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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Diamond open access | 3/5 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_open_access | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T10:14:37.993676+00:00 | kb-cron |
The number of Diamond OA journals is very large (>29,000), but only ~a third are registered in DOAJ, and only ~5% are indexed in either Scopus or Web of Science. Over half of these Diamond OA journals publish 25 or fewer articles per year. Between 2017 and 2019, paid-access journals published ~80% of all articles, paid-OA journals published ~11%, and Diamond OA journals published ~9%. The share of Diamond OA publications among all OA journal articles peaked in 2018 and has been declining since. Only 4.3% of Diamond OA journals are fully compliant with all Plan S criteria. Only 55% of Diamond OA journals provide DOI numbers for their articles. Only 25% of Diamond OA journals provide their content as XML or HTML (in addition to pdf). Only ~ half of Diamond OA journals provide download statistics for their content. 2/3 of Diamond OA journals use double-blind peer review, higher than subscription journals, which prefer single-blind peer review. 25% of Diamond OA journals operated at a loss, and just over 40% reported breaking even. The rest did not know their financial status. Although all Diamond OA journals rely heavily on volunteer work, they have some revenue sources, such as grants, collectively-organised funding, donations, shared infrastructure, membership fees, freemium services, etc. 70% of Diamond OA journals declared operating costs below $/€10,000 per year. In contrast, before cancelling its subscription in 2012, Harvard alone paid $40,000 per year for just one (the most expensive) of Elsevier's journals. The most challenging area for Diamond OA journals is indexing and content visibility in the main research databases, such as Scopus, Web of Science, and SciFinder.
== Distribution ==
The OA Diamond Study gives an estimation of >29,000 diamond open access journals in 2021, which represent a significant share of the total number of scholarly journals. Diamond journals make up 73% of all open access journals registered on the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), with 10,194 entries out of 14,020 in September 2020. In 2013, Fuchs and Sandoval already noted that, as a far as the number of individual journals is concerned, diamond open access is the main form of open access publishing: "Diamond open access is not just an idea, but rather, as the empirical data provided in this paper shows, the dominant reality of open access." While the diamond model is prevalent among open access journals when looking at journal titles, this is not the case when looking at the aggregate number of articles, as they publish fewer articles overall. The OA Diamond Study finds that the 10,194 journals without publication fees registered on the Directory of Open Access Journals published 356,000 articles (8–9% of all scholarly articles) per year from 2017 to 2019, compared to 453,000 articles (10–11%) published by the 3,919 commercial journals with APCs. This discrepancy can mostly be attributed to a consistently lower output from diamond open access journals compared with commercial journals: "In DOAJ we find that the majority of OA diamond journals (54.4%) publish 24 or fewer articles per year; only 33.4% of APC-based journals have a similar size." Diamond journals also have a more diverse editorial production, including other forms of scholarly productions like book reviews or editorials, which may contribute to decreasing their share of the total number of research articles. From 2014 to 2019, the output of diamond open access journal has continued to grow in absolute terms, but has decreased relative to the output of commercial open access journals. The same period showed a significant development of APC-based large publishers as well as an increasing conversion of legacy subscription-based publishers to the commercial open access model. Any estimation of the number of diamond journals or articles is challenging as most non-commercial or community-run journals do not identify as diamond journals and this definition has to be deduced or reconstructed from the lack of APCs or any other commercial activity. Additionally, diamond journals more frequently struggle to be registered in academic indexes and remain largely uncharted.
=== Geographic distribution ===
The majority of diamond open access journals are published in Europe (around 45%) and Latin America (around 25%). In relative terms, the diamond model is especially prevalent in Latin America (95% of open access journals registered in DOAJ) and Eastern Europe (81%). In contrast with Western Europe and North America, the open access movement in Latin America was largely structured around publicly supported platforms like Redalyc or Scielo, rather than APC-based publishers:
The Latin American region, as a result, owns an ecosystem characterized by the fact that "publishing" is conceived as acts of "making public", of "sharing", rather than the activity of a profit-driven publishing industry (...) Latin American academic journals are led, owned and financed by academic institutions. It is uncommon to outsource editorial processes. The OA Diamond Study attributes these differences to the absence of large, privately owned publishers, stating that "Most major, large commercial publishers are based in Western Europe or US/Canada, which explains some of the relative dominance of the APC-model in these regions. Without these publishers, Western Europe and US/Canada would be more similar to other regions." Additionally, Latin American journals have long been neglected in the main commercial indexes, which may have encouraged the development of local initiatives. The diamond model has come to embody an ideal of social justice and cultural diversity in emerging and developing countries. Diamond open access journals are more likely to be multilingual (38%): "while English is the most common language [...] Spanish, Portuguese and French play a much more important role for OA diamond journals than for APC-based ones. Generally, this holds for most languages other than English."