Diamond open access: the model where neither author nor reader pays

For a long time, the open-access debate was squeezed into a single question: “Who pays — the reader or the author?” The subscription model bills the reader; the prevailing gold open-access model turns the bill around to the author (the APC — article processing charge). Either way, the loser is whoever has no budget.

A third way was always there, though it got its name late: diamond open access — the model in which an article is published with no charge to author or reader, and the costs are borne by institutions, consortia, or public funds.

The picture today, in numbers

Open access as a whole is now mainstream: according to STM’s open-access dashboard, 40% of the world’s roughly 3.9 million articles in 2024 were published gold open access; in 2014 that share was 14%. We are talking about a volume that quadrupled in a decade.

But the engine of that growth is the paid model. Digital Science’s April 2025 analysis shows APC-based open-access output climbing from ~1 million to ~1.4 million articles a year between 2020 and 2024, while the diamond model held flat at around ~400,000 articles a year. APC prices are not sitting still either: per Delta Think’s data, list prices at fully open-access journals rose an average of 6.5% heading into 2025.

On the other hand, the diamond model’s strength is greater than the volume statistics suggest: the vast majority of the world’s open-access journals — especially in the social sciences and humanities, and in regions where English is not the first language — are small, institutionally supported journals that charge no APC. The model is not marginal; it is invisible.

Türkiye is already largely “diamond”

Here is the interesting part: Turkish academic publishing operates one of the world’s largest diamond open-access ecosystems without ever having called it that. Of the thousands of university and learned-society journals hosted on DergiPark (the national journal-hosting platform of Türkiye), the great majority charge authors nothing, are free to readers, and cover their costs from institutional budgets. By definition: diamond.

This also fits the nature of university publishing. A university press’s purpose is not profit maximization but the circulation of knowledge; the APC model, meanwhile, filters out early-career researchers and poorly funded fields. The diamond model is the most direct expression of the principle that knowledge produced with public money should remain publicly accessible.

The hidden cost of “free”: operations

The diamond model’s soft spot is less funding than operations. A journal with no APC revenue also has no purchasing power for professional publisher services; workflow management, typesetting, archiving, and the web presence all land on the shoulders of the editor and a few volunteers. If one reason the model “holds flat” is a shortage of funds, the other is the unsustainability of this invisible labor.

Two practical conclusions follow:

First: the diamond journal is the journal that needs efficient infrastructure most. A journal with no budget has no labor-hours to waste either. Submissions, reviewer tracking, and issue production flowing through a system is a comfort for wealthy journals — for diamond journals it is a matter of survival.

Second: diamond and revenue are not mutually exclusive. The same publisher can keep its journals open under the diamond model while selling its books; indeed, the same work’s digital edition can be open access while its print edition is on sale. In Nasirus this hybrid arrangement is the natural state of things: a journal can live open under the diamond model, the store serves open-access titles free while selling print editions, and “open access + print for sale” live together on a single product page. Openness is not an ideological contest; it is a decision that can be made work by work.

Three frequently asked questions

“If a diamond journal’s revenue is zero, where will the quality come from?” Quality is guaranteed by process, not revenue: serious peer review, selective editing, proper production. Weak articles get published in the world’s most expensive APC journals; impeccable peer review can run at the most modest institutional journal. There is no necessary link between revenue model and reviewing rigor — the link is with the institution’s process discipline.

“We don’t charge authors, but should we declare who bears the costs?” You should — for transparency and for index applications alike. The sentence “This journal is funded by X University; no fees of any kind are charged to authors” belongs on the journal’s masthead page. That declaration is the sharpest line you can draw between yourself and predatory journals.

“If we go open access, what happens to the back issues?” Opening retroactively is the ideal; but if your publishing contracts do not allow it, starting open access prospectively from a given date is perfectly legitimate. What matters is a clear statement of which issue onward you are open, and under which license.

A recommendation for institutions: put your policy in writing

Plenty of institutions practice the diamond model in fact but declare it nowhere. Yet a clear, written open-access policy — which publications are open, under which license (which member of the CC family), how archiving works — pays concrete dividends in index applications and international visibility alike. Details that look small, like the license badge showing on the article page, are the journal’s signals of seriousness.

If you want to pin down your institution’s open-access architecture — what will be open, what will be for sale — let’s talk. We have accumulated quite a few examples showing that the balance of “open it all up, and let the press live too” can be struck.