, diamond OA journals experience challenges related to technical capacity, management, visibility, and sustainability, largely because they exist outside of the traditional paywall subscription channels and environments that provide article processing charge funding. The LYRASIS Open Access Community Investment Program (OACIP) is trying to change this. OACIP provides a community-driven framework that enables multiple stakeholders to evaluate and collectively fund diamond OA journals. Since OACIP launched in 2020, 56 institutions from four countries have committed to support five OA diamond journals sustainably for five years, and the program is in the midst of raising funds for six more diamond OA journals. The program has received endorsement by the Budapest Open Access Initiative’s 20th Anniversary Recommendations, and it is inspiring the emergence and growth of similar programs in other countries. This session presents actionable next steps for how libraries, universities, funders, and governments can build on this momentum together to create a more equitable and sustainable scholarly publishing ecosystem.
“Open Access Diamond Journals Study”: https://www.scienceeurope.org/our-resources/oa-diamond-journals-study/