Ownership and governance

/ Wed, 07/03/2024 - 09:24

Abstract

Diamond OA publishing is driven and owned by scholarly communities. This article outlines how that can be achieved in line with the Diamond OA Standard (DOAS) (Consortium of the DIAMAS project, 2024). Diamond OA Publishers must be (part of) a not-for-profit academic or scholarly organisation, and have legal ownership of journal and book titles. Publisher governance structures, interactions with service providers (SPs), and relations to its journals and books should be clearly indicated on the publisher’s web page.

Main Text

Ownership

This article provides an outline of how scholar-driven ownership and governance of Diamond OA publishing can be achieved in line with the Diamond OA Standard (DOAS, Consortium of the DIAMAS project, 2024). Diamond OA Publishers must be (part of) a not-for-profit academic or scholarly organisation. These include but are not limited to research performing organisations (RPOs), research funding organisations (RFOs), organisations connected to RPOs (university libraries, university presses, faculties, and departments), research institutes, and scholarly societies. Publishers are expected to provide transparent information about their ownership structure on their web page.

Diamond OA publishers should have a defined policy about the ownership of the individual journals and books they publish. This policy includes the legal parameters governing the relationship between the publisher and its published journals and books, the determination of ownership for each title, and the explicit definition of the rights/duties afforded to editors within the Diamond OA publisher. It also includes details about the closure of individual journals, book series, and other outputs, as well as the transfer and preservation of their assets.

Diamond OA publishers retain legal ownership of individual journal titles. They must make efforts to avoid that ownership of individual journal titles can be transferred to commercial publishers. One way of achieving that is for the publisher to grant beneficial ownership of the journal to the editorial team and board of the individual journal. This establishes community ownership, empowers the journal’s community, and makes it difficult to sell the journal. Such an arrangement has sometimes been called ‘non-transferable ownership’. Community ownership of journal titles means that a Diamond OA publisher can easily change its service provider without changing the journal title, since ownership of the journal title always remains vested in the publisher and its community.

Governance

Three types of governance information should be distinguished:

(a) the Diamond OA publishers own governance structure
(b) the Diamond OA publishers relation with Service Providers
(c) the Diamond OA publishers relation with the journals and book series it provides services for.

Diamond OA publishers offer information about both their strategic and internal governance structure on their web page. Strategic governance indicates how a particular Diamond OA publisher relates to its scholarly community stakeholders and its host institution; internal governance is about the way in which decisions are reached within the publisher, its governance model and organisation chart.

Diamond OA publishers have clear and potentially distinct policies about their relation with Service Providers (SPs). They may have commercial and non-commercial relations with various SPs that are responsible for distinct technical and non-technical aspects of the workflow (e.g. ownership of infrastructure, copy-editing and typesetting services used, etc.). Information about the various SPs the Diamond OA publisher works with will be provided on its web page.

Diamond OA publishers provide information about their relation with individual journals and book series, and this information is clearly indicated on the web page of the individual journals and book series. Individual journals and/or published books have a clear protocol to guide their relation with all their SPs. They must have one or more policies that apply to its journals and books for the selection of members of editorial bodies (editorial teams and boards) that should include details of their mandate’s length, the regular renewal process, and clearly defined procedures for the dissolution of the board. All journals of the Diamond OA publisher must have a clear definition of the roles and responsibilities of the editorial board towards authors, reviewers, readers and the scientific community, journal and platform owners, the publisher, and the public.

Editors-in-chief and/or Editorial Teams must have full authority and responsibility over the entire editorial content of each journal published by the Diamond OA publisher and the publication timing of that content. Articles and books should carry a Creative Commons licence, preferably CC BY.

Related Guidelines

Related Training Materials

Ownership and governance

References

Consortium of the DIAMAS project. (2024). The Diamond OA Standard (DOAS). Zenodo. https://zenodo.org/doi/10.5281/zenodo.12179619

Licensing

This document is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

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Last Updated

2025-10-14