Editor’s note: Today’s post is by Curt Rice, Executive Director of the U.S.-Norway Fulbright Foundation for Educational Exchange. Reviewer credits to Chef Maryam Sayab.
Before the internet, many disciplines already practiced forms of scholarly communication that evoke what we now call diamond open access. Manuscripts circulated through departmental working papers series (e.g., in economics) and informal scholarly networks — or, as I still remember from my own early career, simply through the mail! And in many ways, these arrangements captured the essential functions of publishing — distribution and quality control — through informal feedback or conference discussions, all without author-facing fees or reader paywalls.
What made this ecosystem possible was not heroism, but tractability: limited scale, manageable volume, and informal governance. And that is precisely what has changed.
Today’s scholarly communication system operates at a radically different scale, with millions of papers published each year (according to estimates from the STM Association and Crossref). What once worked through personal commitment and small-scale networks now requires infrastructure: platforms, preservation, metadata standards, governance, and long-term coordination. Volunteer labor has not disappeared, even though expectations for this have multiplied far faster than corresponding institutional support. The result is a profound disconnect between the necessity of volunteer publishing labor and how weakly it is supported. This is the context in which diamond open access has become a policy priority.
But a quiet tension remains. Diamond open access is often described as “community-led,” and implicitly sustained by goodwill. While that may be viable on a small scale, it is not viable at the scale suggested by current policy ambitions.
This raises a specific and more practical question: what would it mean to support community-led publishing as infrastructure, rather than as a collection of heroic individual efforts?
Volunteer Labor is Not the Problem — Misalignment is
Editing, reviewing, and maintaining platforms all take time, and much of this work is unpaid. Yet it would be unfounded to conclude that the diamond model is unsustainable because of this.
Sustainability is achievable with a sharpened focus on how those efforts are recognized.
Discomfort with unpaid work does not stem from volunteering per se, but from volunteering in ways that appear misaligned with values. Reviewing for a society journal, serving as editor of a community-led publication, or contributing to shared scholarly infrastructure feels different from donating labor to sustain commercial publishing models. Institutions are uniquely positioned to sustain an alternative path, treating historically volunteer efforts in ways that align with their mission.
Initiatives such as DIAMAS articulate standards, governance principles, and best practices for diamond open access, making community-led journals more understandable to funders and policymakers. Such standards are a crucial step towards sustainability. However, they rely on institutions providing continuity, coordination, and recognition.
When that does not happen, the burden falls back on individuals. Editorial work still gets done by heroes. Small teams improvise solutions, and burnout, turnover, or even journal closure is never far off. The issue is not that diamond publishing depends on commitment; it is that the commitment is too often unsupported, unrecognized, and structurally fragile.
Diamond open access as infrastructure, not a publishing model
Discussions of open access often revolve around business models. We compare APC-based publishing, subscribe-to-open arrangements, transformative agreements, and diamond open access as if the primary question were how money flows from authors or institutions to publishers.
That framing is understandable, but it is also limiting.
Diamond open access is not just an alternative perspective on the cash flow; it forces us to think more carefully about infrastructure and who bears responsibility for that. Reconceptualizing our discussions in that direction, however, is not an argument for replacing all other publishing models with diamond open access. Open access today encompasses multiple routes, and that plurality will surely persist. Understanding diamond open access as an infrastructure issue can benefit other models as well; it’s not just the volunteerism in the diamond sphere that deserves recognition.
Of course, all publishing models rely on the same set of shared, durable functions, none of which are solidified by goodwill or clever workflows. They require maintenance, coordination, and long-term responsibility. It’s not that diamond open access has different infrastructure requirements than in other open access approaches, but diamond open access does make responsibility for sustaining that infrastructure harder to avoid.
Seen this way, the sustainability challenge for diamond open access looks less like a problem of revenue and more like a problem of institutional design. Infrastructure exists because organizations decide to sponsor, host, maintain, and treat it as a collective good rather than a side project. This is harder for resource-constrained institutions and disciplines, which is precisely why shared services, consortial support, and funder-backed infrastructure matter.
Where diamond journals function well, the necessary infrastructure logic is often already present, albeit unevenly. University libraries host platforms. Consortia coordinate services.
Editorial work is accommodated within workloads. The problem is not that these arrangements are unknown; it is that they are optional, fragile, and unevenly distributed.
Why Payment is a Tempting Solution — and Why it Falls Short
When concerns about sustainability surface, a common response is to suggest paying reviewers or editors directly. At first glance, this seems reasonable. If editorial and review work takes time, why not compensate that work financially?
Paying reviewers or editors reframes scholarly contribution as a transactional service rather than a professional responsibility embedded in institutional roles. That shift introduces new complexities — around rates, equity, and long-term funding — without addressing who is ultimately responsible for sustaining the system.
More importantly, payment does not solve the problem of alignment. What many academics seek is not remuneration for every hour spent reviewing, but assurance that their professional contributions are recognized, supported, and valued within the institutions that depend on them. Work that counts in workload models, promotion criteria, and organizational planning sends a different signal than work that is paid but structurally peripheral.
Payment may have a role in specific contexts, but it is not a substitute for institutional responsibility. Without that responsibility, even well-intentioned compensation schemes risk reproducing the same fragility they are meant to address.
What Funders and Institutions Can Actually Do
If diamond open access is to function at scale, responsibility must move upstream.
For funders, this means treating community-led publishing as part of the research infrastructure they already support, rather than as a special case. The challenge is that such support is often time-limited, fragmented, or framed as experimental, rather than embedded as a durable part of the research system. Supporting platforms, preservation, and governance is not an optional add-on; it is a prerequisite for sustainability.
For institutions, recognizing editorial and governance work as legitimate academic service does not need to be uniform across disciplines or countries, but it does need to be explicit. The balance between various elements will differ across disciplines, but the underlying responsibility does not. Work that is invisible in evaluation systems will always be fragile, no matter how principled the model behind it.
Libraries already play a central role here, often acting as hosts and stewards of diamond publishing initiatives. Strengthening that role — through stable funding, shared services, and institutional mandates — would do more to support diamond open access than any single technical fix.
Together, we must achieve a shared recognition that sustainability is not primarily a technical problem, nor a moral one. It is an organizational one. What once worked through informal scholarly networks and personal commitment now requires deliberate institutional design to remain sustainable at scale.
From Ideals to Systems
Diamond open access rightly commands strong normative support. It aligns closely with long-standing academic values around access, community governance, and the public mission of research. But ideals alone do not sustain systems — and neither does heroism. Systems endure only when infrastructure is deliberately designed, resourced, and governed.
If funders and institutions want diamond open access to move beyond admirable exceptions, they must design environments in which commitment is supported rather than taken for granted, and responsibility is shared rather than individualized. The question is not whether scholars are willing to contribute.
The question is whether institutions are willing to take ownership.
Discussion
12 Thoughts on "Guest Post — Diamond Open Access Needs Institutions, Not Heroes"
The questions are “whether scholars are willing to contribute,” and “whether institutions are willing to take ownership.” I am not so sure. Accompanying the changes that Curt Rice describes are changes that he does not describe. These changes suggest that, although many of them have not yet tuned into it, many scholars would be willing to contribute and, although publishers have not yet tuned into it, academic institutions can carry on as they now do.
Prior to the internet, the labour of keeping up with the literature, especially for those in their dotage, induced many scholars to read narrowly, or give up. Some of the present readers will recall checking the new journals that arrived, making photocopies and assigning them in appropriate paper files. Now that is possible, within seconds, at one’s fingertips. Paper is gone!
Also at fingertips are organizations that will make the recognition of expertise in esoteric areas no longer dependent on whom the publishers happen to meet at conferences or read about in directly newspapers and journals. External quality recognition, rather than self-marketing, has become easier. For example, an organization calling itself “Scholar GPS” (that I did not know of) contacted me last year, and there are many others (that I do know of).
Thx – I agree that digital access and discovery have transformed scholarly life in important ways. My point was narrower: not about whether scholars are willing to contribute, but about how institutions coordinate responsibility for sustaining publishing infrastructure over time. Access tools and recognition systems certainly evolve, but questions of governance, funding, and long-term ownership remain structural challenges.
Really great article. This is exactly the kind of thinking and rationale that is behind the Open Book Collective – a means for libraries to collectively invest in open access publishing and infrastructure upstream, if for no other reason than to avoid paying more individually downstream!
Thx for that great example. Collective investment approaches highlight exactly the issue of shared institutional responsibility that I was trying to point to. The sustainability question becomes much clearer when it’s framed upstream.
Reading the argument that ‘Diamond Open Access needs institutions, not heroes’, it’s hard not to notice how much the question of institutions is also a question of who those institutions are structurally built to serve. As Gary Younge shows in his new book Pigeon Holed: Creative Freedom As An Act of Resistance, the publishing world – in Britain at least – remains strikingly conservative and elitist in its social composition:
‘the Police Evidence Centre found publishing and architecture the most elitist within the creative sector, with more than 58 per cent of those working within it coming from privileged backgrounds compared to 37 per cent of British workers as a whole. Since non-white people are more likely to be working-class, racial exclusion was, of course, compounded and enabled by class elitism. Using raw data from a 2019 Labour Force Survey, PEC researchers could show that publishing was the whitest within the creative sector with only 5 per cent minorities.’
Meanwhile, a report by the Sutton Trust and the Social Mobility Commission found that newspaper columnists are more likely to have attended private school and Oxbridge than even High Court judges or members of the House of Lords. This leads Younge to conclude that in ‘an era of polarisation and populism, it is a reasonable, if not quite provable, assumption that the unrepresentative nature of the media has some bearing on publishing and journalism’s struggles to be relevant.’
These patterns matter for open-access debates, too, because they reveal a structural paradox: institutions are indeed necessary for sustaining diamond OA – but existing institutions such as the publishing profession are themselves deeply marked by differences and hierarchies of class and race. Simply scaling them without transforming them and their social composition risks reproducing the same (white, middle-class) norms, values and exclusions under a more sustainable model.
The real challenge, then, is not ‘institutions vs heroes’, but how to design and build community-led institutions that redistribute not just publishing infrastructure, but cultural funding, resources and authority, so that forms of committed, resilient and responsible open access are possible that are open in terms of participation and not merely content.
Thx for raising this. You’re right that the question of institutions is never neutral – institutions are shaped by history, power, and social composition. Simply scaling existing structures without reflection risks reproducing patterns of exclusion.
My argument isn’t that “institutionalization” should mean entrenching current hierarchies. Quite the opposite: the point is that durability and equity both require intentional design. Community-led models often bring precisely the kinds of corrective energy you’re describing.
The challenge, as I see it, is how to build institutions that are both stable over time and genuinely open in terms of participation and governance – not just in terms of access to content. That’s a design problem as much as a funding problem.
Some of you have heard this before from me, including at Radical Open Access 3 in Cambridge last year. On that excellent event, see Zenodo archive https://zenodo.org/records/17466027 , and resulting small book https://radicaloa.org/reflections-on-radical-open-access-iii-from-openness-to-social-justice-activism/ . There are actually existing scholarly publishing models that tend to get overlooked. I constantly stress that devoting yourself to work on community led Open Access journals is not that difficult if you have some form of sustained employment or sufficient time, it needs minimal institutional support, and fulfils a variety of academic ‘performance’ measures if done right. You also can build a convivial network in your field. So we are not really individual heroes.
In our case at Journal of Political Ecology , our ‘institutional’ support has been great from the University of Arizona Library, and has carried on since I left that University, and the US, 21 years ago. The work is extremely rewarding. For institutions like mine in Australia which have signed up to the DORA Agreement, there is an added recognition of the type of work that editors, reviewers, and authors do in this sector. I also go slightly further to suggest that senior scholars actually should be doing more, whether it is in journal production, lending their skills, or, [as in Switzerland where salaries for profs are good], getting higher teaching loads to allow junior scholars more time in general.
To address Gary’s point above, yes. at the Journal of Political Ecology [ https://journals.librarypublishing.arizona.edu/jpe/ ] we were approached some years ago to assist with and publish an entirely global South-led section of the journal, which has been extremely successful. ‘Grassroots’ benefits from our infrastructure and knowledge, and also our DOIs, archiving etc, but is entirely run by those diverse hero scholars. This is one way to decolonise a journal.
I am not a hero, but I am arguably the only middle class white guy on the journal team and I have spent thousands of hours on [mainly] editing and proofs over 22 years. I fail to see this as a problem, and in addition we have waited for ‘institutional support’, for example through Plan S, for decades and it has never come. But I doubt that out work is “not viable at the scale suggested by current policy ambitions”, especially outside STEM, which works to a different beat. People like me get up, spend an hour or two dealing with journal submissions, refereeing, and proofing/publishing, day in day out. And also do research and teaching.
Thx, Simon, I appreciate you sharing this perspective — and your experience with Journal of Political Ecology.
My argument isn’t that community-led models don’t work. Clearly they can, and in many cases they work very well.
The concern I’m trying to raise is about what happens over the long term. When journals depend heavily on sustained personal investment from committed scholars – as in your case – there is always the question of what happens when those individuals eventually step back. I worry that too many initiatives remain vulnerable to that transition.
For me, institutionalization is less about replacing community effort and more about ensuring continuity beyond any one generation of editors. The challenge is designing support structures that preserve the energy of grassroots work while reducing the risk of closure when key people move on.
That’s the tension I’m trying to reflect on.
In our case the institutional continuity is there already. 31 years.[we are one of the oldest social science OA journals, from 1994]. Thanks to a university library at Arizona as the institutional base we have had zero issues with continuity or sustainability since about 2001. Not sure much more is needed. So I would see institutional support as 1) webspace and stable software – Janeway in our case, formerly OJS, I believe Arizona has a contract with Janeway 2) small $ needed for Portico and DOIs 3) an editorial team large enough to contain senior and junior and senior members, with the latter eventually cycling out but passing on editorial skills – these are the “individuals” who have paid work in the sector that the journal does not pay for 4) perhaps social media presence [which takes minutes, not hours to maintain] but the individual managers generally do that .
I honestly think the ‘institutional support’ can be that minimal. we publish 50-70 double refereed papers a year, plus Grassroots section and book reviews, less than many in STEM but average for social science, indeed probably on the high side.
The kind of arrangement you outline with stable library hosting, contracted infrastructure (Janeway/OJS), archiving, DOIs, and editorial succession embedded within paid academic roles is precisely the sort of light but real institutional grounding I think many successful diamond journals depend on.
My concern is less about cases like yours, where that base exists, and more about initiatives that rely almost entirely on informal continuity or on one or two individuals without a durable institutional anchor.
If we think of “institutionalization” not as heavy bureaucracy but as the kind of stable hosting, stewardship, and succession planning you outline, then we may not be very far apart.
The interesting question is how to make that level of support more common across fields and regions.
Thanks Curt. In your reply to my comment you write: ‘For me, institutionalization is less about replacing community effort and more about ensuring continuity beyond any one generation of editors.’
I hear you. Still, I can’t help wondering whether there’s a danger here of presuming two things that are far from guaranteed.
First, that there will in fact be such subsequent generations of academics – something that’s by no means as certain as it perhaps once was, at least in the humanities, given current developments in places such as the UK and US. Two recent accounts on the LSE Impact blog (https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2026/01/19/why-are-uk-universities-failing/) and in The Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/20/universities-humanities-programs) both point to contraction, precarity and declining institutional support.
Second, that future scholars will actually want to edit open access journals and books.
In a discussion I’ve been having with Roger Malina (http://garyhall.squarespace.com/journal/2026/2/10/the-most-spoiled-generation-boomer-theory-algorithmic-hustle.html) around Defund Culture (where, for those interested, I go into the relation of OA to institutions and issues of race and class in more detail: https://www.mediastudies.press/pub/nb-hall-defund/release/3), I’ve been reflecting on how many ‘earlier career’ researchers no longer see the academic profession as especially attractive or even viable. Working in universities is often regarded as precarious, hypercompetitive, conservative and socially exclusive: too much the province of an ageing demographic.
Instead, at least in my field, we’re witnessing the emergence of the theorist-as-content-creator: people sustaining intellectual work by building audiences for their research through social media, newsletters, podcasts and other subscription platforms. In this rapidly developing ecology, influence is coming to replace citation, with platform metrics functioning as an alternative to peer review.
The attraction is easy to understand. Circumventing traditional institutional gatekeepers – universities, libraries, funding agencies, academic presses, peer-reviewed journals – and using digital channels such as YouTube, Instagram or Reddit to operate as independent, self-organised writers and researchers can feel like a refusal of inherited hierarchies no longer considered particularly fit for purpose.
From this perspective, the challenge for diamond OA may not only be continuity and stability within institutions, but to what extent coming generations will locate their intellectual identities within those institutions at all.
Gary, this is an important extension of the argument and you’re making some very big points.
You’re of course right that the future of academic institutions and especially the humanities, cannot be taken for granted. Contraction and shifting career aspirations are going to affect us. And the emergence of scholar-as-content-creator (which I look forward to hearing more about!) reflects both dissatisfaction with existing structures and the possibilities opened by digital platforms.
That development raises questions about durability, preservation, governance, and collective standards. Audience-building and influence can coexist with peer review and institutional affiliation, but they operate according to different logics.
My concern is less about defending existing institutional forms than about ensuring that knowledge production retains some shared infrastructure – archiving, stewardship, continuity, collective accountability – even if the organizational landscape evolves.
That tension — between fluid intellectual life and stable knowledge infrastructure — seems to me central to the diamond OA conversation.
