Clarify whether Big Five OA papers counted as “diamond” are truly diamond or products of specific agreements

Determine whether the 12.4% subset of publications reported as being in diamond open access journals among the 351,559 gold open access papers published between 2015 and 2018 by Elsevier, Sage, Springer-Nature, Taylor & Francis, and Wiley are genuinely published in diamond open access journals or instead arise from publisher-specific agreements.

Background

The paper distinguishes between gold open access (APC-based) and diamond open access (no fees for authors or readers) and reviews prior findings on their prevalence across publishers and databases.

In discussing prior large-scale estimates from Butler et al. (2023) for the five largest publishers, the authors note uncertainty about whether papers categorized as appearing in diamond journals are genuinely diamond or reflect special publishing arrangements. Resolving this uncertainty is important for accurately characterizing the scale and nature of diamond open access within outputs of dominant commercial publishers.