- The paper presents a viable diamond OA model in mathematics with a detailed cost structure of approximately $3,000 per journal per year.
- It employs streamlined editorial workflows and lightweight technological solutions to minimize traditional administrative hurdles.
- The experiment validates that overcoming coordination barriers can sustainably transform scholarly publishing without imposing fees on authors or readers.
Diamond Open Access and the AMR Operational Framework
Introduction
"Diamond Open Access: The AMR Experiment" (2601.02910) presents a critical analysis and comprehensive blueprint for viable diamond open access (OA) journals in mathematics. The author examines the historical context that has sustained subscription- and author-pays (gold OA) models, identifies coordination and infrastructure as principal obstructions to reform, documents the implementation and stabilization of diamond OA journals under the Association for Mathematical Research (AMR), and evaluates the sustainability proofs acquired over a multi-year deployment. The essay synthesizes the salient results, structural propositions, and sociotechnical implications for the mathematical publishing ecosystem.
Contextualization: The Problematic Landscape of Mathematical Journals
The entrenched culture of mathematical publishing hinges on legacy models: subscription-based access (reader-pays) and author-pays (gold OA). Numerous reform initiatives—including the Cost of Knowledge boycott, governmental or society-endowed platforms (e.g., Centre Mersenne, Episciences, MathOA), and nonprofit but not universally open publishers (e.g., MSP)—have failed to alter the broader equilibrium owing to infrastructural and coordination costs. The arXiv, while transformative for dissemination, is not a substitute for journals’ roles in selection, certified peer review, and post-publication curation.
The paper quantitatively dissects the gold OA model, where article processing charges (APCs) typically range from $2,000 to over$10,000 per article, highlighting resultant exclusions of under-resourced authors and institutions. Despite community endorsement for free access, uptake of diamond OA (with neither reader subscription nor authorship fees) remains minimal due to several nontrivial operational requirements: DOIs, ISSNs, submission and tracking software, hosting with long-term continuity, institutional archiving, and robust indexing.
The AMR Infrastructure: Technical Design Principles
The AMR’s model targets the cost-time Pareto optimum: editors’ time is prioritized, with minimal but strategic financial outlay eliminating administrative inefficiencies while discarding print-era legacy costs. The paper details a concrete cost stack of approximately $3,000 per journal per year, comprising:
- EditFlow (MSP): Delivers state-of-the-art editorial workflow, vastly reducing the manual labor needed for coordination, referee tracking, and decision management.
- Open Journal Systems: Provides persistent web hosting, metadata exposure, and interaction points aligned with modern scholarly standards.
- Crossref DOI registration and ISSN assignment via the Library of Congress: Ensures persistent identifiers and formal journal existence.
Professional typesetting is eschewed; authors and editors perform lightweight copyediting, and authors finalize LaTeX proofs in Overleaf or similar, subject to style adherence. This model leverages the technical competence of the community for document production and transfer of presentation control to authors, claiming a quality advantage over error-prone commercial production workflows.
Editorial Operations and Policy
AMR-journal editorial and refereeing labor remains, as always, an academic service performed by university-affiliated mathematicians. The key claim is that the diamond OA model does not inflate this load and avoids the perverse incentives that arise when editorial revenue is acceptance-dependent. Journals are online-only, obviating fixed page quotas and allowing for elastic issue sizes; no artificial scarcity is manufactured. This policy is maintained with continuous and regular publication—eliminating editorial backlogs and arbitrary rejections for non-scientific reasons.
AMR provides organizational continuity and disaster mitigation via lightweight but persistent oversight. The probability of multiple points of editorial/institutional failure coinciding is minimized by the umbrella structure.
Financial Sustainability
AMR’s requirement of only ~$3,000/year/journal enables capitalizing an endowment to fund operations in perpetuity, already accomplished for existing AMR-backed journals. Critically, AMR does not solicit funds from authors, readers, or libraries, completely decoupling operation from the traditional fiscal circuits of academic publishing.
Institutional Justification and Broader Implications
The paper argues that large established societies, such as the AMS, face substantial inertial and resource barriers to mass transition to diamond OA, even for journals with strong diamond OA pilots (e.g., Communications of the AMS). This is due to the superfluous overhead imposed by legacy workflows and their institutional ossification, not individual choices. Thus, the AMR experiment demonstrates that new operational models are best trialed in new organizations; successful experiments may eventually inform incumbent societies’ strategies once norms shift.
The implications are significant: the technical obstacles to scalable, sustainable diamond OA publishing in mathematics have been solved at modest cost. Further adoption is now a function of sociocultural factors: author trust, willingness to submit, and evolution of prestige signaling and hiring/prize evaluation criteria. The experiment has already led to five fully indexed, reputable journals (e.g., JAMR, Journal of Experimental Mathematics), including successful “flips” and takeovers of previously commercial titles.
Theoretical and Practical Outlook
This deployment invalidates claims that diamond OA is unscalable or inherently impractical due to cost. The AMR architecture provides a turn-key template supporting reproducibility, reliability, and prestige accumulation for journals in both well-organized subfields and the broader mathematical community. The principal challenge is now social and reputational inertia. The paper’s explicit prescription is to build, operate, and let time and community consensus determine the standing of OA venues.
There are further implications for disciplines beyond mathematics. Given comparable culture and infrastructure (LaTeX-based workflows, strong arXiv adoption, editorial service as academic duty), similar models are plausible in other STEM fields. Finally, integration of AI-based tools for copyediting and process automation hints at further cost reductions and workflow optimization in the future.
Conclusion
"Diamond Open Access: The AMR Experiment" (2601.02910) supplies a complete operational template for scalable, minimally expensive, and robust diamond OA publishing. It identifies the coordination barrier—not financial resources or technical complexity—as the main obstruction to reform, and provides evidence that its removal catalyzes community-level change. The primary variable is now community buy-in, prestige, and time. The diamond OA model as realized by the AMR is positioned for broad adoption should mathematical culture shift further toward open dissemination without reader or author fees.
