Diamond Open Access Needs Institutions, Not Heroes

Before the internet, many disciplines already practiced forms of scholarly communication that evoke what we now call diamond open access. Manuscripts circulated through departmental working papers series (e.g., in economics) and informal scholarly networks — or, as I still remember from my own early career, simply through the mail! And in many ways, these arrangements captured the essential functions of publishing — distribution and quality control — through informal feedback or conference discussions, all without author-facing fees or reader paywalls.

What made this ecosystem possible was not heroism, but tractability: limited scale, manageable volume, and informal governance. And that is precisely what has changed.

Today’s scholarly communication system operates at a radically different scale, with millions of papers published each year (according to estimates from the STM Association and Crossref). What once worked through personal commitment and small-scale networks now requires infrastructure: platforms, preservation, metadata standards, governance, and long-term coordination. Volunteer labor has not disappeared, even though expectations for this have multiplied far faster than corresponding institutional support. The result is a profound disconnect between the necessity of volunteer publishing labor and how weakly it is supported. This is the context in which diamond open access has become a policy priority.

But a quiet tension remains. Diamond open access is often described as “community-led,” and implicitly sustained by goodwill. While that may be viable on a small scale, it is not viable at the scale suggested by current policy ambitions.

This raises a specific and more practical question: what would it mean to support community-led publishing as infrastructure, rather than as a collection of heroic individual efforts?

Read the rest of this piece at The Scholarly Kitchen