The least expensive model in academic publishing has turned into the one European universities cannot reliably pay for. Diamond open access — journals and platforms that charge neither readers nor authors — now shoulders much of the EU's stated ambition for scholarly publishing, yet the money behind it is still volunteer time, library goodwill, and a scattering of project grants with expiry dates.

The pressure increased sharply on 23 May 2023, when the Council of the European Union adopted conclusions on scholarly publishing that called for open, transparent, and equitable access to research, and pointed member states toward not-for-profit publishing models without author fees. The direction was plain. The financing was left to national governments and universities to invent.

Zero-fee publishing is buckling under its own success

Diamond open access means a reader pays no subscription and an author pays no article processing charge, commonly called an APC. That promise removes two revenue streams, but it does not remove the work. Journals still need copyediting, typesetting, reference checking, plagiarism screening, web hosting, digital object identifiers, long-term archiving, and editorial coordination. Someone, somewhere, has to cover those costs.

The academic publishing world has long treated this corner of the ecosystem as small and simple. It is neither. The 2021 OA Diamond Journals Study, commissioned by cOAlition S, estimated that roughly 29,000 diamond journals operate globally. They publish a substantial part of the scholarly record, especially in the humanities and social sciences, and most are tiny. They live inside a university department, a museum, a learned society, or a research institute, and they run on the same premise year after year: an editor handles submissions at night, a librarian maintains the software between other duties, and a small grant covers typesetting when it appears.

That arrangement worked, after a fashion, when diamond journals were a quiet alternative. It has begun to crack because European policy now treats diamond as a preferred model rather than a curiosity. Science Europe and the European University Association have argued that scholar-led publishing deserves recurrent institutional funding, not project money. Recurrent funding, however, is exactly what universities find hardest to commit when their library budgets are already locked into subscription packages and read-and-publish agreements.

Here's the catch

The catch is not that diamond open access costs too much. It is that the costs are invisible, local, and attached to no invoice the system recognises. A university can record a €50,000 subscription package as an expense. When a library diverts a quarter of one staff member's time to maintaining Open Journal Systems for six faculty journals, that labour often never appears in a budget line at all.

Free-riding compounds the problem. A diamond journal hosted in one country serves readers and authors across Europe and beyond. The institution that funds it bears the full cost of a global public good. Small countries with strong publishing traditions have maintained national platforms for years: Croatia runs HRČAK, Finland runs Journal.fi. Both are respected, both reduce duplication, and both depend on national support that can shift with ministry priorities and electoral cycles.

The second squeeze comes from the success of read-and-publish deals. Libraries that once paid subscriptions now sign read-and-publish agreements that bundle access and APC payments. Diamond obligations must then be carved out of the same budget that is still buying access to Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley, and Taylor & Francis. In most universities the open access budget is not a fresh pot of money. It is the old serials budget wearing a new label.

What European universities are actually trying

The baseline for all this work remains the 2021 OA Diamond Journals Study, which turned an undercounted global ecosystem into a policy problem. The EU-funded DIAMAS project has spent three years mapping institutional publishing across the continent and producing a common Diamond Open Access Standard for universities, funders, and platforms. Alongside it, CRAFT-OA has been developing shared technical infrastructure for discovery, quality assurance, and journal production.

Those projects share a logic. Thirty small journals installing and patching their own publishing software will fail in thirty different ways. One shared set of tools, maintained centrally, costs less and creates something closer to public infrastructure. The European Research Council's own open access mandates have already pressed this question onto university grant offices, as our earlier coverage of the ERC's grantee rules explained. Funders can require free access, but someone still has to operate the machine that makes free access durable.

University library consortia are making the same calculation. Some are pooling money to support diamond platforms rather than subscribing to proprietary ones. Others are hiring scholarly communication librarians to run in-house publishing operations. These are not large budget lines. They are often a fraction of what the same university pays for a single read-and-publish deal, which is why the phrase 'diamond open access funding crisis' is slightly misleading. The money exists. It has just been committed elsewhere.

Collective funding, not another invoice

The most plausible fixes look less like a market and more like public broadcasting. Universities and funders contribute to a common pot that supports a portfolio of journals and services, rather than paying per article. The European Council's May 2023 conclusions moved in this direction by inviting member states and the Commission to invest in community-led, non-profit publishing infrastructure. That wording matters: it treats open access as a shared service, not as a purchase of individual papers.

France's National Fund for Open Science has run a version of this model for years, channelling money to open platforms and bibliodiversity rather than paying APCs. The Netherlands, Finland, and Croatia have taken different routes, but they share a trait. The funder is a government or a university consortium, and the journals remain owned by the communities that edit them.

What still lags is scale. A national fund can sustain a platform, but no single national fund can sustain the global migration of thousands of journals away from APC models. That is why the idea of a European Diamond Capacity Hub, discussed under DIAMAS, keeps resurfacing. The proposal is to give universities a shared operational layer: training, standards, technical support, and a standing funding scheme. Thousands of small journals would then not each have to negotiate their own survival.

What would make the difference

A handful of changes would do more than any new declaration. One, universities move diamond support into recurring library or research office budgets rather than temporary project funds. Two, national funders coordinate so that a journal serving a European subfield is not left dependent on the generosity of its host department. A third change would attach diamond publishing to research evaluation by counting editorial work and journal stewardship in hiring and promotion files. A fourth would require the universities that benefit most from a shared journal to contribute proportionally, rather than free-riding on the host institution.

None of this is glamorous. It is budgeting, job descriptions, memoranda of understanding, and shared platforms. Diamond open access lacks a villain, a deadline, and a glossy product launch. It has only the slow work of making free-to-read publishing reliable enough to survive beyond the next grant cycle.

For researchers, the immediate consequence is concrete. A postdoc who edits a diamond journal does work that counts for almost nothing in a hiring file. A department that wants to start a journal discovers the library can provide software but not staff time. A tenure-track scholar who publishes in a respected diamond journal still hears the question about the impact factor. Fixing the funding is part of the answer. Fixing the incentives is the other.

Ask the managing editors of most diamond journals what would change their working lives, and the answer is not a new platform. It is a recurring line for typesetting and a salary for the editorial assistant. Those are the least glamorous things in publishing. They are also the things that determine whether a journal survives. The policies are in place. The money is not. Until that changes, diamond open access will remain what it has always been: the most principled part of academic publishing, funded by the least protected people.

Photo by Akhilesh Sharma on Unsplash