The reflections presented here are based on a talk I delivered on 16 March 2026 at the 89th Annual Conference of the German Physical Society (DPG), at the Spring Meeting of the Matter and Cosmos Section (SMuK). Building on my talk “Diamond Open Access: Misconceptions, Systemic Constraints, Potentials,” this post, titled “Diamond Open Access: A Boutique Model for Scholarly Publishing?”, explores whether this may ultimately be the most realistic role Diamond Open Access can play within the scholarly communication system.
The visuals in this post were generated using Google’s NotebookLM.
Every few years, scholarly publishing discovers its next revolution. At the moment, that revolution is called Diamond Open Access (DOA). The idea is seductive: journals that are free for readers and free for authors, operated by scholarly communities or public institutions rather than commercial publishers (Herb & Schmal, 2024). No paywalls, no article processing charges, no extraction of profit from publicly funded research. For advocates of Open Science, Diamond OA promises something close to a structural correction of a system many consider broken. But revolutions in scholarly communication have a curious habit: they rarely overturn the system they seek to replace.
The Plateau Effect
The history of Open Access (OA) is full of moments of enthusiasm. Institutional repositories and Green OA were supposed to transform access to knowledge. Later, Gold OA was expected to shift the economics of publishing. Transformative agreements were supposed to accelerate the transition—perhaps the greatest miscalculation in the history of Open Access (Rothfritz et al., 2024). And now Diamond OA carries similar hopes.
Yet the broader system has proven remarkably stable. In 2024 alone, around 6.2 million scholarly articles were published (Herb, 2025b), and the market dominance of large commercial publishers remains largely intact. Especially Diamond OA has hovered at a stable plateau of roughly 6% for years—still a long way from delivering the knockout blow to Closed Access or Gold OA.
This persistence suggests that the problem is not a lack of technical alternatives. The infrastructures for (D)OA exist. What persists are structural incentives and institutional routines. The plateau effect does not mean that nothing changes. It means that change often stabilizes at a level far below the expectations of reformers.
The Definition of Diamond OA – a moving target?
Even defining Diamond OA turns out to be difficult. At the beginning of the Diamond OA discussions, the term simply referred to publishing without fees for authors or readers. Over time, additional elements were introduced—considered essential by some, optional by others, or simply unknown to many—such as the expectation that publications should be distributed under a CC BY 4.0 license, or that Diamond OA should be scholar-led or non-profit. These characteristics—publishing without fees for readers and authors, non-profit structures, scholar-led governance, CC BY 4.0 licensing—often overlap, but they are not systematically connected. It also raises the question of how to treat—or how to classify—journals that follow the Subscribe-to-Open model. In this model, journals are published by a publisher—typically a traditional closed-access or commercial publisher—and are made Open Access provided that a sufficient number of subscriptions are maintained. However, they remain Open Access only as long as subscription revenues continue to meet the publisher’s financial expectations. These would be journals where authors do not pay publication fees. They might be scholarly owned, if they are published by a learned society. They may also be community-driven. And yet they still operate within a commercial framework, because many learned societies themselves function in ways similar to commercial publishers and sometimes pursue significant financial interests. This example illustrates that being community-owned or scholar-led does not necessarily coincide with being non-commercial.
Debating Diamond OA While Researchers Do Research
In fact, outside the Open Access bubble, relatively few researchers are even aware of these distinctions debated within the community. For many scholars deeply engaged in research, these increasingly intricate discussions about the varieties of Open Access and the pure doctrine of Diamond OA are more likely to be off-putting than inspiring. They risk making Diamond OA appear less like a practical publishing model and more like a theoretical construct—or even a theoretical demon.
Moreover, these ever more precise and restrictive definitions of Diamond OA make it easy to redefine the concept whenever its limited success becomes apparent. The argument often runs as follows: Diamond OA currently accounts for only five or six percent of publications, but that is merely because it has not yet been implemented properly. If only additional criteria were introduced—scholar-led governance, non-profit structures, stricter licensing requirements—then researchers would embrace it enthusiastically and its uptake would increase dramatically.
The Moral Narrative of Open Access: Pro Open Access—or Simply Anti–Big Three?
When researchers talk about Open Access, the conversation often begins with a moral argument. In interviews with scholars from a range of disciplines, attitudes toward OA were overwhelmingly positive. All interviewees supported the principle, even though no one reported serious problems accessing the literature they needed or publishing their own work.
When asked why they advocated so strongly for Open Access—even though they reported having no problems accessing the literature they needed or publishing their own work—the explanation was blunt, and the answer in most cases was straightforward: the Big Three publishers are bloodsuckers. Much of the sympathy for OA stemmed from the fact that the interviewed scholars rejected the commercial interests of the large publishing houses and their pricing policies. This sentiment is widespread. High profit margins, market concentration, and expensive subscription packages have generated considerable resentment among researchers and libraries. But moral criticism does not necessarily translate into behavioral change. When the same scholars were asked whether they would publish Open Access if that meant accepting a journal with a lower reputation, the answer was just as clear: No.
They also stated that they would only publish Open Access, if the APCs were very low or if the journal would not charge fees, which, of course, can be read as an argument in favor of Diamond.
Nevertheless, the problem is not that scholars oppose Open Access. The problem is that academic prestige still structures their decisions.
Trust, Reputation, and Publishing Decisions
An empirical study I co-authored (Herb & Geith, 2020) suggests that researchers evaluate publication venues according to a mixture of formal and reputational factors. They care about the clarity of articles, the quality of graphics, the logical presentation of the text, and the transparency of the presentation. But they also pay attention to signals of trust: the reputation of the editorial board, the prestige of the journal, whether respected authors—or scholars whose expertise they trust—publish there, and how the journal ranks in their own experience as readers. The access model itself—Open Access or closed access—often plays a surprisingly small role in these evaluations. In other words, the scholarly publishing system is less about access models than about trust. And trust tends to accumulate slowly.
The Misconception of Free Publishing
Diamond OA is often described as publishing without costs, and that description is misleading. Diamond journals eliminate author-facing fees, but they do not eliminate the costs of publishing. Editorial management, peer review coordination, metadata production, platform maintenance, archiving, and reserves for future technical upgrades all require resources.
It is worth noting that some cost studies fold publishers’ sometimes rather ambitious profit expectations into their calculations, which naturally pushes the figures upward. In those cases, the numbers reported in these studies reflect not just production costs but profit margins as well. At the same time, focusing narrowly on production costs can also be misleading, since expenses such as technical upgrades, server migrations, and other long-term infrastructure needs are rarely captured. Profit expectations clearly influence Open Access prices—but they do not necessarily determine the actual costs of producing a publication or the sustainability of a publishing infrastructure.
With that caveat in mind, let us return to the cost: Estimates for the cost of publishing an article range from roughly $200 to more than $3,000, depending on workflows and rejection rates (eLife, 2026; Grossmann & Brembs, 2021; Research Information Network, 2009; Waltham, 2010)
The difference is simply where these costs appear. In Diamond OA they are often absorbed through institutional funding, voluntary academic labor or small editorial teams operating with minimal infrastructure (Taubert et al., 2024) . This arrangement can work remarkably well at small scale. But scaling it up is another matter.
When Platforms Meet the Limits of Scale
In an interview with a non-commercial Diamond OA provider operating under public ownership, the interviewee openly admitted that they could no longer accept every journal that wanted to join the platform. In fact, they had become, as they put it, ‘a victim of their own success’: the workload had exploded, and they were now almost relieved when journals left the platform. Some had already done so—moving to commercial publishers. This is somewhat paradoxical. If Diamond OA is often presented as an antidote to the commercialization of scholarly publishing, it seems almost grotesque when non-commercial Diamond OA platforms effectively become incubators for journals that later reappear as commercial Gold Open Access titles charging APCs.
The difficulty is compounded by the increasing technical demands of scholarly publishing. Modern journals are expected to deliver structured XML workflows, persistent identifiers such as ORCID/ DOIs, rich metadata, interoperability with indexing services, and integration with research information systems. Meeting these expectations requires technical expertise and stable infrastructure; commercial publishers invest heavily in these areas. Small Diamond OA teams often rely on manual labor and limited automation (Taubert et al., 2024). Competing in this infrastructure race is not impossible—but it is difficult.
Recent developments also illustrate how closely preprint infrastructures are becoming integrated with commercial publishing workflows. In 2026, the chemistry preprint server ChemRxiv—operated by several chemical societies—joined Wiley’s new Research Exchange Preprints platform, meaning that these scholarly societies have chosen to link their community preprint infrastructure directly to a publisher-run submission and dissemination system.
À la vôtre – The OENO One Case: Success Depends on Investment
Several Diamond OA initiatives illustrate the challenge of scaling community-driven publishing infrastructures. One example is Open U Journals, a Diamond OA platform hosted by the University of Bordeaux (France). The project launched with external funding and a clear vision: provide a sustainable infrastructure for community-driven journals. Once the initial funding period ended, the expectation was that participating institutions would continue supporting the journals. Of the journals available on the platform at the end of the project funding, only one had obtained a Journal Impact Factor (2.9 for the year 2022): OENO One, a journal devoted to the science of winemaking, oenology.
The reason might have been: It was (and is) sponsored by leading commercial companies from the wine industry (e.g., Château Lafite Rothschild, Château Mouton Rothschild, Moët Hennessy) and staffed accordingly. This illustrates that, regardless of how critically one may view the Impact Factor, it still functions as a signal of quality—and being able to display this signal requires investment. It should be noted, however, that the journal’s Impact Factor declined after the end of the initial funding period to 2.2 (for the year 2024). While the available evidence does not allow firm conclusions, this may also suggest that the funding had a positive effect on the professionalization of the journal. On the other hand, it should be remembered that the 2024 value evaluates publications from 2022 and 2023 and the citations to them, which still fall within the project’s funding period.
All ten funded journals still exist, and all state that they publish in Diamond OA. However, I would regard two of them as only formally existing due to a lack of activity. Two others publish articles at times with larger intervals but remain active. The low output should not necessarily be interpreted negatively; it may also be a consequence of a funding model that is not based on per-article fees, which makes mass output unattractive.
Community-Grown Diamond OA
Yet focusing solely on the obstacles would miss an important point. Some of the most successful Diamond OA initiatives share a particular characteristic: they emerge organically from disciplinary communities. These initiatives demonstrate that sustainable alternatives can emerge when they are deeply rooted in disciplinary communities. The LIPIcs series (Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics), operated by Schloss Dagstuhl / Leibniz Center for Informatics, publishes diamond conference proceedings through a community-driven infrastructure financed by a modest publication fee of €80 (paid by the organization behind the conference). Another notable example is SciPost, a scholar-led publishing platform in Physics that combines Diamond OA with transparent governance and community-based peer review, funded through institutional memberships and consortial support. Unlike many top-down platform initiatives struggling with scalability and sustainability, these community-grown models illustrate that Diamond OA can work—provided it is anchored in strong disciplinary networks, shared governance, a high level of trust within the community, and collective responsibility for the publishing infrastructure.
And the Prestige Problem?
When Diamond OA services are genuinely community-driven—emerging from within a disciplinary community and enjoying strong acceptance there (as LIPIcs or SciPost) —the reputational problem that many other Diamond OA platforms face tends to disappear. In such cases, the publishing venue is embedded in established scholarly networks and serves a clearly recognized need. By contrast, Diamond OA services that are less community-grown and instead created in a more top-down manner often struggle with legitimacy. Some appear to serve little more than the demand for a free publishing opportunity rather than addressing a clearly articulated need within a scholarly community. And these services encounter the same structural constraint: prestige.
Hooray: New Metrics Boost Diamond. When Open Science Meets the Prestige Economy
Academic careers depend on recognition, and recognition is (like it or not) closely tied to journal reputation. Changing the publishing model does not automatically change the prestige economy of academia, which drives decisions about where to publish. This is why reform debates increasingly focus on research assessment. If hiring committees, funding agencies, and evaluation systems began to reward open science practices more explicitly, Diamond OA journals might gain visibility and legitimacy more quickly. But this solution carries risks of its own (Azeroual et al., 2024; Herb, 2025a). Replacing the Journal Impact Factor with a new metric for openness could simply reproduce the same problems in a different form. The more fundamental question, however, is what these Open Science metrics—designed to reward Open Science compliance and Open Access publishing—are actually meant to achieve. Are they intended to measure performance, or to incentivize changes in behavior? And this leads to an even more important question: what exactly should be rewarded? Good science—however one might define it—or publishing under Diamond OA conditions? And one must not forget: Metrics, after all, tend to shape behavior in unintended ways. This dynamic is often described by Goodhart’s law: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
A Balance between Idealism and Structure
Diamond OA occupies an interesting position in the landscape of scholarly communication. It represents a normative vision of what scholarly publishing could look like: community-driven, publicly supported, and accessible to everyone. At the same time, it operates within a system structured by prestige, evaluation metrics, and institutional incentives. These structures do not disappear simply because a new (and for some even better) publishing model exists. For this reason, Diamond OA should probably not be understood as the final stage of Open Access. It is better understood as one experiment among many—a promising but structurally constrained attempt to reshape scholarly communication. And perhaps that is enough.
To avoid future disappointments with Diamond OA as well, we might want to burden it with fewer expectations. It is not a miracle solution but rather a corrective—one that works in some areas, but not in all. We should abandon the fantasy of a total flip to Open Access driven by Diamond OA, and we should critically reflect on attempts to reform research assessment to promote Open Access. If Diamond OA were truly to sound the death knell for Closed Access, it would have to scale enormously and effectively eliminate the Big Five—or at least the Big Three—publishers. In my view, it is entirely sufficient if Diamond OA fills a niche and serves the clearly identifiable needs of particular research communities. Its limitations should be stated openly. Diamond OA is less a mass product than a tailor-made solution—something that is not universally applicable. It is, in a sense, a boutique model, not an industrial-scale replacement.
References
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eLife. (2026). Editorial Process. https://elife-rp.msubmit.net/html/elife-rp_author_instructions.html#process
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Herb, U., & Schmal, W. B. (2024, September 29). The benefits of diamond are not crystal clear—Research Professional News. https://www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-europe-views-of-europe-2024-9-the-benefits-of-diamond-are-not-crystal-clear/
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Rothfritz, L., Schmal, W. B., & Herb, U. (2024). Trapped in Transformative Agreements? A Multifaceted Analysis of >1,000 Contracts (arXiv:2409.20224). arXiv. http://arxiv.org/abs/2409.20224
Taubert, N., Sterzik, L., & Bruns, A. (2024). Mapping the German Diamond Open Access Journal Landscape. Minerva, 62(2), 193–227. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-023-09519-7 Waltham, M. (2010). The Future of Scholarly Journal Publishing among Social Science and Humanities Associations. Journal of Scholarly Publishing, 41(3), 257–324. https://doi.org/10.3138/jsp.41.3.257