Abstract submission deadline: March 23rd 2026

In recent years, Diamond Open Access (OA) has risen to the fore in the ongoing exploration of which knowledge production models are both ideal and feasible. Ideal from access-to-read and access-to-publish perspectives; feasible from economic, infrastructural, and labour perspectives. And then, of course, there is the question of what the global scholarly community is most invested in and how willing it is to orient and commit to any one model.

Diamond OA is largely understood as open access publication that is free to readers and to authors (i.e. there are no paywalls or article processing charges). UNESCO defines Diamond OA more comprehensively as “an equitable scholarly publishing model, supported by shared infrastructures and open licensing, providing scholarly knowledge as a digital public good with no fees for readers or authors.” This reflects the understanding that Diamond OA is more than a business model: Diamond OA represents a transition to a nonprofit, community-led, scholarly publishing ecosystem and even toward an OA knowledge commons (Beigel 2025; Fuchs and Sandoval 2013; Gatti et al. 2025). From this active, transitional position Diamond OA pushes against the corporatization of OA via novel revenue generation and capture techniques developed by the Top 5 commercial academic publishers (or the data analytics companies they have become).

The name “Diamond OA” may have only risen to prominence in the past ten or so years, but the concept has been in action for decades. Latin America is heralded as leading the most concerted, historical Diamond OA system, but there are longstanding examples of Diamond OA from all over the world – including this journal, which launched in 1995 and has never been paywalled nor requested article processing charges. Diamond OA, in name, has been formalized in part through more recent endeavours such as the Aligning and Mutualizing Nonprofit Open Access Publishing Services Internationally (ALMASI) and Developing Institutional Open Access Publishing Models to Advance Scholarly Communication (DIAMAS) projects and the annual Global Summit on Diamond Open Access, now in its third iteration.

Although free-to-read and free-to-publish are compelling arguments for scholars, administrators, librarians, funders, governments, and the broader public alike, there have been criticisms of the Diamond OA model as well, including the age-old question of sustainability that plagues the OA movement: who will pay for this form of publication? There are also differences of opinion on the exact parameters of and appropriate governance models for Diamond OA.

The future path that Diamond OA will take—toward more policy-driven standardisation (Moore 2025) or toward a focus on Ubuntuism, communality, and bibliodiversity (and crucially, away from market logics)—will have significant ramifications for the global scholarly community. As Reggie Raju and Felicia Nkrumah Kuagbedzi assert in a post provocatively titled “Resurrection of the Betrayal” (2025), the evolution of Diamond OA will have consequences across academia, not least of all for the minoritized regions and groups who have been instrumental in developing Diamond OA in the first place. Given the centrality of Diamond OA to smaller, nationally- or regionally-focused journals, the success or failure of this model will also affect those types of publications substantially (van Bellen and Cespédes 2025). Rupert Gatti, Pierre Mounier, and Johan Rooryck therefore point to the complexity of Diamond OA as an “intricate web of relations” (2025, 19)—a web that both enriches and complicates the momentum and direction of Diamond OA.

Through this special issue, we invite broader discussion on Diamond OA and its future(s), from the highly conceptual to the deeply infrastructural. What is next for Diamond OA as it oscillates between the potential for either a technocratic or community-led and commons-based future?

This special issue invites abstracts for papers of ~6,000-8,000 words reflecting on these issues. Please note that we are not seeking to publish case studies.

Potential topics may include:

• Diamond OA in theory:
  • Conceptual underpinnings of commons-based knowledge production
  • Community-led activist movements that echo in or inspire Diamond OA
  • Labour issues, funding scarcity, and the tragedy of the commons
  • Issues of control and ownership in scholarly publishing
• Critique of the “Diamond” label
  
  • What does Diamond OA allow for and what does it limit?
  • Diverse interpretations of Diamond OA
• Regional specifications and differences
  • How does Diamond OA differ around the world?
  • How do different regions maintain autonomy while Diamond OA becomes more global in scale?
• Diamond OA for books and other non-journal artifacts 
  
  • Where is this model extended beyond journal publishing?
  • Community-driven publishing ecosystems
• Infrastructures for Diamond OA
  
  • How is Diamond OA different from or building on current research infrastructure?
  • Centralisation, interoperability, and capacity building and tensions with bibliodiversity
• Decolonizing knowledge
  • Diamond OA as a challenge to western-centric and market-driven OA
  • The potential of south-south and cross-continental collaborations

When submitting an abstract, please note that your proposal is for consideration in the The Future of Diamond Open Access: Possibilities, Perils, and Pathways special issue. Abstract submissions are due on March 23rd 2026 and should be addressed to the special issue editors Alyssa Arbuckle and Janneke Adema via jep.editors@gmail.com. Submission policies and additional details are available on our Policies page.

Full papers of accepted abstracts are due by July 13th 2026.

Please direct any questions to JEP co-editors Janneke Adema and Alyssa Arbuckle via jep.editors@gmail.com.

Works Cited 

Beigel, Fernanda. 2025. “Untangling the Future of Diamond Access: Discussing Quality Standards for the Re-communalization of Scholarly Publishing.” Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17552531 

Fuchs, Christian, and Marisol Sandoval. 2013. “The Diamond Model of Open Access Publishing: Why Policy Makers, Scholars, Universities, Libraries, Labour Unions and the Publishing World Need to Take Non-Commercial, Non-Profit Open Access Serious.” triple C 11 (2). https://doi.org/10.31269/triplec.v11i2.502

Gatti, Rupert, Pierre Mounier, and Johan Rooryck. 2025. “Beyond ‘No Fee’: Why Diamond Open Access is Much More than a Business Model.” Current Trends in Open Science: Will Open Science Change the World?, edited by Nicola Cavelli, pp. 11-34. Milano: Ledizioni LediPublishing. 

Raju, Reggie, and Felicia Nkrumah Kuagbedzi. 2025. “Resurrection of the Betrayal: Diamond Open Access Assuming a Commercial Model.” https://lib.uct.ac.za/articles/2025-12-02-resurrection-betrayal-diamond-oa-assuming-commercial-model

UNESCO. n.d. “Diamond Open Access.” https://www.unesco.org/en/diamond-open-access

van Bellen, Simon and Lucía Céspedes. 2025. “Diamond Open Access and Open Infrastructures have Shaped the Canadian Scholarly Journal Landscape Since the Start of the Digital Era.” The Canadian Journal of Information and Library Science 48 (1). https://doi.org/10.5206/cjils-rcsib.v48i1.22207