Knowing what’s missing, identifying how to overcome barriers

This article investigates the discourses of academic legitimacy that surround the production, consumption, and accreditation of online scholarship. Using the web-based media and cultural studies journal (http://journal.media-culture.org.au) as a case study, it examines how online scholarly journals often position themselves as occupying a space between the academic and the popular and as having a functional advantage over print-based media in promoting a spirit of public intellectualism. The current research agenda of both government and academe prioritises academic research that is efficient, self-promoting, and relevant to the public. Yet, although the cost-effectiveness and public-intellectual focus of online scholarship speak to these research priorities, online journals such as M/C Journal have occupied, and continue to occupy, an unstable position in relation to the perceived academic legitimacy of their content. Although some online scholarly journals have achieved a limited form of recognition within a system of accreditation that still privileges print-based scholarship, I argue that this, nevertheless, points to the fact that traditional textual notions of legitimate academic work continue to pervade the research agenda of an academe that increasingly promotes flexible delivery of teaching and online research initiatives.

Traditionally, there have been two important media of academic publishing: scholarly journals and scholarly books. The first scholarly journal, the Journal des Sçavans, was founded by Denis de Sallo, appeared already in January 1665 in Paris, reappeared after the French Revolution as the Journal des Savants, and still exists as a leading journal in the humanities. Only a few weeks later, Henry Oldenbourg, the first secretary of the Royal Society of London, established a second scholarly journal, the Philosophical Transactions, with a focus on science. The purpose of these journals was to formalize the extensive correspondence between philosophers and scientists.1 In the 18th and the 19th century, more specialized journals gained in importance, most of which were published by learned societies. At the end of the 19th century, university presses too began to publish scholarly journals. Another traditional means of academic publishing are the various types of scholarly books, in particular monographs, edited volumes, reference works (specialist dictionaries, encyclopedias, and specialty reference manuals), and technical handbooks.2 A narrow definition of academic works would exclude textbooks and books for the broader public. Shavell (2010, 337–39) employs four criteria to determine whether a journal or book is academic in nature: (1) the authors and/or the publisher are usually academics; (2) the readers are mainly academics; (3) the content is academic in character; (4) only low royalties are paid, if any. As of today, scholarly journals are the preferred mode of academic publishing in particular in the sciences and some social sciences (e.g., economics), whereas scholarly books still play an important role in the arts, the humanities, and part of the social sciences. Whereas scholarly books are published by a large number of small national publishers in a multitude of languages, the most important scholarly journals are typically in English language and published by a few large commercial publishers. Until the mid-20th century, the most important journals were published by learned societies, before commercial publishers began to enter the academic publishing market in the 1960s and 1970s by launching new titles or acquiring existing ones. This development has led to a significant concentration of (commercial) publishers in the academic journal market.3 It is difficult to say for sure how many scholarly journals are available around the world. Some sources speak of more than 100,000, others of 87,000 or 73,000.4 In August 2018, Ulrich's Web Directory listed 33,119 active scholarly peer-reviewed English-language journals with about 3 million articles a year, complemented by an additional 9,372 journals in other languages. As an important subset, 11,655 journals with 2.2 million articles were included in the Clarivate Analytics' Journal Citation Reports (STM, 2018, 25–26). The Web of Science (WoS) database counted almost 12,500 journals in 2019 (see below, Section 2.2.1). With the mass expansion of academic education and the increasing size of faculty after World War II, publications in peer-reviewed, highly ranked journals have become an important precondition for academic careers in many disciplines, in particular in the sciences, economics, and partly in the other social sciences. In 1964, Eugene Garfield launched the Science Citation Index to calculate the impact factors of journals in science, medicine, and technology. This index was later followed by the Social Sciences Citation Index in 1973, the Arts & Humanities Citation Index in 1978 (Regazzi, 2015, 86–88), and the Emerging Sources Citation Index in 2015. These indices led to the development of the Journal Impact Factor (JIF), a metric that serves to rank a scholarly journal based on the number of citations to articles in that journal by articles in other indexed journals within a certain time period. During the same time, commercial publishers have increased their market shares to the detriment of non-for-profit publishers, such as learned societies and universities, becoming the dominant players in the market for scholarly journals. Today, the "big five" commercial academic publishers—Elsevier, Springer, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, and Sage—cover more than half of the market for scholarly journals. Since the 1980s, we have seen a sharp increase not just in the number of journals but in particular also in journal subscription prices, forcing many academic libraries to cancel serials subscriptions and to cut back on new monographs (the so-called serials crisis, cf. Eger & Scheufen, 2018, 23–29). These developments induced an increasing number of scholars, initially in the United States, to promote open access (OA) to scholarly articles as a replacement of or an addendum to the subscription model. After some individual initiatives in the late 1980s, the early 2000s saw the emergence of a global movement by scholars, librarians, and research sponsors, resulting in the "Budapest Open Access Initiative" (February 2002), the "Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing" (June 2003) and the "Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities" (October 2003).7 Two roads to OA can be distinguished8: First, gold OA refers to electronic journals with OA for all readers, often based on creative commons licenses. The publishers' costs are covered not by subscription fees but from other sources, such as article-processing charges (APCs)9 paid by authors, libraries, learned societies, or research sponsors, or subsidies from learned societies and other sources. Hybrid OA journals, whose numbers are rising fast, allow the authors to choose between paying an APC, thereby granting the reader OA, or not paying an APC and requiring the reader to pay for access to the article.10 A special branch of gold OA is mega-journals, the first one of which, PLOS One, was first published in 2006. In these journals, the peer review is restricted to examining only the soundness of the submitted articles but not their broader interest or impact. Also, mega-journals are not oriented towards a specific subject matter. The second road, green OA, refers to authors self-archiving pre-prints or post-prints of their papers on so-called OA repositories, potentially in addition to publication in traditional subscription-based journals. OpenDOAR listed 5,713 repositories in July 2021, of which 5,073 were classified as institutional repositories managed by universities, faculties, or other academic institutions, 364 as disciplinary (subject) repositories which aggregate research papers in specific disciplines (e.g., PubMed Central, arXiv, SSRN, and RepEc), 138 as aggregating repositories (including Academia and Scielo), and 139 as governmental repositories.11 Whereas institutional and disciplinary repositories generally respect the authors' or publishers' copyright, so-called Robin Hood or Pirate OA repositories do not. The most prominent example is Sci-Hub, founded in 2011 by Alexandra Elbakyan, a young scholar from Kazakhstan, which made over 60 million journal articles publicly available. Due to complaints by academic publishers, Sci-Hub had to switch domains several times.12 Recent years have seen the emergence of academic social networks such as Research Gate and Mendeley, as well as a stream of new forms of disseminating scientific content, including blogs, podcasts, and Facebook posts by prominent scholars. Regarding OA books, the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) in June 2021 listed 43,036 academic peer-reviewed books from 621 publishers.13 The number of academic journals, as listed in the WoS database, has been growing steadily over the past two decades, from around 5,000 in 2000 to almost 12,500 in 2019 (Figure 1).14 Source: Author's calculations based on data from Web of Science (2021) The academic journal market is dominated by a few large commercial publishers, with the "big five" accounting for more than half of the academic journals listed by the WoS in 2019: Elsevier (1,754 journals), Springer (1,406), Wiley Blackwell (1,242), Taylor & Francis (1,199), and Sage (642).15 However, due to a downturn by Elsevier that began around 2006, this dominance has declined from around 60% in 2000 to around 51.7% in 2019 (Figure 2). Source: Author's calculations based on data from Web of Science (2021) Coupled with the advent of the internet and the concurrent increasing digitization of academic works, which through the bundling of different journals and/or formats ("big deals") facilitated second-degree price discrimination, this dominance has led to a drastic increase in subscription prices since the early 1990s (Bergstrom, 2013; Eger & Scheufen, 2018; Ramello, 2010). The resulting serials crisis—with academic libraries having to cut their journal portfolio—gave rise to a new publishing regime that offers OA to journal content. The share of pure (i.e., non-hybrid) OA journals as listed by the Directory of Open Access Journals (2021) has been increasing steadily, from around 3% of all WoS-listed journals in 2000 to more than 10% in 2019 (Figure 3). Source: Author's calculations based on data from Web of Science (2021) and DOAJ (2021) Interestingly, pure OA journals also gained ground in terms of quality. Figure 4 shows boxplots of the impact factors16 of closed access (CA) versus OA journals over time. While CA journals enjoyed an impact factor advantage over OA journals for a long time—all location scales of the impact factor for CA journals being above the ones for OA journals—OA journals are nowadays of the same quality, notwithstanding considerable differences between disciplines (see the contribution by Eger et al. to this issue). In 2019, impact factor distributions of both OA and CA journals are at the same level. Thus, advancing both in quantity and in quality, OA journals are becoming ever more relevant. The literature has identified the following advantages of an OA regime for academic works: (1) OA publications are likely read and therefore (2) cited more widely,17 which in turn (3) raises the incentives for academic authors to publish their research results as citations increase their reputation. These observations led to a broad discussion in academia as to whether the copyright regime may impede the evolution towards a universal OA regime, with very different conclusions being drawn regarding the impact of OA from a social welfare perspective (Scheufen, 2015; Shavell, 2010). Source: Author's calculations based on data from Web of Science (2021) and DOAJ (2021) The growing relevance of academic OA publishing warrants a closer look at the development of pure OA journals as the gold road towards OA. Figure 5 shows the number of newly launched OA journals from 2002 to 2020. Following relatively slow growth from 2002 to 2014, with fewer than 500 new OA journals per year (except 2013), the number has exceeded 1,000 in every year since, peaking in 2017, when more than 2,000 new OA journals were added to the DOAJ database. Today, the DOAJ database counts more than 16,000 OA journals in many different fields of research, published in 80 languages by publishers from 126 countries.18 Source: Author's calculations based on data from DOAJ (2021) Notwithstanding this impressive development, the relevance of OA journals varies substantially across academic disciplines (Figure 6).19 The research field with the largest attributed number of OA journals is Social Sciences (3,817), followed by Health Sciences (2,785), Technology and Engineering (1,416), and Language and Literature (1,153). By contrast, the natural science fields of Mathematics & Statistics (341), Physics & Astronomy (274), and Chemistry (181) feature only few OA journals.20 Source: Author's calculations based on data from DOAJ (2021) Remarkable differences also exist regarding a variety of OA journal characteristics (Table 1).21 Most (52%) OA journals leave the copyright of published works with the author, whereas the traditional CA regime demands that the exploitation rights are transferred to the publisher. Moreover, only around 28% of all OA journals charge APCs—a remarkable finding, as the OA regime implies the transition from a "reader pays" to an "author pays" model. Other fees (e.g., a submission fee to cover the review process) are charged by only around 2% of all OA journals. Nevertheless, author fees may constitute a significant obstacle for authors to publish in an OA venue, especially for non-tenured researchers seeking to publish in highly ranked journals, which are most likely to charge APCs (Budzinski et al., 2020). This obstacle also applies in particular to many researchers from developing countries, whose institutions rarely cover such costs. Yet 18% of OA journals provide for the possibility to waive such author fees. OA publishing may indeed be considered a form of development aid, for two reasons: First, few institutions in the developing world have so far been able to subscribe to academic journals. The OA regime can thus promote scientific participation and thereby foster the global evolution of science as a "trial and error" process. Free or cheaper access to literature for researchers in the developing world tends to increase both their output (number of publications) and input (number of references) (Mueller-Langer et al., 2020). Second, an OA regime grants access to the latest results in science for groups who were previously excluded because they are not "club" members of a university library. This includes, e.g., corporate researchers, physicians, or farmers. Notwithstanding all the changes discussed above, scholarly journals remain the most important medium of communication in many disciplines. For more than 300 years, they have been fulfilling the four key functions of registration (attribution), certification of articles (peer review), dissemination (distribution, access), and preservation (scholarly memory and permanent archiving). In recent decades, a fifth function must be added: the evaluation of researchers and their institutions.22 The increasing importance of OA articles in scholarly journals has triggered some controversial discussions, in particular regarding the questions as to whether OA negatively affects the quality of journal articles, whether OA improves the dissemination of research results, and how OA affects the competition between academic publishers as well as the distribution between academics and non-academics, between poor and rich universities, and between poor and rich countries. We shall discuss each of these questions and some related points in more detail below. In times when "alternative facts" tend to trump sound research results, academia must provide the public with reliable information. The users of this information should be sufficiently certain that the results are based on proper methods, reflect the state of science in the specific field, and were obtained independently, e.g., of any political or commercial interests.23 For that reason, strict and continuous quality control of research results is a "conditio sine qua non" for academic publishing. Facilitating the communication of content from authors to readers, the academic journal market may be characterized as a two-sided market (Rochet & Tirole, 2003). While readers look for the most important research results in their fields by top authors, the latter are interested in the journal's reputation, in wide readership, and in citations. Thus, journals with high impact factors hold the greatest attraction to both sides. With this in mind, the crucial question arises what effect, if any, OA is likely to have on the quality of academic articles. Jeffrey Beall, a librarian at the University of Colorado in Denver, is very skeptical regarding the quality of OA articles, especially those that are financed by APCs: "By adding a financial component to the front end of the scholarly publishing process, the open-access movement will ultimately corrupt scholarly publishing and hurt the communication and sharing of novel knowledge" (Beall, 2013, 590). A weak form of "corruption" would to OA publishers' incentives to peer review and to more submitted papers in to increase from However, the commercial publishers' incentives to increase the number of articles to the detriment of the journal's quality at the the quality the APCs that the journal is able to as well as A form of "corruption" refers to the of some OA journal publishers have been to in particular young and who on publications for their or to allow authors to publish articles in OA journals, by articles with or peer academics on their the or of journals, and so In established a of publishers, which was in January in to not only from the publishers but also from OA who that the to to OA. this quality to be a one which exists only in some disciplines (e.g., economics), whereas in other disciplines, such as some OA journals are the ranked journals and there is of a quality researchers their and if academic institutions and research to the APCs for articles by journals, this is to A by is that OA may new and will new and of their will remain (Beall, 2013, 590). 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A Review of:
 Chang, Y-W. (2017). Comparative study of characteristics of authors between open access and non-open access journals in library and information science. Library & Information Science Research, 39(1), 8-15. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.lisr.2017.01.002
 
 Abstract 
 Objective – To examine the occupational characteristics and publication habits of library and information science (LIS) authors regarding traditional journals and open access journals.
 Design – Content analysis.
 Setting – English language research articles published in open access (OA) journals and non-open access (non-OA) journals from 2008 to 2013 that are indexed in LIS databases.
 Subjects – The authorship characteristics for 3,472 peer-reviewed articles.
 Methods – This researcher identified 33 total journals meeting the inclusion criteria by using the LIS categories within 2012 Journal Citation Reports (JCR) to find 13 appropriate non-OA journals, and within the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) to identify 20 appropriate OA journals. They found 1,665 articles by 3,186 authors published in the non-OA journals, and another 1,807 articles by 3,446 authors within the OA journals.
 The researcher used author affiliation to determine article authors’ occupations using information included in the articles themselves or by looking for information on the Internet, and excluded articles when occupational information could not be located. Authors were categorized into four occupational categories: Librarians (practitioners), Academics (faculty and researchers), Students (graduate or undergraduate), and Others. Using these categories, the author identified 10 different types of collaborations for co-authored articles.
 Main Results – This research involves three primary research questions. The first examined the occupational differences between authors publishing in OA journals versus non-OA journals. Academics (faculty and researchers) more commonly published in non-OA journals (58.1%) compared to OA journals (35.6%). The inverse was true for librarian practitioners, who were more likely to publish in OA journals (53.9%) compared to non-OA journals (25.5%). Student authors, a combined category that included both graduate and undergraduate students, published more in non-OA journals (10.1%) versus in OA journals (5.0%). The final category of “other” saw only a slight difference between non-OA (6.3%) and OA (5.5%) publication venues.
 This second research question explored the difference in the proportion of LIS authors who published in OA and non-OA journals. Overall, authors were more likely to publish in OA journals (72.4%) vs. non-OA (64.3%). Librarians tended to be primary authors in OA journals, while LIS academics tend to be primary authors for articles in non-OA publications. Academics from outside the LIS discipline but contributing to the disciplinary literature were more likely to publish in non-OA journals. Regarding trends over time, this research showed a decrease in the percentage of librarian practitioners and “other” authors publishing in OA journals, while academics and students increased their OA contributions rates during the same period. 
 Finally, the research explored whether authors formed different types of collaborations when publishing in OA journals as compared to non-OA journals. When examining co-authorship of articles, just over half of all articles published in OA journals (54.4%) and non-OA journals (53.2%) were co-authored. Overall the researcher identified 10 types of collaborative relationships and examined the rates for publishing in OA versus non-OA journals for these relationships. OA journals saw three main relationships, with high levels of collaborations between practitioner librarians (38.6% of collaborations), between librarians and academics (20.5%), and between academics only (18.0%). Non-OA journals saw four main relationships, with collaborations between academics appearing most often (34.1%), along with academic-student collaborations (21.5%), practitioner librarian collaborations (15.5%), and librarian-academic collaborations (13.2%).
 Conclusion – LIS practitioner-focused research tends to appear more often in open access journals, while academic-focused researcher tends to appear more often in non-OA journals. These trends also appear in research collaborations, with co-authored works involving librarians appearing more often in OA journals, and collaborations that include academics more likely to appear in non-OA journals.

While Diamond Open Access is widely considered the most progressive publishing form for Open Access journals, these journals face various challenges including (technological) standardisation, ensuring sustainability for journals, and juggling a broad set of workflows while depending largely on voluntary work.The CRAFT-OA project (Creating a Robust Accessible Federated Technology for Open Access) aims to help standardise Diamond Open Access journals by offering technological innovations available to all Diamond Open Access journals. In cooperation with the DIAMAS project, CRAFT-OA will foster a community of practice, further enhancing Diamond Open Access publishing by uniting the scholarly community behind common goals.The proposed poster will include an overview of the key objectives and phases of the project as well as a section dedicated to explaining how the project’s results will support diamond OA publishing and be made available via the capacity centre prepared jointly with the DIAMAS project. Specifically, it will explain how the results of DIAMAS and CRAFT-OA complement each other in that regard by providing all information, best practice guidelines, workflows and training materials relating to Diamond Open Access in one place.

In recent years, the discourse around Open Access has highlighted the importance of Diamond Open Access. Diamond Open Access removes financial barriers for both authors and readers, thereby enabling more equity in the dissemination of scientific research. Science policy makers and funders also have recognized the value of Diamond Open Access. The Action Plan for Diamond Open Access (Ancion et al., 2022) and the planning of global, regional and local Diamond Open Access hubs (Mounier & Rooryck, 2023) illustrate this development. A major challenge that arises when Open Access is free for readers and authors is the issue of funding. Diamond Open Access initiatives are often community-governed and frequently independent of big commercial publishers. These initiatives need sustainable funding to be able to continue operating. Collective funding models offer a solution to this problem. For example, consortial funding has successfully financed the Open Library of the Humanities for almost 10 years now, and commercial companies such as Knowledge Unlatched also utilize similar models. However, there are some challenges with this kind of funding model, particularly as more initiatives seek collective funding. The presentation will focus on some of the challenges and solutions of collective funding models form Diamond Open Access at the example of the Open Library Economics (OLEcon). OLEcon is an initiative from ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre Economics (Germany). OLEcon offers support for journal editors in the disciplines business and economics who want to establish a scholar-led Diamond Open Access model for their journals. Additionally, OLEcon organizes a funding consortium for these journals. The first challenge that OLEcon encounters is that institutions receive “nothing” in return if they contribute to Diamond Open Access initiatives. This is in contrast to transformative agreements where institutions receive exclusive rights for their affiliates if they participate in the agreement. Second, libraries have limited funds for Open Access so they can not finance every Open Access initiative. In a project funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), OLEKonsort (2023-2026), these problems are addressed by establishing several stabilising mechanisms for the funding consortium. These include an easy participation process, and a community building approach. The presentation discusses the experiences that were made in the first two years of the project.

Diamond open access (OA) journals are a publishing model that is free for both authors and readers, but their lack of indexing in major bibliographic databases compared to gold journals presents challenges in assessing their uptake. Furthermore, the characteristics of diamond journals, such as language and country of publication, have often been used to support the argument that they are more diverse and serve national research communities. However, there is a notable lack of empirical evidence regarding their geographical and linguistic characteristics. Using the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) as a benchmark, we investigate OA journals through their coverage in OpenAlex, Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus by field, country, language. The results show the lower coverage of diamond journals in WoS and Scopus and confirms the national scope of diamond journals compared to gold. The share of English-only journals is considerably higher among gold journals in every database. High-income countries have the highest share of authorship in every domain and type of journal, except for diamond journals in the social sciences and humanities. Understanding the current landscape of diamond OA indexing can aid the scholarly communications community and decision-makers in advancing policy and practices toward more inclusive OA models.

Over the past twenty years, open access publishing has been enthusiastically embraced as a means of making scientific knowledge accessible to a wider audience.Initially, it was seen as a significant opportunity by the academic world (1).However, over time, while this model provided free access to readers, it also created significant financial burdens for authors due to the publication fees they incurred.Today, the vast majority of open access journals require authors to pay article processing charges (APCs), which typically range from $250 to $3,500 per accepted article (2,3).This situation has created a major challenge, particularly for researchers in low-and middle-income countries where physician salaries are low and funding systems supporting scientific research are underdeveloped.In many countries, APCs can exceed physician salaries, making it very difficult for scientists to submit their work to high-quality journals.As a result, the ideal of "equality of access to information" at the heart of the "open access" concept is not being fully realized (2,4).At this point, "diamond open access," also referred to as "platinum open access," a lesserknown but more inclusive model of open access publishing, has come to the fore.In this model, there are no fees for either readers or authors.However, the most significant challenge for this model is sustainability: very few journals worldwide have adopted it, and many of those that have are supported by universities, civil society organizations, and research institutions (5-7).The Turkish Archives of Otorhinolaryngology, the official scientific publication of the Turkish Society of Otorhinolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, has been a diamond open access journal since 2013, charging no fees to readers or authors.Our association has borne this financial burden for years, dedicating itself to promoting scientific publishing and providing an equal publishing environment for both national and international researchers.

The planetary science community is launching a new journal, Planetary Research, as an alternative to traditional publishing models that profit from publicly funded research. This initiative aims to address accessibility and inclusivity challenges in scientific publishing by adopting the diamond open access model, ensuring no fees for authors or readers. Unlike gold, green, and hybrid open access journals, which impose significant financial barriers on authors through article processing charges or hinder the availability of their research outputs via subscriptions, diamond open access relies on minimal operational costs, achieved through free and open-source software for editorial and archival tasks and volunteer contributions.    Scheduled to launch in January 2026, Planetary Research will be governed transparently by members of the planetary science community, providing opportunities for researchers at all career stages to contribute to its development and operations. An open call for editorial board and steering committee members will be announced at the 2025 Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. The journal will cover the full scope of planetary science, including extrasolar systems, exoplanets, spacecraft and Earth-based observatory data, laboratory studies of extraterrestrial materials, theoretical and numerical modeling, and terrestrial analog research. Original research will be published as long-format articles or short letters. Peer reviews as well as assessments and recommendations by the editorial team will be linked to the published article on the journal website    By eliminating financial barriers, the journal aims to democratize access and dissemination of scientific knowledge, promote inclusivity, and foster collaboration. To ensure sustainability, Planetary Research will leverage volunteer-driven editorial processes, open-source platforms for managing both the peer review process and journal website, as well as low-cost infrastructure for web hosting and digital object identifiers (DOIs). Geoscience diamond open access journals typically report annual operational costs of approximately USD 1000, demonstrating the feasibility of this model. We are currently assessing funding possibilities to cover these operational costs and ensure the perenniality of the journal. The journal will also prioritize outreach to both the scientific community and the general public with the creation of a volunteer-driven media team, emphasizing the societal value of open access to planetary research as community participation is central to Planetary Research. Everyone is welcome to join our pre-launch discussions that are hosted on an online forum accessible via the pre-launch website (https://planetary-research-journal.online/). This open forum will remain active post-launch, allowing members to engage with the steering committee, editorial board, and media team, in order to adapt and evolve the journal in response to community needs. By embracing the principles of accessibility, inclusivity, and transparency, Planetary Research seeks to set a new standard in scientific publishing, ensuring that the benefits of planetary science are freely available to all. 

<p xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" class="first" dir="auto" id="d7284389e118">Editorial management has become increasingly complex in today's rapidly evolving scholarly publishing landscape. Editors of institutional, non-profit journals that do not charge authors or readers - referred to as Diamond Open Access (OA) journals - often find themselves navigating a multitude of challenges, from maintaining high editorial standards to ensuring transparency, credibility and integrity in an environment marked by budget constraints and resource limitations. As a result, many editors can feel isolated and disconnected, lacking the networking and support systems crucial for professional development and collaboration. A recent European initiative seeks to help Diamond OA journals deal with these challenges. (DIAMAS Project 2024) <p xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" dir="auto" id="d7284389e120">The European Diamond Capacity Hub (EDCH) is a collective designed to strengthen the Diamond Open Access (OA) community in Europe by supporting institutional, national, and disciplinary capacity centers, as well as Diamond OA publishers, service providers and tools &amp; technology providers. Built on the results of the DIAMAS (Developing Institutional Open Access Publishing Models to Advance Scholarly Communication) and CRAFT-OA (Creating a Robust Accessible Federated Technology for Open Access) projects, the EDCH offers services, tools and best practices via an online platform (https://diamas.org/), which includes: <p xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" dir="auto" id="d7284389e122">● Diamond Discovery Hub (DDH): An authoritative index of Diamond OA journals designed to help authors, libraries, funders, and research assessment bodies identify trustworthy journals. To be included, journals must meet clearly defined Diamond criteria. (Armengou et al. 2024) <p xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" dir="auto" id="d7284389e124">● Diamond Open Access Standard and self-assessment tools: A quality assurance framework that enables publishers to assess compliance with best practices. (Consortium of the DIAMAS project 2024) <p xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" dir="auto" id="d7284389e126">● Publishing tools: A collection of software solutions and add-ons aimed at enhancing the efficiency of publishing workflows and platforms, allowing publishers to manage content more effectively and maintain high editorial standards. <p xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" dir="auto" id="d7284389e128">● Registry and Forum: A curated registry of Diamond OA publishers, service and tools and technology providers helps publishers identify reliable service and technology providers. The Forum offers a space for publishers and providers to discuss challenges and work together on solutions that enhance integrity and transparency in scholarly publishing. <p xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" dir="auto" id="d7284389e130">● Resources &amp; Guidelines: A comprehensive set of materials supporting publishers transitioning to Diamond OA. This includes high-level introductions to Diamond OA <p xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" dir="auto" id="d7284389e132">publishing, detailed guidelines and best practices for journal publishing and resources to support the sustainability of institutional publishing. The Toolsuite and Guidelines uphold integrity and transparency in scholarly publishing by providing Diamond OA publishers with clear standards, best practices, and practical guidance on editorial quality, research integrity and transparency in governance, funding, and editorial policies. <p xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" dir="auto" id="d7284389e134">● Training Platform: Targeted learning modules that equip editors and publishers with the knowledge to implement best publishing practices and maintain research integrity. <p xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" dir="auto" id="d7284389e136">EDCH is community-governed and tailored to the needs of the Diamond OA community. It empowers Diamond OA publishers to uphold the highest standards of scholarly communication and significantly contributes to greater equity in scholarly publishing by providing free, openly licensed resources that help publishers deal with challenges without the need for costly expert support. With resources available in multiple languages (English, Croatian, Spanish and Portuguese), Diamond OA publishers can access knowledge and tools to improve their practices regardless of their financial capacity. <p xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" dir="auto" id="d7284389e138">Designed to address the most pressing challenges, EDCH provides tailored support, training, and networking opportunities for editors of Diamond OA journals. By fostering a collaborative community, the EDCH empowers editors to access best practices, quality assurance frameworks, and resources that enhance their editorial management capabilities. This initiative not only promotes integrity and transparency in scholarly publishing but also fosters a sense of belonging among editors, enabling them to share experiences and solutions. With a focus on equity, the EDCH aims to equip these journals with the tools they need to thrive in a competitive publishing landscape, ensuring that high-quality research remains accessible and sustainable for all.

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This study examines the influence of diamond open access (DOA) publishing on research engagement among library professionals in India. Using a quantitative approach, data were collected through a structured online survey administered to 106 library professionals who had published in DOA journals. The findings reveal a strong consensus on the benefits of DOA, particularly its capacity to ensure equitable access to scholarly content by eliminating article processing charges (APCs) and enhancing the visibility and impact of research outputs. Respondents emphasized DOA’s potential to promote inclusivity, especially for researchers in under-resourced settings, and its role in fostering collaboration and diversity in scholarly publishing. However, the study also identifies critical challenges that hinder the widespread adoption of DOA. These include limited journal availability, concerns about journal quality and prestige, and the uncertain sustainability of the fee-free model. Despite these concerns, statistical analyses indicate that library professionals regard DOA as a viable and impactful alternative to gold open access, especially in terms of long-term benefits to scholarly communication. The study highlights the evolving role of library professionals as not just information custodians but also active contributors and advocates in the open access movement. It recommends institutional recognition and support for library professionals as strategic stewards of DOA publishing initiatives. The findings underscore the need for sustained advocacy, infrastructure development, and collaborative funding models to realize the full potential of DOA. Ultimately, this research contributes valuable insights into how DOA can support a more inclusive, accessible, and sustainable academic publishing landscape in the Global South.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to report results of a study which investigated the growth of open access (OA) journals across the world with reference to the Asian region. Details of 117 OA journals were collected from the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) to determine the geographic distribution, language of publication and growth of periodical year-wise. The study makes detail analysis of four OA periodical published from India, Iran, Pakistan and Taiwan. Pattern of authorship and contribution according to nature of professional work were analyzed. The study reveals that most contributions were made by teaching professionals in comparison to working library and information officers. Single-authored contributions dominated (44 per cent) in all periodicals of the Asian region, indicating low amount of teamwork/collaborative contributions to library and information science (LIS) research by the authors of this region. To know the subject distribution of articles, the study was limited to 27 ...

Open access publishing, where readers do not pay to access articles, became possible due to the\nelectronic publishing revolution that is the Internet [1]. The seminal definition of open access,\nand one upon which most literature still draws, is that of the “Budapest Open Access Initiative”\n(BOAI):\nBy “open access” to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of\nthese articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any\nother lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control\nover the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited [2].\nTo achieve this free access to scholarly literature, the BOAI recommends two complementary strategies. The first is self-archival of scholars’ work in dedicated online archives. The second\ncalls for the establishment of open access journals that ensure immediate open access to the articles they publish without any access restriction or subscription fees to readers.\nThere are many other definitions of open access, and Bailey [3] gives a useful overview of\nothers and of the evolution of terminology in this space. However, the BOAI still contains the\nfundamental principles and goes hand-in hand with Creative Commons which provides the\nmost prevalent licensing architecture that enables open access.\nThe evolution of open access first centered around gold and green options. Green open access, or “the green way to open access,” is modeled on the practices of physicists who, from as\nfar back as 1991, began archiving personal versions of their papers prior to publication on a\ncentral archive called ArXiv [4]. Gold open access, by contrast, refers to articles that are made\navailable immediately at the point of publication by the publishing journal itself and as the\nmanuscript’s final version of record. Such articles are “born free” [5]. How gold access comes\nabout can vary. Authors may pay an article processing charge (APC), and this may be to a\njournal that is completely open access. The rise of open access mega-journals exemplifies an\ninnovative form of a journal that successfully pursued this model [6]. Journals have also taken \nEamon Costello\n70 | Sci Ed 2019;6(1):69-72 http://www.escienceediting.org\na “hybrid” approach, continuing to publish closed-access articles available only via subscription but alongside fully (gold)\nopen access articles for which authors have paid an APC. Additionally, some open access journals do not charge any APCs.\n“Diamond open access” is one term posited to define this\nform of non-APC open access:\nIn the Diamond Open Access Model, not-for-profit, noncommercial organizations, associations or networks publish material that is made available online in digital format,\nis free of charge for readers and authors and does not allow\ncommercial and for-profit reuse [7].\n“Platinum” offers an alternative term to “diamond” for a\njournal that charges no APCs to authors. Regarding consistency of terminology, it has the advantage that platinum, like\ngold, is a metal and that it is more valuable than gold. Both\ndiamond and platinum are now used and mean broadly the\nsame thing. However, it will be a new term—bronze open access—that the remainder of this paper focuses on.

IntroductionAlong with the proliferation of Open Access (OA) publishing, the interest for comparing the scientific quality of studies published in OA journals versus subscription journals has also increased. With our study we aimed to compare the methodological quality and the quality of reporting of primary epidemiological studies and systematic reviews and meta-analyses published in OA and non-OA journals.MethodsIn order to identify the studies to appraise, we listed all OA and non-OA journals which published in 2013 at least one primary epidemiologic study (case-control or cohort study design), and at least one systematic review or meta-analysis in the field of oncology. For the appraisal, we picked up the first studies published in 2013 with case-control or cohort study design from OA journals (Group A; n = 12), and in the same time period from non-OA journals (Group B; n = 26); the first systematic reviews and meta-analyses published in 2013 from OA journals (Group C; n = 15), and in the same time period from non-OA journals (Group D; n = 32). We evaluated the methodological quality of studies by assessing the compliance of case-control and cohort studies to Newcastle and Ottawa Scale (NOS) scale, and the compliance of systematic reviews and meta-analyses to Assessment of Multiple Systematic Reviews (AMSTAR) scale. The quality of reporting was assessed considering the adherence of case-control and cohort studies to STrengthening the Reporting of OBservational studies in Epidemiology (STROBE) checklist, and the adherence of systematic reviews and meta-analyses to Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA) checklist.ResultsAmong case-control and cohort studies published in OA and non-OA journals, we did not observe significant differences in the median value of NOS score (Group A: 7 (IQR 7–8) versus Group B: 8 (7–9); p = 0.5) and in the adherence to STROBE checklist (Group A, 75% versus Group B, 80%; p = 0.1). The results did not change after adjustment for impact factor. The compliance with AMSTAR and adherence to PRISMA checklist were comparable between systematic reviews and meta-analyses published in OA and non-OA journals (Group C, 46.0% versus Group D, 55.0%; p = 0.06), (Group C, 72.0% versus Group D, 76.0%; p = 0.1), respectively).ConclusionThe epidemiological studies published in OA journals in the field of oncology approach the same methodological quality and quality of reporting as studies published in non-OA journals.

Five years afterPLoS Biology launched, the publishing landscape has changed radically. How much have PLoS andPLoS Biology contributed to this change, and what does the future hold for open access?