Focus: the way forward for diamond openaccess

The Global Summit on Diamond Open Access took place from 23 to 27 October 2023 in Toluca (Mexico). The goal was to bring the community together to reflect on “diamond” scholarly publishing and build a dialogue between publishers, institutions, experts and stakeholders from all continents. The summit offered a series of hybrid and multilingual events prepared by several organizations, including the ANR (French National Research Agency), cOAlition S, OPERAS and Science Europe. Pierre Mounier, deputy director and International Relations manager at OpenEdition, and coordinator for the European infrastructure project OPERAS, looks back at the outcome of the summit and the role of OpenEdition in promoting and implementing the diamond model, as well as structuring the French diamond community.

• The conclusions drawn from the Global Summit on Diamond Open Access reveal that the diamond model is implemented in a variety of ways across the world’s regions and countries. Outside of Latin America, where the event was held, France was the most represented country at the summit. Does France take a specific approach to economic models? How does its approach differ from that in other countries?

France stands out for its ability to organize itself around infrastructures that support diamond open access (OA) publishing models. OpenEdition obviously jumps to mind as a prime example, but there are others too. The Métopes infrastructure was also present and active at Toluca (reaching an agreement with Erudit and Redalyc to work together on the JATS XML format), as was the Episciences publishing platform, managed by the CCSD (Centre for Direct Scientific Communication). Representatives from key stakeholders Mir@bel and Réseau Medici also attended. Although France is far from the only country that strongly promotes the diamond model, it undoubtedly has the ability to make infrastructure a priority at an early stage to support its university presses and its rich ecosystem of stakeholders committed to this form of publishing. There are many possible reasons for that, but I think it would be too long to explain right now. However, let’s not forget that the word “infrastructure” has French origins, which still transpire today!

• Which issues came to the fore for French publishing stakeholders and infrastructures such as OpenEdition?

The main challenge for the diamond OA model is to piece together the diverse and fragmented landscape brought to light by the Open Access Diamond Journal Study (OADJS). Needless to say, France is already ahead in that respect. It has developed a network of national infrastructures and platforms in harmony with its roadmap for research infrastructures, once again occupying a unique position on the international scene. Personally, I’m convinced that OpenEdition has the experience and substance needed to play a key role in the national structuring process, hand-in-hand with its partners and other infrastructures making up the national OA landscape. However, if you take a step back, it quickly dawns on you that OpenEdition – like all French stakeholders – also faces the challenge of cooperating at European and international level, which is a whole new ball game. We already have so much to do in France that many of us find it difficult to envisage investing more time, energy and resources in inherently complex and uncertain European and international cooperations. Nevertheless, it is absolutely essential that we do so, as the scholarly publishing landscape, including in the humanities and social sciences, is subject to gravitational forces that go beyond national borders. The diamond OA community therefore has to take up the challenge of building structures at European and international level, especially when it comes to boosting visibility, pooling resources and increasing capacity. French stakeholders should be a key driving force behind this movement.

• The creation of a Global Diamond Open Access Federation was approved at the summit, and a “capacity hub” operated by OPERAS and federating several “diamond capacity centres” is in the pipeline thanks to financial backing from the ANR and the CNRS (National Centre for Scientific Research). What will these capacity centres look like and what role will OpenEdition play?

At the summit, my colleague, Johan Rooryck, suggested using a structural model based on a pyramid with four tiers.

The first tier consists of Diamond journals and their publishers, representing the community to be federated. This community should obtain the help and services it needs from the capacity centres and infrastructures hosted by research institutions, universities, libraries, scientific communities and at national level. These are the “capacity centers” in the second tier shown above. In light of this, OpenEdition and the Repères network could be regarded as institutional and national capacity centres.

The regional and international tiers don’t exist yet, so we need to start from scratch. A European hub would be a structure for pooling resources, especially between capacity centres, in the same vein as Redalyc-Amelica, which brings together resources and stakeholders across Latin America. The purpose of a global federation would be to enable the individual regional hubs to cooperate wherever possible.

Looking specifically at the European hub, from next year, a common access portal will be made available to diamond journal publishing teams, containing a useful set of tools: a list of service providers that can assist with tasks related to editorial coordination, editing, publishing and digital dissemination; a quality standard, covering seven aspects of scholarly publishing and accompanied by a self-assessment tool for pinpointing areas for improvement; a toolkit and guide to help find the resources needed to make headway; a training platform – currently under development – to help develop skills; and a forum for discussions, exchanging ideas, helping one another and organizing collective action.

All those resources are currently being developed as part of the DIAMAS project, funded by the European Commission and coordinated by OpenEdition through its parent institution, the University of Aix-en-Marseille. Part of OpenEdition’s contribution to the DIAMAS project is to develop the training platform. A parallel project, Craft-OA, also funded by the European Commission, but coordinated by the University of Göttingen, is underway to develop technical tools. It includes providing improved versions of the most popular publishing software programs, such as OJS. It also involves creating a “Diamond Discovery Hub”, which will provide a list of diamond journals to give them greater visibility and improve their indexing in large-scale scholarly data tools. More generally, the project will also provide a technical toolkit, like the one developed for good practices as part of the DIAMAS project. OpenEdition will be coordinating the development of the Diamond Discovery Hub.

Several interoperability tools for communication between different publishing software, as well as with OpenAire and EOSC, are under development as part of this project. The goal is to boost the robustness and resilience of the technical infrastructure used to publish and disseminate diamond journals. Most of the developments from both projects will be integrated into the European hub. The joint goal with the entire community of service and technology providers is to offer European diamond journals a continent-wide infrastructure that is robust, resilient, efficient and intuitive for publishing teams and researchers. I know this all seems very ambitious, or even overly ambitious to some extent, but we need to keep two things in mind: firstly, the infrastructure does not need to be created from scratch. Many resources are already available. Unfortunately, they are dispersed, well hidden and isolated. The idea is to gather them all together into an organized structure so that they can be managed as a coherent whole, giving them the authority and recognition they deserve. In any case, if we want the diamond OA model to be a success, we don’t really have a choice. The diamond model is competing against other models developed by publishing giants operating at international level. In our case, the least we can do is step up and right the scales, not by creating a new giant, but by mobilizing the strength and resources of our community to an equal degree. Individually, diamond model stakeholders don’t stand a chance of being heard in a globalized scholarly publishing environment. Together, we can have a say and change things. The participants’ decision to join forces at the conference in Toluca sent out a strong message: ¡Juntos somos más fuertes y mejores! Together, we are stronger and better.

• How does all that affect OpenEdition’s communities and our national and international partners?

I hope that in the near future, our communities and partners will witness a positive change in their working conditions and processes. They will have better access to all kinds of useful tools, services, skills and resources. They will also be more visible, gain more support from policy makers and have better access to research funding. Inevitably, the question of academic discipline comes to the fore at this point. The initiative to boost the diamond model concerns all disciplines, not just the humanities and social sciences. However, it is interesting to note that the OA model is far more predominant in the humanities and social sciences (and in mathematics) than in other disciplines, where although not completely absent, it is nonetheless less frequent. These other disciplines have gravitated en masse towards a model where authors pay publication fees (the so-called “Gold APC” model).

Many of our colleagues from those other disciplines are beginning to understand the limits of the fee-based scholarly publishing model they are pressured or have chosen to accept, and are looking for an alternative. It is up to us from the humanities and social sciences to show them what can be achieved. In our disciplines, there are countless inspiring examples of thriving OA journals. Some were created recently based on a diamond OA model and have met with resounding success, whereas others are older, but have prospered wonderfully by taking the digital revolution in their stride before transitioning to diamond OA. Why is that? Well, the truth is, such journals can only flourish if our research colleagues take things in hand to decide the future of the journals as a collectively managed publishing space. It ensures journals meet the specific needs of the research community, under its direction, and are not simply a product to be consumed and discarded. And anyway, beyond the question of who pays what, the very reason the diamond OA model stands apart is that the research community itself oversees or manages the journals, and ensures their success. I think it’s important for our research colleagues from the humanities and social sciences to reach out to other disciplines, and spread the word about the tried-and-tested methods they use to communicate about their research.

• Science Europe recently brought research funding organizations around the table to work together on guidelines for diamond OA. What are the goals of this initiative?

The goal is simple, yet reaching it is another story. Today, funding agencies are geared to financing projects selected through calls for proposals. For several agencies, support for scholarly communication is provided through the eligible expenses included in the funding allocated to a project. APCs are a good example of eligible expenses. With the DIAMAS project in mind, the idea is to work with agencies on solutions for setting up a wider range of funding mechanisms to support a variety of OA publishing models, including diamond.

The ANR made a significant move in that direction by announcing in Toluca that it would help fund the creation of the European hub in 2024. It is an excellent start and sends a very strong message to other agencies. However, we need to boost our efforts collectively, at European level at least. It is encouraging to see the growing interest of research funding agencies for the diamond model, and their willingness to think about adapting their funding approach to ensure several models can co-exist, reflecting the true needs of scholarly communities rather than the effects of financial mechanisms that involuntarily lead to distortions and pose a threat to bibliodiversity.

---

---