While most European funders and institutions actively endorse Open Access publishing, researchers have to take action and to figure out what is the best Open Access solution for them. While finding the right information presents a practical challenge, there are also heated debates about the ethics and even morality of the current publishing system. For example, the existing system of publishing Open Access requires the researcher to cover the costs of making a publication open; this requirement puts researchers from richer institutions in a more advantageous position than their colleagues with less financial support.
Diamond
The event A Diamond Future of Open Access Publishing, organised by VU Amsterdam's University Library as part of the international Open Access Week, took us for 90 minutes into an optimistic future world, where Open Access is the default and authors don't have to worry about the costs anymore as those are carried by various stakeholders, such as the government and libraries. This financial model is called... Diamond Open Access.
Examples
We heard from 3 speakers representing 3 Diamond initiatives, all supported by the VU Open Access Innovation Fund:
- Jos Baeten from Mathematics in Open Access (MathOA)
- Damian Trilling from Computational Communication Research (CCR)
- Roeland van der Rijst and Dineke Tigelaar from Pedagogische Studiën
Baeten took us into the history of Open Access, to the year 2015, when Johan Rooryck stepped down as editor of Lingua to start a diamond Open Access journal Glossa. MathOA did similar work on turning commercial journals into fair Open Access ones, but they also started new high quality journals that were Open Access from the beginning.
Trilling continued with his story of starting a new journal for a field that did not have a venue yet. The decision was to start open access from the beginning and to establish a foundation that will make the financial situation of the journal independent from a particular institution or company.
Pedagogische Studiën had a slightly different path as they existed as a paper-only journal for a long time; when thinking about transition to digital they chose a diamond open access model.
