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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Diamond open access | 2/5 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_open_access | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T10:14:37.993676+00:00 | kb-cron |
=== Debates over the identity of the open access commons (2003–2012) === In the early debates over open access, the distinctions between commercial and non-commercial forms of scientific publishing and community-driven or corporate-owned structures seldom appear, possibly due to the lack of viable business model for open access. Open access publications were rather increasingly categorized into two different editorial forms: open access articles made immediately available by the publisher and pre-published articles hosted on an online archive (either as a pre-print or post-print). Starting in 2003, the ROMEO project started to devise a color-code system to better identify the policy of scientific publishers in regard to open sharing of scientific articles, from "yellow" (pre-print only) to "green" (no restriction in place): "the 'greenest' publishers are those that allow self-archiving not only of the author's accepted manuscript, but of the fully formatted and paginated publisher PDF". In 2004, Harnad et al. repurposed this classification scheme into a highly influential binary scale: articles directly made available by the publisher belong to "gold" open access (instead of "yellow") and online archives are defined as "green" open access. With this breakdown of open access into "green" and "gold", there is no distinction between commercial and non-commercial publishers. For Peter Suber the "gold" model embraces both journals supported by APCs or by other means of funding, as well as volunteer-run journals: "In the jargon, OA delivered by journals is called gold OA, and OA delivered by repositories is called green OA." Tom Wilson introduced the expression "Platinum Open Access" in 2007 following an heated debate with Stevan Harnad and other open access activists on the American Scientist Open Access Forum mailing list. On his blog, Wilson defended the necessity of enlarging the classification of open access publishing forms as well as stressed the danger of conflating commercial and non-commercial open access journals.
[The "gold" and "green" classification] is not really the whole story and is in danger of perpetuating the myth that the only form of open access publishing is that made available through the commercial publishers, by author charging. This is why I distinguish between open access through author charging, which is what the Gold Route is usually promoted as being (…) and the Platinum Route of open access publishing which is free, open access to the publications and no author charges. In other words the Platinum Route is open at both ends of the process: submission and access, where as the Gold Route is seen as open only at the access end. The term "diamond open access" was coined later in 2012 by Marie Farge, a French mathematician and physicist and open access activist. Farge was involved in the Cost of Knowledge campaign led by Timothy Gowers against the excessive cost of scientific publishing. The reference to "diamond" was a hyperbolic pun on the "gold" metaphor that aims to suggest that non-commercial/free model were ultimately the best: "I have proposed to call this third way 'Diamond OA' by outbidding the 'Gold OA' terminology chosen by the publishers". "Free OA" was also contemplated as an alternative name. The Forum of Mathematics, an open access journals co-created by Timothy Gowers, was the first publication to explicitly claim to be a diamond journal: "For the first three years of the journal, Cambridge University Press will waive the publication charges. So for three years the journal will be what Marie Farge (who has worked very hard for a more rational publication system) likes to call diamond open access, a quasi-miraculous model where neither author nor reader pays anything".
=== Defining the diamond model (2012–present) ===
In 2013, Fuchs and Sandoval published one of the first systematic definitions of diamond open access: "Diamond open access Model, not-for-profit, non-commercial organizations, associations or networks publish material that is made available online in digital format, is free of charge for readers and authors and does not allow commercial and for-profit re-use." This definition is associated with a controversial stance against the leading definition of gold open access: "We argue for differentiating the concept of Gold Open Access Publishing because Suber and others mesh together qualitatively different models, i.e. for-profit and not-for-profit ones, into the same category, whereas others, especially policy makers, simply forget or exclude not-for-profit models that do not use author fees or reader fees." The debate over the relationship between "diamond" or "platinum" open access publications versus "Gold" open access has never settled and remains a point of contention, even after the publication of the OA Diamond Study. While valuing this study, Martin Paul Eve still considers diamond open access to be a "category error". Since 2013, the theoretical literature on the diamond model has been increasingly influenced by institutional analysis of the commons. Consequently, the "Open access commons" has recently emerged has an alternative label, although the term is used less as a descriptor and more as a programmatic ideal for the future of non-commercial open access. The conclusion of the OA Diamond study calls for the realization of The OA Commons as "a diverse, thriving, innovative and more interconnected and collaborative OA diamond journal ecosystem that supports bibliodiversity and serves many languages, cultures and domains in the future.". Similarly, Janneke Adema and Samuel Moore have proposed to "redefine the future of scholarly publishing in communal settings" through a "scaling small" that ensures the preservation and development of diverse editorial models. Analysis of the diamond model has been significantly deepened by the commission of large scale empirical studies such as the OA Cooperative Study (2016) by the Public Knowledge Project and the OA Diamond Study (2021) by the cOAlition S. Noteworthy, the 2021 study found: