Imagine a university library deciding whether to support an open-access journal.
Every article will be freely available online, whether that library contributes or not. Its researchers will still be able to read the journal. Its students will still benefit. Meanwhile, the library’s budget is already under pressure.
Why should it pay?
That question sits at the heart of Diamond Open Access. The model promises something genuinely equitable: authors do not pay to publish, and readers do not pay to read. Yet editors must still manage submissions and coordinate peer review. Manuscripts must still be prepared, and platforms, metadata, preservation, and indexing must still be maintained.
Diamond OA may be free at the point of use, but it is never free to produce.
Its survival, therefore, depends on solving a difficult collective-action problem. Publishers must persuade institutions to support a publishing system whose benefits are deliberately shared with everyone, including those that contribute nothing.
The strongest funding models do not rely on goodwill alone. They combine the public benefit of openness with something contributors can value immediately: guaranteed access, familiar purchasing processes, useful formats, reduced financial risk, or a voice in governance.
Diamond OA Removed the Fee, Not the Cost
The open-access movement began with a straightforward ambition: research, especially publicly funded research, should be made free to read. It has made enormous progress towards that goal. Millions of articles that would once have been locked behind paywalls can now be read by anyone with an internet connection.
But open access does not eliminate the cost of publishing. It merely moves the cost from the reader to the author.
Under APC-funded Gold Open Access, a publisher makes an article freely available after an Article Processing Charge has been paid. The charge may be covered by the author, a research grant, a university, or a national agreement. Where that funding exists, the arrangement can work reasonably well.
Where it does not, the model creates a production barrier.
Researchers in poorly funded disciplines, smaller institutions, and many parts of the Global South may be able to read the literature but struggle to participate in it. Those in middle-income countries can be particularly exposed: their institutions may lack adequate publishing funds, while their countries do not always qualify for full waivers.
This is one reason transformative agreements have not resolved every question of equity. They may shield eligible authors from individual APC payments, but access to those agreements remains highly uneven.
Diamond OA attempts to remove both barriers. Authors are not charged to publish, and readers are not charged for access.
Under the definition used by the European Diamond Capacity Hub, Diamond OA also involves scholarly communities owning or controlling the content-related elements of publication. That makes it more than a zero-fee arrangement. It is also a question of who governs the publishing system.
The ideal is compelling. Financing it is much harder.
The Real Problem Is Collective Action
Suppose 200 libraries benefit from a Diamond OA journal. The journal needs only 50 of them to provide enough funding for another year. Each library now faces the same temptation. If enough of the other 199 institutions contribute, the journal will remain open anyway.
One library could withdraw its support, save some money, and continue enjoying the same access. That decision may be rational for an individual institution. If too many institutions make it, however, the journal loses its funding.
This is commonly described as the free-rider problem, although the term should not be treated as a moral accusation. A library may decline to contribute because of budget cuts, local priorities, procurement restrictions, or uncertainty about whether its payment will make a difference. It is not necessarily trying to exploit the system.
Successful collective models respond by changing the decision facing the institution. Instead of asking a library to donate money for an abstract public good, they give it a clearer proposition:
What does our participation make possible, and what would be lost if institutions like ours walked away?
Subscribe to Open: Making Participation Matter
Subscribe to Open is designed primarily for established subscription journals that want to become open access without introducing APCs.
Rather than asking libraries to join an entirely new funding program, a publisher invites existing subscribers to renew through largely familiar procurement processes. If enough institutions participate, the publisher opens that year’s content to everyone. If support falls below the required level, the content remains gated.
This arrangement makes clever use of the status quo. Libraries already know the journal, its value, and the process for renewing it. They do not have to create a new budget line, administer individual APCs, or evaluate an unfamiliar platform.
There is also an element of loss aversion. A library cannot assume that the next volume will remain open regardless of its decision. Continued openness depends on sufficient collective participation, and paying institutions retain assured access even if the opening threshold is not reached.
Some publishers strengthen the offer with benefits such as continued access to archive content, although the details vary between programmes.
We have examined how Subscribe to Open works in practice. Its most important lesson for the broader Diamond OA discussion is behavioral: supporting open access becomes easier when participation resembles something institutions already understand.
S2O is not automatically Diamond OA under definitions that require community ownership. Commercial and nonprofit publishers can both use it. Nevertheless, it reaches a similar result when successful. Readers receive open access, authors face no APC, and existing library expenditures support the transition.
Its weakness is the same mechanism that gives it power. The decision resets periodically. Publishers must repeatedly demonstrate value, maintain trust, and persuade enough libraries to renew. Openness is achieved one cycle at a time rather than guaranteed permanently.
What Diamond OA Can Learn from Freemium
The freemium model is familiar from software. A basic service is free, while users who need greater convenience or additional functionality pay for a premium version.
OpenEdition’s freemium program applies a version of this thinking to scholarly communication, particularly in the humanities and social sciences. Basic scholarly content can be read openly in HTML, while participating institutions pay for downloadable formats and additional library services.
Depending on the publication and program, these services may include access to PDF or EPUB files, usage statistics, metadata feeds, technical support, and integration with library discovery systems. The library is therefore not simply paying to read the text. It is paying to make that text easier to acquire, discover, download, manage, and use.
This distinction matters. Institutions may resist paying for access when the content is already available, but they may be willing to pay for utility. A researcher reading one article on a website may be satisfied with HTML. A library serving thousands of researchers has broader concerns: authentication, metadata quality, reporting, long-term access, and compatibility with its existing systems.
Freemium is not Diamond OA in the strictest sense because some formats and services remain restricted to paying institutions. It nevertheless offers an important lesson for Diamond publishers.
A Diamond journal platform, for example, might offer everyone full access to its articles while institutions fund enhanced analytics, metadata services, workflow integrations, and training. The knowledge remains open; the institutional service helps pay for its continued production.
Direct to Open: Sharing the Risk of Publishing Books
Journals benefit from recurring publication and funding cycles. Scholarly books present a different problem.
A monograph requires considerable investment before its audience can be known. The publisher must pay for editorial work, peer review, production, design, metadata, platform delivery, and marketing. Under the traditional model, it attempts to recover those costs through individual sales to libraries and readers.
Opening the book immediately may increase its reach, but it also removes much of the revenue on which the press previously relied.
Collective funding models such as the MIT Press’s Direct to Open attempt to redistribute that risk. Instead of asking libraries to buy individual ebooks for their own collections, the press asks them to support a forthcoming group of titles. If enough institutions participate, those books are made openly available to the world.
Participation fees can be adjusted according to institutional characteristics, while supporting libraries may receive access to backlist collections and other benefits. This changes what the library is buying. It is no longer purchasing one copy for one campus. It is helping to finance the publication of a collection for everyone.
The model depends on risk pooling. No single library must underwrite the full cost of a monograph program, and the publisher gains a clearer view of available revenue before committing the entire frontlist to open access.
The results show both the potential and the uncertainty of the approach. In 2026, support from more than 260 institutions enabled the MIT Press to open 72 frontlist titles. Direct to Open also expanded to include books from Duke University Press and Goldsmiths Press, although different collections reached their funding goals at different times.
That unevenness is important. Collective funding does not remove financial risk. It shares the risk and makes it more visible.
For libraries, the incentive is a combination of mission and reciprocity. Their contribution expands global access, but they also receive an immediate institutional benefit. For the publisher, the model turns a collection of one-off purchases into coordinated support for a publishing program.
Library Partnerships: Turning Funders into Participants
Another approach is to move beyond the buyer-and-seller relationship entirely.
The Open Library of Humanities supports a portfolio of humanities journals through its Library Partnership Subsidy model. Libraries provide relatively manageable annual contributions that collectively support a nonprofit publishing platform. Authors do not pay APCs, and readers do not pay for access.
The important feature is not simply that many libraries contribute. It is that participating institutions can be represented in the organization’s governance.
This changes the psychology of the relationship. A subscriber pays for access to a product controlled by someone else. A partner helps sustain infrastructure in which it has a recognized stake.
Governance participation also provides something that conventional subscriptions rarely offer: visibility into how decisions are made. Libraries can better understand what their contributions support, how budgets are developed, and how the platform plans to expand.
That does not make cancellation impossible. Libraries still face financial pressures, and open-access programs must still justify their costs. But an institution that sees itself as part of the system may evaluate the expense differently from one receiving a routine subscription invoice.
The model draws on ownership, identity, and commitment. Institutions are not being asked merely to purchase content. They are being asked to help govern a piece of scholarly infrastructure.
For community-led publishing, that distinction may be essential. Diamond OA is more likely to remain independent when the institutions financing it can also influence its direction.
Shared Infrastructure Lowers the Bill
Funding models receive most of the attention, but sustainability also depends on how much money must be raised in the first place.
A small journal may need a submission system, website, hosting, DOI registration, metadata distribution, archiving, plagiarism screening, accessibility support, and technical maintenance. If every scholarly institution builds and manages these services independently, even a modest publishing operation can become expensive.
Shared infrastructure can reduce that duplication.
The European Diamond Capacity Hub develops a coordinated environment for Diamond publishers, service providers, and technology providers. Its services include guidance, training, discovery, self-assessment, community coordination, and publishing tools intended to improve efficiency and interoperability.
The aim is not to make publishing costless. It is to prevent every publisher from repeatedly solving the same technical and administrative problems alone.
Shared platforms can be particularly valuable to small university presses and society journals. They allow publishing organizations to concentrate resources on editorial judgment, peer review, author support, and subject expertise rather than maintaining bespoke systems that perform broadly similar functions.
The Diamond Open Access Standard provides a framework through which publishers can examine areas such as governance, editorial quality, openness, efficiency, equity, and financial sustainability. It cannot guarantee the quality of every article. What it can do is help a publisher demonstrate that responsible processes are in place.
That evidence becomes important when temporary grants end and a publisher begins asking institutions for continuing support.
The Hidden Subsidy Diamond OA Must Acknowledge
Some Diamond journals appear extraordinarily inexpensive because much of their real cost is invisible.
Editors contribute their time as part of their academic responsibilities. Reviewers work without payment. University departments provide office space, servers, and administrative assistance. Libraries absorb technical work. Staff members take on publishing duties that may never appear in the journal’s formal budget.
These contributions are valuable, but they are still costs.
A journal dependent on one enthusiastic academic, one technically skilled librarian, or a small group of volunteers may be open without being sustainable. If those individuals retire, move some place else, or simply run out of time, the publishing operation can quickly weaken.
Diamond OA should not build its financial case by pretending that professional publishing work costs nothing. Doing so risks reproducing another form of inequity, particularly when invisible labor falls on early-career academics, precarious staff, or poorly funded institutions.
A credible model should identify both cash expenditure and relevant support. It should know what the work would cost if a key volunteer were no longer available. It should also distinguish genuine efficiency from unpaid labor being taken for granted.
Can These Models Work Beyond Europe and North America?
Many visible models have been developed in Europe and North America, where library consortia and relatively large acquisition budgets make coordinated funding possible.
However, they cannot simply be copied into every region.
In Southeast Asia and other parts of the Global South, university libraries may operate under different procurement rules, currencies, and funding cycles. A fee that appears modest to a European institution may be difficult for a smaller university elsewhere. Some libraries may lack the autonomy to support an overseas publishing program even when they believe in its mission.
The flow of money also matters. A supposedly global funding model can reproduce old inequalities if institutions in less wealthy countries are primarily treated as beneficiaries, while governance and strategic decisions remain concentrated in the Global North.
A more genuinely international model would need equitable fee bands, regional representation, and meaningful participation in governance. It might also require national research funders, ministries, university systems, and library consortia to treat scholarly publishing as shared infrastructure rather than as a collection of isolated journal subscriptions.
For university presses in the region, the most realistic starting point may not be a large global crowdfunding campaign. It may be a focused consortium built around a field, language, or regional research community.
Several universities could jointly support a group of journals. A national library consortium could fund a common publishing platform. A ministry could finance core infrastructure while participating institutions contribute editorial expertise, training, or technical services.
The principle remains the same: distribute the cost across organizations that benefit from a healthy scholarly communication system.
The implementation, however, must reflect local budgets and institutions rather than imitate a model designed for a different environment.
What a Publisher Needs Before Asking Libraries to Pay
No behavioral insight can rescue a poorly designed offer.
Before asking institutions to support Diamond publishing, a press needs to understand its real costs. It should know how much is spent on editorial management, production, technology, metadata, preservation, staffing, and administration. A vague request to “support open access” is much harder to defend than a transparent explanation of what a contribution will finance.
The publisher also needs a credible community. Libraries are more likely to support journals and books that serve identifiable researchers, disciplines, or institutional priorities.
Just as importantly, the contribution must be easy to administer. Familiar invoicing, consortium arrangements, multi-year commitments, and clear fee bands can make the difference between an expression of support and an actual payment.
Participating institutions should be able to see:
- what the program costs
- how fees are calculated
- what happens if the target is missed
- what their participation makes possible
- what benefits contributors receive
- who controls the program
- how results will be reported
Trust is not an optional addition to collective funding. It is part of the financial infrastructure.
Free Access Still Needs a Funding System
There is no single business model that will make Diamond Open Access sustainable everywhere.
A journal with a stable subscriber base may be suited to Subscribe to Open. A book publisher may benefit from a Direct to Open arrangement. A community-led journal platform may be better supported through library partnerships. Other publishers may combine institutional subsidy, consortial support, grants, endowments, and paid services around openly available content.
The models differ, but the strongest share several characteristics.
They spread costs across many institutions. They reduce the risk faced by any single participant. They fit, where possible, into familiar library workflows. They provide transparency about how money is used. They give contributors a reason to see themselves as participants rather than donors.
Most importantly, they recognize that openness is a public benefit supported by real publishing work.
The lesson is not that libraries must be manipulated into paying for something everyone can access. It is that institutions are more willing to support open scholarship when the contribution is understandable, the costs are credible, and participation produces a benefit they can defend internally.
Diamond OA will not survive on goodwill alone. Nor should it depend indefinitely on hidden labor and temporary grants.
It will survive when the institutions that rely on scholarly communication can see both their place in the system and the consequences of walking away.