The mission to make scholarly research freely accessible to all has come a long way. Back in 2002, the Budapest Open Access Initiative set out its vision for removing barriers to scientific literature. The radical deceleration had a clear impact on the accessibility of journal articles, but the accessibility of academic books lagged. As an answer, the OAPEN platform launched in 2010 to try and facilitate the transition to open access for academic books. These projects helped promote the ideal of equal access. However, making scholarly research freely available relied heavily on pay-to-publish models such as gold open access (Gold OA). Ultimately, this left behind authors working in institutions without the means to cover extensive book processing charges (BPCs). The current publishing landscape has led others to wonder if there’s a solution to this problem of equality. Now, diamond open access (diamond OA) is potentially being positioned as the long-term solution to achieving accessibility in academic book publishing at no cost to authors. But can it work?

What is diamond open access publishing?

Within academic book publishing, diamond open access publishing is a scholarly publishing model in which books are freely accessible to readers, but authors do not pay book processing charges to publish. Sustaining diamond OA is the financial and infrastructural support offered by institutions such as universities, libraries, consortia, and scholarly societies.

The model contrasts with gold open access, which requires book processing charges generally ranging from 6,000–8,000 euros (depending on individual publisher fees and length of monograph, etc.) to be paid to publish. It also differs from green open access (green OA), which allows accepted book manuscripts to be deposited in an institutional repository before formatting and typesetting.

Although gold OA is the dominant publishing model, is there a possible alternative?

How diamond open access might liberate academic book publishing

Currently, academic publishers mostly rely on funds generated by book processing charges to cover production and publishing costs. But this model is limiting to researchers from less-resourced institutions, especially those in the Global South. As a result, we are left with a publishing model built around equitable access to research but with a long way to go to achieving true equity. That’s where diamond open access might come in.

Instead of academic books being financed by the authors or their institutions, the diamond OA model enables financing avenues to be established to allow publishers to move away from book processing charges.

One such avenue is The Open Book Collective (OBC). The OBC is a UK-registered charity organisation that unites publishers, publishing service providers, and scholarly libraries to fund and sustain open access book publishing. On this online platform, libraries and other institutional supporters can subscribe to Supporter Programmes. Income from these subscriptions can then be used by publishers and service providers to fund open access book projects. This collective funding model provides an equitable, flexible system for supporting book authors worldwide.

The OBC is just one funding avenue available. The infrastructure for supporting academic books through diamond OA is not as established as that available for supporting academic journals. This brings us onto the current limitations of the model.

What are the concerns?

Diamond open access is already able to operate at scale for certain publishers working in journal publishing. Scaling diamond OA for book publishers is proving to be a little more difficult. This is in keeping with the trend of policy and funding development that has seen OA journal publishing eclipse that of OA book publishing in the decades since the Budapest Open Access Initiative.

One of the biggest concerns is the complexity of creating a working diamond OA model for scholarly books. Currently, journals – and not individual articles – are identified as either diamond OA or non-diamond OA. For books, it is not so straightforward. Individual books could be classified as diamond OA. But this would require decisions for each title and the maintenance of many registries. In the long term, this would be complex and demanding on resources.

Another key limitation is the applicability of pre-existing OA diamond criteria to the scholarly books model. The Operational Diamond Open Access Criteria for Journals outlines six criteria is currently used to distinguish between diamond OA journals and non-diamond OA journals. But there are challenges in applying each of these criteria to academic books. For example, criteria two states that diamond OA journals must select papers via an explicitly described evaluation process. The process should also be in line with accepted practices in the relevant discipline. However, peer review for books is a much more complex, nuanced process. The extent of editorial intervention depends different facotrs. These can inldue the type of book and what stage the book is at in the publishing process, for example.

Perhaps the biggest concern of all, however, is how limited diamond OA infrastructure currently is. The gold OA model is necessary for publishers to make these books a reality for authors and readers.

The possible future of academic book publishing

So, what might a world with diamond open access for books look like? Well, rather than completely replacing gold open access, it is more likely that a mixed publishing ecosystem might develop to support the publication of open access books.

A potential model might see publishers receiving further financing from collective resources and authors being asked to secure partial funds through project grants, institutional support, donations obtained by the author, or even personal funds. The important thing here is that there would be no compulsory fees. Instead, emphasis relies on the joint efforts of author(s) and publisher in securing funding.

But such a model requires more than cooperation between author and publisher. It also requires academic institutions, research libraries, and national funders to support the development of collective, long-term infrastructural investments. The truth is that high production costs, scalability, and market realities make shifting to diamond OA easier in principle than in practice. For a complete shift to occur, the visionary enterprise of diamond OA needs to prove it can cope with these wide-ranging and complex limitations.