loading . . . Diamond OA, boutique or bazaar? A reply to Herb (2026) Johan Rooryck
(co-coordinator European Diamond Capacity Hub at OPERAS Research Infrastructure)
https://pulse49.com/2026/03/23/diamond-open-access-a-boutique-model-for-scholarly-publishing
In _Diamond Open Access: A boutique model for scholarly publishing_ (2026), Ulrich Herb argues that Diamond OA just fills a niche of scholarly publishing, and only serves the needs of particular research communities. He views Diamond OA as a tailor-made solution that is unable to scale, or apply universally. According to the author, Diamond OA is a boutique model, not an industrial-scale replacement for the current system. The author adds that the limitations of Diamond OA should be stated openly, as if they had not been.
The text is riddled with misconceptions about Diamond OA. First of all, the author claims that Diamond OA is presented as a revolution, while it is in fact the oldest model of publishing. It is rather the advent of highly profitable commercial publishing in the last 50 years that represents a relatively short period in the history of scholarly publishing, an observation that is underscored in Fyfe et al (2022).[1] The author seems to have little faith in any attempt to reform scholarly publishing: neither Green, Gold, nor Transformative Agreements find grace in his eyes and are peremptorily dismissed. So is Diamond, as it has plateaued at 6% of all published articles worldwide (based on figures from OpenAlex).
Curiously, the author concludes from this stable figure that the problem is not technical, since infrastructures for Diamond OA exist. That is not only a nonsequitur – the existence of infrastructure bears no relation to market share – it is disingenuous. In the last five years, a wealth of studies[2] have shown that Diamond OA suffers from fragmentation and lack of funding. Diamond OA journals sometimes struggle with visibility and technical capacity. Of course, recommendations[3] have been formulated to remedy this situation at the national and regional levels so that Diamond OA publishing can realize its full potential. Since Diamond OA requires public money, these recommendations take time to be implemented and acted upon.
The author furthermore writes that _“These characteristics—publishing without fees for readers and authors, non-profit structures, scholar-led governance, CC BY 4.0 licensing—often overlap, but they are not systematically connected.”_ That is incorrect. The European Diamond Capacity Hub explicitly connects these characteristics in the six operational criteria[4] it has adopted to define journals that qualify for the Diamond Discovery Hub,[5] a curated registry of currently 3600 Diamond OA journals in Europe. How Subscribe to Open relates to Diamond OA also has a simple answer: as long as the journal does not ask authors or readers for fees, and is owned by a nonprofit organisation, such as a scholarly society, it is Diamond OA. The six operational criteria for Diamond OA are agnostic with respect to the way the scholarly society funds the journal: if that includes converted subscription funds, that is entirely fine. By contrast, journals that are owned by commercial publishers are excluded from the Diamond Discovery Hub. While it is true that being community-owned or scholar-led does not necessarily coincide with being non-commercial, this is not the only criterion for Diamond OA: the six operational criteria have to be jointly met for a journal to be considered Diamond OA.
It is unfortunate that the author is not aware of these developments in Diamond OA, which have been disseminated widely.
The author also writes that _“these increasingly intricate discussions about the varieties of Open Access and the pure doctrine of Diamond OA are more likely to be off-putting than inspiring”_. But this is a straw man argument: it has never been the intention of Diamond OA publishers to fully explain the intricacies of Diamond OA to researchers. Diamond OA just wants to build an alternative publishing model that is in the hands of the scholarly community and that is equitable for authors and readers. All authors need to know is that they can publish for free. If every APC-charging journal has a Diamond OA counterpart of the same quality and reputation, it is unlikely that researchers will want to continue to pay for the privilege of publishing.
The author writes: _“Diamond OA is often described as publishing without costs, and that description is misleading. Diamond journals eliminate author-facing fees, but they do not eliminate the costs of publishing.”_ But this is another red herring: there is no Diamond OA publisher who says that there are no costs to publishing.
I agree with the author that authors choose journals on the basis of prestige. But Diamond journals can and do have an outstanding reputation in their field. When journals flip to Diamond OA, i.e. when editorial teams and boards decide to leave a commercial publisher and start a new Diamond OA journal, they take the reputation of the journal with them. Admittedly, such moves are exceptional, but they represent proof of concept that prestige and trust are portable. Trust does not reside with the publisher, but with the team editing the journal.
The author also suggests that Diamond OA publishers are not able to meet the increasing technical demands of scholarly publishing. That is not true. Even a small publisher like the Open Library of Humanities is able to put out high-quality journals whose articles’ metadata are demonstrably more complete that those of commercial journals of the most prestigious publishers: DOIs, ORCIDs, RORs, Grant IDs. It is also just not true that all Diamond OA publishing service providers are small: Erudit in Canada publishes over 200 Diamond OA journals, OpenEdition in France services 672 journals, most of which are Diamond OA, Redalyc serves over 1800 Diamond OA journals in Latin America, and 75% of Relawan Jurnal’s 24.000 journals in Indonesia are Diamond OA.
In terms of sheer number of journals, about 14.000 no-fee (i.e Diamond OA) journals have passed muster at the _Directory of Open Access Journals_ (DOAJ), and in the ALMASI project, Laakso & Taskin (2025) (see fn 2) identified 20,355 Diamond OA journals across Africa, Latin America, and Europe, with 13,202 being based in Europe, 5,821 in Latin America, and 1,351 in Africa.
To provide, as the author does, the example of Open U Journals, a Diamond OA platform hosted by the University of Bordeaux (France) that serves 10 journals, seems almost deliberately non-representative of the vast scale of journal communities presented by Diamond OA worldwide. At the same time, the example _is_ representative of something the author did not intend: Diamond OA often serves communities of practitioners – educators, policy-makers, social workers, healthcare professionals, agriculture, forestry, and water management engineers – but also SMEs and economic actors such as the wine industry, which stimulate innovation at the local level, creating jobs and economic growth.
The author also neglects a dimension of Diamond OA that is crucial to scholarly publishing, i.e. its multilingual nature. Pölönen et al. (2021)[6] show that 75% of all APC-based journals in DOAJ are English-only as opposed to 33% of Diamond (i.e. nonprofit) OA journals. 39% of Diamond journals publish in multiple languages including English, as opposed to 14% for APC-based journals. They find that 5% and 2% of the APC journals publish in Indonesian and Persian respectively; and that only 2% of the APC-based journals publish exclusively in other languages across the world. By contrast only 33% of Diamond OA journals are English-only and 29% of Diamond OA journals publish exclusively in languages other than English: As such, Diamond OA journals serve a vast ecosystem of local communities.
To conclude, Diamond OA globally represents a vast tapestry of journals, a kaleidoscopic bazaar[7] of scholarly diversity. A ‘boutique’ or a ‘niche’ it is not.
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[1] Fyfe, A., Moxham, N., McDougall-Waters, J., & Røstvik, C. M. (2022). A history of scientific journals. UCL Press.
[2] Bosman, J., Frantsvåg, J. E., Kramer, B., Langlais, P.-C., & Proudman, V. (2021). OA Diamond Journals Study. Part 1: Findings. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4558704, Armengou, C., Aschehoug, A., Ball, J., Bargheer, M., Bosman, J., Brun, V., de Pablo Llorente, V., Franczak, M., Frantsvåg, J. E., Hersperger, O., Klaus, T., Kramer, B., Kuchma, I., Laakso, M., Manista, F., Melinščak Zlodi, I., Mounier, P., Pölönen, J., Pontille, D., … Wnuk, M. (2023). Institutional Publishing in the ERA: Results from the DIAMAS survey. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10022184 Laakso, M., & Taskin, Z. (2025). D1.1 Scoping Report on Non-for-profit Publishing Ecosystems. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18257718 ; Rico-Castro, P., de Pablo Llorente, V., & Bonora Eve, L. (2026). Landscape Report on Diamond Open Access Publishing in Africa, Europe, and Latin America.
Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18377966
[3] https://zenodo.org/records/8202169
[4] https://zenodo.org/records/12721408
[5] https://ddh.edch.eu/en
[6] Pölönen, J., Kulczycki, E., Late, E., Røeggen, V., & Sivertsen, G. (2021). Response to BOAI steering committee concerning multilingualism in Gold OA publishing environment. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5592704
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar
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OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
jrooryck (March 30, 2026). Diamond OA, boutique or bazaar? A reply to Herb (2026) . _the diamond papers_. Retrieved March 30, 2026 from https://thd.hypotheses.org/560
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https://thd.hypotheses.org/560
