Revenue streams
Abstract
These guidelines provide an overview of the diverse funding mechanisms for Diamond OA, and a framework to ensure transparency and maintain trust, in alignment with the values of the disciplines served by scholarly Publishers.
Main Text
A Diamond OA publisher is typically funded via public funding. Public funding can be directly provided to the Diamond OA publisher by a parent institution or a public body in the form of a regular annual contribution or via project funding. It can also be provided indirectly via the salaries of people who fulfill other tasks at the parent institution in addition to their work for the IP. In addition to public funding, IPs may rely on income that reaches them via diverse revenue streams. These include, but are not limited to, income from print-on-demand services, editorial services not related to Diamond OA journals, or Voluntary Author Contributions (VAC). Voluntary Author Contributions are permitted as a revenue stream, as long as it is clearly indicated on the website at the journal level that delivered publication services are not contingent on the payment of any fees by the authors. For an example see the journal Glossa Psycholinguistics’ policy on VACs, or that of the Open Library of Humanities.
The Diamond Open Access Standard’s (DOAS) Guidelines make it clear that the origin of the revenue streams should be in line with the values, expectations, and traditions in the disciplines the Diamond OA publisher is serving. The nature of revenue streams should not have an impact on editorial independence. Editorial operations related to content and peer review are independent and free from influence from the bodies that financially support the Diamond OA publisher or bodies that support individual publications of the Diamond OA publisher.
Any conflicts of interest between additional revenue streams (including commercial activity) and authors, reviewers or editors should be clearly indicated by the Diamond OA publisher on their website. Ideally, Diamond OA publishers also provide transparency on their funding via an explicit statement about the Diamond OA publisher’s funding streams on their website, where donations, project funding, in-kind contributions, and voluntary contributions are also acknowledged.
Discipline-specific considerations
The availability of revenue streams depends to a large extent on the specific scholarly (sub)disciplines served by the IP, the level of scholarly organization of those (sub)disciplines, and the extent to which researchers and organisations in these (sub)disciplines have access to external funding. Diamond OA can be funded by the membership fees of scholarly societies if the relevant discipline is organized in that way. Similarly, Voluntary Author Contributions (VACs) – are typically paid by authors with access to appropriate funds, either from their institution or extramural grants. While VACs can be a good redistributive mechanism (a VAC typically pays for the costs of more than one article), they are strongly dependent on the capacity of the specific discipline to capture grant money and the location and policies of the institutions that authors work for. As a result, VACs may not be an appropriate revenue stream for all IPs. For example, due to its experimental nature, psycholinguistics attracts a fair amount of grant money, but the neighboring discipline of descriptive linguistics of African languages is typically less well endowed with such grants.
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References
- Consortium of the DIAMAS project. (2024). The Diamond OA Standard (DOAS). Zenodo. https://zenodo.org/doi/10.5281/zenodo.12179619
Licensing
This article is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License