With this topic, I would like to open a space for discussion on an issue that seems to be occupying quite a few journals and/or scholarly societies in recent times: How to transition towards a sustainable and equitable model of Diamond Open Access publishing in the context of journals that are owned and/or managed by scholarly societies.
In the past, membership in scholarly society was often linked to the subscription to a society journal and, in fact, a way to support the publication of the journal. In many cases, however, societies have also started to rely on income from library subscriptions to their journal to, in fact, sustain the activities of their society.
In such a context, in can be harder than in some others to “flip” a journal from subscription-based to Open Access or, indeed, from a hybrid or Gold Open Access model to a Diamond Open Access model.
This is of course wide-ranging and complex topic, but for the moment, I would just be very interested in any point of view on this matter from the community, or experience in managing such a transition, in any area of the humanities, social sciences (or indeed hard sciences!). Please do feel welcome to join the discussion!
I just happened to notice that this thread here, especially the podcast itself and its transcript, are highly relevant to the topic at hand here as well. Four representatives of national consortia (from Canada, Finland, Norway and The Netherlands) discuss how they support Diamond OA journals at the national level. And they also discuss how this relates to scholarly societies.
Ideally, these costs would be covered by one of the above business models that do not charge APCs.
Collective (or Library) supporters programs seem one of the most viable models to me, but it should be handled by not-for-profit publishers (real ones, not like CUP) that aim only at covering costs. I’m not sure if such a publisher/platform exists.
Initially, I thought S2O was interesting (e.g. Project MUSE’s S2O initiative) but it’s not addressed to OA journals, only to APC-based journals.
An example of a journal funded by membership fees is European Societies - a journal published by MIT Press, owned and supported by the umbrella membership organisation - the European Sociological Association (180 euro per year). I think this is something that can work as long as the number of paying members is larger than the number of published articles per year. If you base the calculation on 800 euro per article and you want to leave something of the membership fee to the society, you need 8x more embers than published articles, e.g. 100 articles (costing 800 euro each) and 800 paying members.
These are just some thoughts to continue the conversation…
I think some central aspects of this issues are the following:
how to reassure potential authors that shifting from an established publisher to a DOA journal doesn’t affect the quality and prestige of the journal?
for journals in JCR and other rankings valued by some countries and universities, will the shift to DOA affect this?
what’s the motivation for societies (and paying members) to pay publications costs for articles published by non-members?
how financially sustainable is for societies to rely on Collective or Library supporters programs? What’s a good strategy for societies to talk to libraries and receive constant financial support?
I will try to outline a few considerations, given that nowadays it is really difficult to give a definition of prestige that cannot derive (only) from a logo or tradition, but depends heavily on processes
Many institutions have signed COARA, committing themselves to a multidimensional evaluation that is not based exclusively on bibliometric indicators (especially proprietary ones), to enhancing peer review, and to supporting multilingualism
Many institutions have signed the Barcelona Declaration on ORI, committing themselves to supporting open publication indexing tools: for exemple openalex openaire, opencitations.
The DIAMAS project has defined a multidimensional quality standard for scientific publications oa diamond.
The diamond model based on the Diamas standard therefore meets the expected quality requirements.
If you choose to make a change, it might be worth making a “real” change, one that goes beyond just the business model.
The minimum requirements I would look for in my choice are therefore: Systematic use of PIDS (DOI, ORCID ROR)
The requirements of DOAS
Support for publication in different languages (with a view to ensuring that the lingua franca should not and cannot be the lingua unica)
Complete freedom from conditioning by the publisher
The possibility of implementing different forms of peer review (post or pre-publication peer review)
Indexing in the main open infrastructures
A data policy for data-based research (data should be archived in specific repositories and should be FAIR)
This does not mean that journals indexed in proprietary databases cannot continue to be included, because if they meet the database requirements, the business model does not matter and also the publisher (Tim Gowers docet)
the motivation for societies (and paying members) to pay publications costs for articles published by non-members is reciprocity, and it is the same for every Diamond Open Access initiative.
Just a first observation about S2O: it is not for APC-based journals actually, but specifically for subscription journals, see https://subscribetoopencommunity.org The idea is that of a gentleman’s agreement: the publisher announces the price they need for OA publication of the journal, and when enough libraries pay the subscription, the content is made OA. This is an equitable model, because both readers and authors face no costs for publication or reading. If the titrle of an S2O journal is owned by a society, an S2O journal is effectively Diamond OA, since it is community-owned and free to read and publish in.
S2O also allows societies owning journals to negotiate with publishers about extra income on top of the cost of publishing the journal. Many people do not like that idea, but we need a transitional phase to progressively wean off the societies from the income they garnered earlier from subscriptions.
The (relatively modest) risk of S2O that its critics always exaggerate is that libraries will stop paying for the subscription because the content is available for free anyway. This is the typical problem of the commons: you can of course profit from the commons without contributing to it. But I think we need to develop an ethics of the scholarly commons where all stakeholders find it essential to contribute as much to the commons as they take from it.
Supporting national Diamond OA journals is a great first step. But this often neglects the international aspect of Diamond OA. The Diamond OA journal I an the co-editor-in-chief of, Glossa: a journal of general linguistics https://www.glossa-journal.org is legally owned by a Dutch foundation (LingOA www.lingoa.eu, and publishes only in English. Most of its editorial Board is international. Does that make Glossa a Dutch Diamond OA journal? Unclear. Also, most Diamond OA journals run on OJS/ PKP free software (based in Canada), and are (or can be) indexed by DOAJ, based in DK. How can national initiatives for Diamond OA contribute to the maintenance of this software and DOAJ services? It is not sufficient to sweep just in front of one’s own national Diamond OA door, we must think of the entire international Diamond OA street.
Reassure potential authors: make sure the editorial board remains the same between the old and the new journal, or that there is considerable overlap. This was essential in the flip from Lingua to Glossa: authors, readers, and reviewers trusted the board, not the publisher.
Yes, if the new journal has a new title, it will lose rankings.. But these can be re-established within 5 years. Again, Glossa is a good example. Note however that rankings attract a swarm of papers to be desk-rejected (I speak from experience).
The motivation for societies to pay publication costs for non-members is to (a) attract new members (b) serve science and scholarship first by publishing papers as a function of their quality, not membership. To exclude non-members from a society journal is a bit like preventing foreign tourists traveling by car from using your national road system because they are not paying taxes used for road maintenance…
A good strategy for societies to talk to libraries is to make sure that the local departments that correspond to the journal’s focus establish close relationships with their local librarians to convince them how important the journal is for the department, the discipline, and for the members of the local department publishing in that journal.
About S2O I completely agree with the comment on this article published in Katina Magazine: Scholarly Publishing Won’t Be Saved by Incremental Change
Unfortunately, scientific publishing is a wicked problem, and the solutions implemented often cause new problems or perpetuate old ones.
Thank you for initiating the topic @Christof! This really taps into one of the big questions of OA publishing, and simple answers are rarely to be found as context seems to matter a lot. From my own immediate environment I know that Finnish scholarly societies have benefitted immensely from having a free infrastructure to use for hosting their diamond journals, journal.fi, which combined with often a high degree of in-kind and volunteer work can make the wheels go around for smaller publications outlets. Finland also offers modest state subsidies to peer-reviewed scholarly society journals, something which is further makes flips a bit more easy to make and enables to have some professional copyediting involved. One can and probably should question what all this dependency on government support does for political resiliency of the national publishing ecosystem, but so far there has not been any problems related to this.
Would one flip and have to completely rely on “market powers” to keep operations running in the long term then S2O as mentioned earlier in the thread is likely the most viable option that also fits into the way that libraries can are allowed to allocate and use their funds.
Thanks for all your answers, I feel this should become an output of the Diamas project: a brief leaflet that societies can quickly browse to move the first steps towards Diamond OA.
