Dear HIFA colleagues,
Yesterday I shared an optimistic article on the furture of Diamond OA journals.
https://www.hifa.org/dgroups-rss/open-access-123-chaos-coming-scholarly-...
Thanks to Margaret Winker and the WMA Newsletter, I was interested to read an opposite perspective on the SScholarly Kitchen blog. Extracts below.
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When “Free” Isn’t Fair: The Hidden Costs of Diamond OA
The “no-fee” model often conceals significant costs. Editorial labor, copyediting, typesetting, hosting, preservation — none of these are free. When no revenue is collected from subscriptions or APCs, someone must absorb the expense. Often, that “someone” is a small editorial team working unpaid, a university department stretching its limited budget, or a scholarly society relying on volunteer time.
The closure of Work Organisation, Labour and Globalisation illustrates this point starkly. Its diamond OA pivot aligned perfectly with open science principles, but without sustainable funding, the model collapsed under the weight of uncompensated work.
By contrast, some well-resourced systems are experimenting with structured funding. In 2024, the Dutch research council NWO launched grants of up to €50,000 to support journals flipping to diamond OA, recognizing that transitions are costly and require financial planning. Similar initiatives, such as NSF-funded programs at MIT, provide crucial short-term support for the transition phase. However, most of these grants last only a few years, leaving journals facing significant uncertainty once the initial funding ends. This underscores a critical gap between facilitating a transition and ensuring long-term sustainability.
Building a Fairer Future: From Celebration to Collaboration
If diamond OA is to fulfil its equity promise, it cannot rely solely on idealism. The Toluca–Cape Town Declaration (2024), emerging from the 2nd Global Summit on Diamond Open Access, calls for a coordinated global effort to strengthen the model, including sustainable funding mechanisms, shared infrastructure, common quality standards, and collaborative governance structures.
Several policy recommendations emerge from recent research:
Shared Infrastructure: Pooled publishing platforms and shared technical services can reduce costs and raise quality across many small journals.
Institutional Funding: Universities and governments should integrate diamond OA support into core research funding, rather than relying on short-term grants.
Indexing Inclusion: Repositories, indexing services, and bibliometric systems must adapt to better represent regionally focused and non-English diamond journals.
Capacity Building: Training in digital publishing, metadata standards, and editorial best practices can help journals meet global technical criteria.
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COMMENT (NPW): It's interesting to see that Diamond OA advocates are now saying that diamond OA should be supported in core research funding. Which brings us back to where we were a few weeks ago: research funders should take responsibility for affordable APCs that reflect actual processing costs.
Best wishes, Neil
HIFA profile: Neil Pakenham-Walsh is coordinator of HIFA (Healthcare Information For All), a global health community that brings all stakeholders together around the shared goal of universal access to reliable healthcare information. HIFA has 20,000 members in 180 countries, interacting in four languages and representing all parts of the global evidence ecosystem. HIFA is administered by Global Healthcare Information Network, a UK-based nonprofit in official relations with the World Health Organization. Email: neil@hifa.org