Then the internet came. Big publishers started sharing offering digital-only subscriptions. This would lower the cost and therefor the prize. That was the idea. But the big publishers remained expensive publishers.

Then open access came. The idea is that journal article would have a open license, often CC-BY or similar. This meant that researchers could share articles with colleagues and students without additional cost. The idea was that this would lower the cost of the journals. After all, libraries could reshare the articles, and contribute in funding the distribution of the knowledge. But the big publishers insisted to be the only source of the PDFs, and they remained expensive publishers.

Then came the article-processing charge (APC) model. The authors would contribute for the publishing and distribution process. For some years, new publishers showed, organized by and for scholars, keeping the APC close to the cost of production and distribution. The APC was estimated at somewhere between 50 and 600 euro per article, likely more now, after the inflation of the last five years. But scholars did not trust these publishers. Second, publishers saw a market and a business model in APC-based publishing. Libraries were pressured to keep access to big publishers that realized that if scholars wanted to keep publishing there, they could charge higher APC based on popularity. New expensive publishers entered the market, some with good intentions, some with bad intentions. And among all the confusion, the big publishers remained expensive publishers.

This is where we are now. Because sharing knowledge was a great idea, we want to keep the license, but we need to drop the financial incentives: we need to drop the APC.

Enter the world of diamond open access, where science is published under an open license, and neither the reviewers, not the readers, nor the authors pay, all key stakeholder in the exchange of scientific knowledge. And no tax by publishers.

Can we do this? More and more people think so, and diamond open access is gaining traction.

One aspect that limits the uptake of diamond open access models is that the scholarly community needs to change their trust model. We have seen a transition from societal publishers to commercial publishers, from scholarly-led to publisher-led. And commercial publishers certainly breached my trust (see also doi:10.5281/zenodo.4926030).

Many scholars prefer the certainty of a scholarly journal where they can trust that the editorial board and their reviewers take their job seriously. This matters. The notion that peer reviewers may reject your work is an extrinsic motivation for at least some researchers to do a better job (personal communication). And that feature works well: there are indications that research published as preprint sees limited change after the formal peer review process (doi:10.1038/d41586-026-02167-3 and doi:10.64898/2026.06.30.735556):

“For most scientists, reputation is important, and they would not upload something they would not be comfortable with publishing in a journal later.”

In an ideal situation, reputation would not be part of the whole equation: researchers never submit anything they think is not scientifically sound. Journals would never desk-reject an article that is scientifically sound. The question is mostly how to reach that. Everyone is busy, and it has not been so long ago that the journal impact factor was by many as indicator of scientific quality. The reality is far more complex than that.

Finding Diamond Open Access journals

So, let’s assume you are interested in the idea, and want to know what diamond open access journals exist in your research field, before you can even consider the quality of that journal, you need to know which journal is diamond open access. Therefore, I asked yesterday on Mastodon about databases that list which journal are diamond.

It actually turns out that the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) does not indicate if a journal is diamond. You can filter on zero APC, but that is not the same. In fact, zero APC is routinely used by big publishers to launch new journals. One they have critical mass, they will start charging non-zero APCs.

I already received some replies about possible options:

1. Diamond Discovery Hub: lists just over 4,000 diamond journals, but seems closed data (thx Najko! see also doi:10.15291/libellarium.4569)
2. wheretopublish.github.io: open data, accepts additions, but lists only 9 diamond journals (thx Anne!)
3. B!SON: a recommender that depends on DOAJ, so also without clear diamond indication (thx Jon!)

All pieces of the puzzle.

When I grew up as a scholar, I learned to publish in journals where you respect the research, where you see important research in your field get published. Nowadays, this is changing. In fact, young researchers (tho many older scholars alike) fear to publish in predatory journal by accident (really! [citation_pending]). The big publishers and the new publishers have been adding so many new journals, and academia has really pushed the “publish as many articles as you can” model, that it kind of makes sense why things are different now.

And, a central database with trustworthy information about the quality of diamond open access journals is just needed.

A final note, while I have not been able to create a list of diamond open access journals with OpenAlex, already in February 2025 I found a way to list articles tagged with a diamond status. This query lists over three thousand of such annoated articles for Maastricht University:

(Interestingly, the journal where the three most cited articles were published turned diamond already in 2004 and was discontinued about half a year go “Due to recent changes in operational resources”, according to Wikipedia.)

Building trust

So, while the above solution do allow you to increase your success rate or finding a diamond open access journal in your field, the next question is: what can you learn about this journal. For example, what does Wikipedia say about the journal (if anything)? Do you know people that have published in that journal? The OpenAlex screenshot shows

That make me wonder what Wikidata has to offer. After all, as one of the largest linked open data sources, they must have some information.

I am not disappointed. The type diamond open-access journal is actively used, and there is plenty of other of useful fields for these journals. I came up with this SPARQL query (with some QLever sugar for labels):

PREFIX wdt: <http://www.wikidata.org/prop/direct/>
PREFIX wd: <http://www.wikidata.org/entity/>
PREFIX rdfs: <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#>
SELECT DISTINCT ?diamondJournal ?diamondjournalLabel
      # (SAMPLE(?url_) AS ?website)
      (SAMPLE(?issnl_) AS ?issnl)
      (GROUP_CONCAT(DISTINCT STR(?issn_)) AS ?issn)
      (SAMPLE(?lang_) AS ?language)
      (SAMPLE(?doaj_) AS ?doaj)
      (GROUP_CONCAT(DISTINCT STR(?subject);separator=", ") AS ?subjects)
WHERE {
  ?diamondJournal wdt:P31 wd:Q108440863 .
  OPTIONAL { ?diamondJournal wdt:P236 ?issn_ }
  OPTIONAL { ?diamondJournal wdt:P7363 ?issnl_ }
  OPTIONAL { ?diamondJournal wdt:P856 ?url_ }
  OPTIONAL { ?diamondJournal wdt:P407 / @en@rdfs:label ?lang_ }
  OPTIONAL { ?diamondJournal wdt:P5115 ?doaj_ }
  OPTIONAL { ?diamondJournal wdt:P921 / @en@rdfs:label ?subject }
  ?diamondJournal @en@rdfs:label ?diamondjournalLabel .
} GROUP BY ?diamondJournal ?diamondjournalLabel

This lists more than 1,500 diamond open access journals:

With Wikidata we can then list UM authors that published in diamond journals. That list is remarkably short, however, if you compare it with the earlier results from OpenAlex. That is because Wikidata only contains a subset of scientific literature and not all articles are correctly linked to the items about their authors. But I also spotted journals in the OpenAlex list that are not really diamond.

What is next?

Clearly, we need better metadata, but things are not looking that bad either! We have something to work with. What is your favorite diamond open access journal?

So, with “version of record” defined, why do we have only one in publishing?

There is absolutely no reason not to have multiple versions of the same narrative, as long as they are clearly tagged. Open Science has been doing this for two decades, but publishers have been slacking. Retractions are updated versions of the same article, as are corrections, corrigendum, and errata. It is not that publishers do not know how to do it. Hesitently, they are accepting that preprints exist, but publishers tend to frame that as inferior versions. There was a paper earlier this month that looked into how much the versions are really different, and when I find it again, I will add the link.

Of course, money, control, power likely have a role here. And historic reasons too, I guess. After all, when you have to print a journal issue and send them by horse carriage to universities around the world, making updates is indeed not trivial.

Twitter or X (or Mastodon or Bluesky)

But as an openscientist, I have the urge to keep research output relevant. We do this for data, we do this for community standards, and we do this for research code. Routinely. Again, for decades. Must open access not learn from open science here?

I asked that recently on Mastodon. Specifically, should the Ten simple rules for getting started on Twitter as a scientist article (doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1007513) not be updated? Looking at the number of scientific papers that discuss social media in scientific communication, ten tips sound to me to be timeless. And I was interested in why or why-not the paper should be updated. Content-wise, a trivial update would be to update the name to X, which is the name of what was formerly known as Twitter. But then, updating the paper to replace Twitter by Bluesky or Mastodon would not be that much work either.

The discussion brought up various aspects of this question (and hereby thanks to all who joined the discussion!). Is it worth it? Is it legal? Should it be an update, or just a new paper? Who should do it? Do scholars have some responsibility to keep there research relevant? If I string-replace Twitter with X, how do I make clear who the original authors are, and what my role is? How do we get PLOS to point to the new version (surely not as corrigendum)? I do not have the answers.

But I do see differences between different types of research output and that makes these question an essential part of Recognition and Rewards. If it some types of output have different rules, then we do not give all scholars the same chance of recognition. Of course, this is the current situation, and just reflects that academia still has much to do to adopt Open Science.

Another important aspect is that all those Dutch universities are expected to compete which each other for funding. As a result I have experience rather interesting collaborations between universities. That’s a downside of a small country: everyone knows each other, often in way to much detail. But my point is that the Dutch can be rather conservative. That kills innovation, and is in my opinion a key reason why we are not breaking into the top 50 of rankings, more than concentration. Concentration of funding in Top research institutes has not been extensively evaluated, but I think the efficiency is not proven higher than previous funding approaches.

Anyway, this letter I received is part of their Open Access program. Here too, the Dutch universities are conservative (well, relatively from my views, at least). Now, the Open Access debate is not so interesting, because it primarily ends up about who pays who (boring) and whether we should go gold or green (besides the point, see below), and, sadly, here too many people think about who pays who again (still boring).

Therefore, giving the outlined importance and impact of Dutch research, I found it relevant to post about the progress of Open Access in my small country. The letter is available in English.

Basically, the letter is an answer to an earlier letter from our government about Open Access, and it warns about actions that will soon be undertaken (so, not really pro-active). However,

“[they] are also appealing to you to continue to advocate free access to your own scientific publications.”

Well, I have, not so actively, and maybe this post can be the start of a change. Because what basically bothers me is that the Open Access discussion, also in The Netherlands, is biased. And indeed, the letter continues with a section about gold and green access. If the VSNU really wants to promote free access to research, it should not even accept green. We all know that it is not about being able to look at (free), but to be able to mix and improve. Reuse. Continue. Stand on shoulders. The fact that this letter focuses on publications only, does not spend a word on reuse, is rather depressing and not giving me even the slightest hint that The Netherlands will break into that Top 50 any time soon.

Overall, the latter is relatively positive for the Open Access movement, though reactive. They still have some explanation to do:

“The golden route is more complex. However, many believe that in the end it is a more sustainable route to Open Access.”

(Or maybe readers can explain me what is complex about the golden route?)

The following is a rather interesting section, but really only when they had focused on Open Access in its pure form that allows research reuse. I think it now leaves you with a low starting point bargaining with resistant publisher lawyers and managers that have long lost the interest of the academics in favor of that of the share holders:

For the past ten years, publishers have been offering journals in package deals referred to as Big Deals. Shortly negotiations with the major publishers about these Big Deals Will take place, including Elsevier, Springer and Wiley. The Dutch universities have expressed their wish to make agreements with these publishers about the transition to Open Access as part of those Big Deals. Universities expect publishers to take serious steps to facilitate that transition.

I hope the VSNU will clarify with what they mean with “serious”. Because they all came up with “me too” solutions (setting up new OA journals) without seriously changing their model. No large publisher dared making the flagship journals full gold Open Access. That is serious business; all we see now is scribbling in the margin.

Perhaps that is the reason of the wish to be in the top 50. Maybe the VSNU just wants a better bargaining position.

The letter ends with what researchers can do. And with that, they are spot on:

As a researcher, you can play a vital role in the transition to Open Access. We have mentioned the possibility of depositing arlídes in the repository of your own university. But there is more. It’s important to consider that researchers play a key role in the publishing process: as providers of the scientific content, as reviewers and as members of editorial and advisory boards. We hope that where ever possible, you will ask publishers to convert to an Open Access model.

What any researcher can already do to promote (proper) Open Access:

1. stop reviewing publishing closed-access papers (you have way too much review requests already, and some filtering will not hurt you)
2. stop reviewing publishing for non-gold Open Access journals (step further than the first item)
3. submit only to full-gold Open Access journals (plenty of options; importantly, the quality and impact of your paper is not dependent on the journal, but on you. if not, you’re just a bad author and researcher and should go back to school or start learning from feed back on your Open Notebook Science, so that you improve your act before you submit; really, it happens to the best of us: multidisciplinary research is hard: you cannot excel in biology and chemistry and statistics and informatics and computer science and data analysis and materials science and as perfect and creative linguistic (well, not all of us, anyway))
4. put your previous mistakenly closed-access papers in university repositories (most Dutch universities have solutions; not all yet)
5. make previously published closed-access papers gold Open Access (yes, you can! I am in the process of doing this for the CDK I paper, and other ACS papers will follow)
6. get an ORCID
7. use #altmetrics to see that gold Open Access gives you more impact for your papers too (service providers include ImpactStory, Altmetric.com, Plum Analytics, etc)

Of course, it is not only about publications. Again, the VSNU would do good to learn that research is not the same as publications. Besides sending letters, I think the VSNU can do this to promote Open Science, which is what I hope they are after:

1. negotiate with the government and major science and funding agencies (KNAW, NWO) to stop focusing on publications as primary output
2. start focusing on output other than publications (e.g. data sets, software) even if you have not ended negotiations with other, just to set a proper example
3. make research outcomes machine readable (read this interesting post from our national library)
4. actively explore business models around Open Science (and not have your universities’ spin-off departments only know about patent law, ignore the rest of the world)
5. adopt the ORCID nation wide, staring Jan 2015
6. start using #altmetrics to get a better perspective of the performance of your members

Of course, I am more than willing to help the VNSU with this transition. I can be reached at the Department of Bioinformatics - BiGCaT, NUTRIM, FHML, Maastricht University. There are many options I have missed here (like data repositories, data citing, DOIs, and whatever).

PS. my ImpactStory profile will tell you that more than 80% of my publications are Open Access. Not all gold yet, but I am working on changing that for some old papers.

I still have a free program, other than I want to see Google Wave in action (and while I have receive my invitation, I have not received a login account yet). There is a potentially interesting talk about Second Generation Small Molecule Therapeutics by 15:00. But no plans otherwise for the afternoon and/or evening.

If you like to talk about CDK, Bioclipse and/or the Blue Obelisk movement. Or about my talk on Open Data, Open Standards and Open Source (ODOSOS) in chemoinformatics.

If you happen to be around the Frankfurt Westend campus. In building 4, I think, the Hörsaalzentrum, where the conference is. Please let me know if you like to meet up. I hope to be online :), but no promise on that… should work at a Uni location, not? Let’s see… This is how to ping me, and don’t worry about redundancy.

Email: egon.willighagen at gmail dot com
IRC: #cdk at irc.freenode.net
Twitter: egonwillighagen
Identica: chemblaics
Blog: just leave a reply to this message

Meanwhile, blogspace has been flooded with dislike of the PRISM intiative (e.g. see also the other Peter’s blog ). The website is so sad, it is almost funny again; but on second thought, it is so sad, you wonder the world will end because of WOIII or because of a total halt of scientific progress. It’s so sad, it is hard to decide between the real webpage and this parody which is the fake one.

Wiley seems to be the king of commercial exploitation. While the sue over 6 data points seemed to be an incident, they now try to get their reading public pay twice for published material: once for reading the paper (well, if you exclude incidental, oh-I-m-sorry-our-IT-department-messed-up attempts to have readers pay for open access papers; or was that another publisher?), and once for accessing the data (spectra) in that paper.

Update

I am likely a bit too harsh on Wiley here. They do and have done an excellent job on dissemination of scientific knowledge. I just think that it would suit them well to allow taking advantage of current ICT/chemoinformatics technologies to improve the advance of science; I would say that should be a goal of a scientific publisher. Instead, they do not give explicit permission to reuse data from their publications, unless it involves the commercial exploitation of that database. Sure, curation is expensive, but chemoinformatics has advanced, and very much can be done with an uncurated database. There are enough people interested in setting up free databases, without that costing Wiley a penny. Why not allow that? Wiley is surely aware of this interest, so it is there turn now to act.