Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A learned society publishes a fully diamond OA journal funded by its membership.
- Is an instance
A university library underwrites a diamond OA platform serving regional humanities scholarship.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
Labelling a journal 'diamond' while charging authors a submission fee.
- Not an instance
A diamond OA initiative that depends entirely on volunteer labour with no sustainable funding.
Editorial commentary
Diamond OA (also called platinum OA) journals charge neither subscription fees nor article-processing charges. They are usually run by academic communities, learned societies, university presses or library publishing services. The 2021 OA Diamond Journals Study (Bosman, Frantsvåg, Kramer, Langlais, Proudman) identified roughly 29,000 such journals worldwide, predominantly in the humanities, social sciences and Global South publishing ecosystems (notably AmeliCA, Latindex, Redalyc, SciELO).
How diamond journals are funded instead of charging authors
Because no one pays a per-article fee, diamond titles rely on non-market funding: institutional subsidies from a university press or library, membership dues from a learned society, direct grants from national research-funding agencies, or in-kind labour from academic editors and reviewers. That structure removes both reader and author paywalls, which is why diamond OA aligns most directly with knowledge-equity goals, but it also creates a documented sustainability risk: a title that depends entirely on volunteer labour with no durable funding line can be fragile in a way an APC-funded or subscription journal is not.
Building capacity: the Action Plan for Diamond Open Access and DIAMAS
The 2022 Action Plan for Diamond Open Access, coordinated by cOAlition S, Science Europe, OPERAS and the French National Research Agency, set out to professionalise diamond publishing rather than treat it as a stopgap awaiting a fee-based model. The EU-funded DIAMAS project (Horizon Europe, 23 organisations across 12 European countries, a 36-month programme) followed on directly from that plan: it mapped Europe’s Institutional Publishing Service Providers and produced the Extensible Quality Standard for Institutional Publishing (EQSIP), a shared quality bar that lets diamond journals professionalise their editorial and technical practice without introducing author or reader fees.
How it differs from gold OA
Diamond OA is a subset of the broader open access landscape, but it is not the same as gold OA: a pure gold journal is open to read but typically funded by an article-publication charge paid by the author or their funder, whereas a diamond journal charges neither side. See also Subscribe-to-Open, a related but distinct model that keeps a subscription-style institutional payment rather than eliminating fees outright.
References
- Bosman J et al. ‘The OA Diamond Journals Study’, Science Europe / cOAlition S, 2021. Action Plan for Diamond Open Access (2022). DIAMAS project (diamasproject.eu).
Also known as
Diamond OA · Platinum open access
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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