Community-Led Diamond Open Access

Updated 28 October 2025

Community-Led Diamond Open Access is a model of scholarly publishing where the costs are fully covered by academic institutions, consortia, or public funds, eliminating author and reader fees.
It operationalizes community governance through consortial, institutional, and volunteer-driven platforms that leverage open-source technology for efficient publishing.
The approach promotes equity and sustainability by reallocating existing resources and minimizing financial barriers, ensuring universal access to scholarly communication.

Community-Led Diamond Open Access (CL-DOA) is a model of scholarly communication in which the costs of publishing—including editorial processing, peer review, dissemination, and infrastructure—are entirely covered by academic institutions, consortia, scholarly societies, or public funds rather than by charging author fees (APCs) or reader access charges. This approach stands in contrast to “gold” open access, in which authors or their funders typically pay APCs, and to traditional paywalled or hybrid subscription publishing. CL-DOA is marked by its focus on non-commercial, community governance and a commitment to universal, barrier-free access for both authors and readers.

1. Foundational Principles and Operational Models

Diamond Open Access is defined by the absence of both author-side publication fees and reader-side access charges. Instead, costs are borne by academic or public stakeholders—universities, libraries, scholarly societies, or public agencies—who may pool resources directly or via coordinated consortial arrangements (Shashok, 2017, 0805.2739). The operationalization of CL-DOA typically involves one or more of the following features:

Community-governed funding via library consortia (e.g., SCOAP3 in HEP, see below).
University-, society-, or government-supported journals and platforms, often built on open-source or in-house technology.
Volunteer labor for core publishing tasks (editorial, copy-editing, technical).
Transparent, non-profit management structures.

SCOAP3 in high-energy physics exemplifies the model: libraries and funding agencies reallocate existing subscription expenditures (“B”) to collectively cover peer-review and editorial functions, following formulas such as $B \approx N \cdot P$ and $I_i = f_i \cdot B$ , where $N$ is annual article count, $P$ the per-article cost, and $f_i$ the national share of literature (0805.2739).

2. Types of Community-Led Diamond OA Initiatives

CL-DOA encompasses a range of publication venues and infrastructures:

Disciplinary consortia: As with the physics-based SCOAP3, these models channel resources from a whole research field (0805.2739).
Institutional and library-led journals: Universities and their libraries organize and fund platforms (e.g., those built on OJS), often with additional government or society backing (Bellen et al., 8 Nov 2024).
Volunteer-driven society journals: Editorial and operational work is contributed as professional “gifts,” with funding focused on minimal infrastructure and technical services (Taubert et al., 2023, Pierantonio et al., 2020).
Distributed, decentralized publication networks: Emerging models (“distributed, community-driven academic publishing system”) utilize shared infrastructure (university data centers) and community-wide, algorithmic peer evaluation (Barbone et al., 2023).

Distinct models are mapped along the axes of labor monetization (volunteer/gift-based vs. professionalized/paid) and institutional size/participation, per the German OA landscape analysis (Taubert et al., 2023).

Model Type	Funding Source	Labor Structure
Consortial (e.g., SCOAP3)	Library/funding agency pool	Tendered publisher services, community oversight
Institutional (e.g., Wellcome Open Research)	Parent institution/funder direct	Staff and faculty in academic roles
Volunteer society journal	No fees, volunteer labor	Editors/reviewers as “gift economy”
Distributed/decentralized	Shared institutional servers	Community-wide peer review, algorithmic selection

Economic: The diamond model avoids market-driven APC inflation and the transfer of public funds into commercial publisher profits (Thibault et al., 2018). Cost analyses reveal that highly automated, LaTeX-based workflows paired with open-source tools can reduce annual publishing costs to <$1,000 for 200 articles, equating to$\sim$\$1 per article, with minimal required human labor (Bos et al., 14 Apr 2025). SCOAP3, by contrast, estimated a cost ceiling of $\sim$ 10 million €/year for HEP globally (0805.2739).

Technical: The success of CL-DOA is dependent on:

Robust open-source infrastructure for submission, copy editing, and hosting (e.g., HotCRP, OJS, in-house tools) (Bos et al., 14 Apr 2025).
Automation of metadata extraction and production pipelines, especially in disciplines where LaTeX dominates (Bos et al., 14 Apr 2025).
Legal and technically sustainable OA tracking: OA status is best monitored through interoperable metadata and APIs from sources like DOAJ, ROAD, and OpenAlex (Leeuwen et al., 2018, Simard et al., 2 Apr 2024).
Distributed hosting and collaborative editing environments.

Social and Governance: CL-DOA initiatives hinge on:

Community mobilization, both for labor and decision-making (Pierantonio et al., 2020).
Formal governance transitions, moving from founder-led to distributed oversight with role diversification and codified responsibilities, as measured by metrics such as count ( $K$ ) and Shannon entropy ( $H$ ) of roles/actions in project constitutions (Noori et al., 19 Sep 2025).
Distributed review models: Initial and ongoing peer review may be community-wide, algorithmic, and transparent (Barbone et al., 2023).

4. Diversity, Inclusivity, and Indexing

Diamond OA journals show greater geographic and linguistic diversity than gold OA. Empirical analysis demonstrates that diamond journals are less likely to be indexed in traditional bibliometric databases (Web of Science, Scopus), are more frequently published by institutions in Latin America, Asia, and non-Western countries, and often operate in multiple languages or local vernaculars (Simard et al., 2 Apr 2024). For example, OpenAlex indexes >12,500 diamond OA journals, with $\sim$ 60% not appearing in WoS or Scopus; in the SSH domains, almost 70% of diamond journals are absent from these traditional indexes (Simard et al., 2 Apr 2024). Canadian data show 62% of active journals are diamond OA, with especially high adoption in the digital era (85% of new titles since 2015), predominantly sponsored by universities and supported by infrastructures such as Érudit and OJS (Bellen et al., 8 Nov 2024).

Indicator	Diamond OA	Gold OA
Indexing in WoS/Scopus	Low ( $\sim$ 40-50%)	Higher (up to 77%)
Language diversity	High (multilingual, 27% non-English in SSH)	Lower, more English
Regional prevalence	Latin America, Asia, community-led	Western, commercial
Authorship (OA in India SAUs)	6.74% of OA output (Roy et al., 24 Mar 2025)	57.27% (Roy et al., 24 Mar 2025)

5. Governance Evolution and Community Management

As community-led infrastructure matures, formal governance adapts incrementally, not by abrupt transfer of authority but by layering new roles and actions, and balancing regulatory scope. This is quantitatively characterized by rising counts of roles/actions and increasing normalized entropy, reflecting greater differentiation and balance (Noori et al., 19 Sep 2025). Early models focus on all-project or “core editor” roles; over time, responsibilities diversify (e.g., technical oversight, ecosystem management, compensation). Regulatory tone remains enabling, emphasizing empowerment over restriction.

This evolutionary pattern is key for the sustainability of CL-DOA, enabling accountability and resilience as participation scales (Noori et al., 19 Sep 2025).

6. Sustainability, Funding, and Structural Challenges

Empirical studies from Germany and Canada indicate persistent sustainability risks for diamond OA, particularly for small, volunteer-run journals (“lower left” quadrant in landscape maps) (Taubert et al., 2023, Bellen et al., 8 Nov 2024). The main structural challenges are:

Over-reliance on a few individuals, risking burnout and operational fragility.
Scarcity of stable, long-term funding versus one-off project grants.
Difficulty scaling volunteer/mutualized labor for large volume journals (CL-DOA is most robust for small/mid-size titles).
High journal cessation rates among new titles, particularly those founded with minimal infrastructure in the digital era (median age at cessation 11 years in Canada) (Bellen et al., 8 Nov 2024).

Professionalization of certain functions, division of labor, stable institutional engagement, and the hybridization of volunteer and monetized contributions are recommended for future stability (Taubert et al., 2023).

7. Future Directions and Broader Implications

CL-DOA has demonstrated feasibility and cost-efficiency in multiple disciplines and global contexts (0805.2739, Shashok, 2017, Bos et al., 14 Apr 2025). Its expansion is aided by digital innovation (automated workflows, open infrastructures), but long-term resilience depends on resolving challenges of scaling, funding sustainability, and labor burnout (Bellen et al., 8 Nov 2024, Taubert et al., 2023). Policy-level ambitions in Canada, the EU, and India are steering toward broader CL-DOA adoption through direct funding, infrastructural support, and requirements for immediate OA (Bellen et al., 8 Nov 2024, Roy et al., 24 Mar 2025).

Decentralized, blockchain-backed models (e.g., COOL Research DAO in astrophysics) point to further radicalization of the community-led, open-access paradigm, offering peer-to-peer economic and reputational exchange and dynamic knowledge networks as potential next steps (Chevance et al., 22 Jan 2025).

In summary, Community-Led Diamond Open Access is characterized by resource reallocation, non-commercial governance, community ownership, and intensive mutualization of scholarly labor. Its viability and sustainability depend on governance evolution, technological automation, diverse funding pipelines, and ongoing adaptation to community needs and institutional context. The approach continues to offer a blueprint for equitable, transparent, and sustainable scholarly communication across disciplines and regions.