Diamond Open Access is a publishing model in which neither the author nor the reader pays a fee — production costs are covered instead by universities, scholarly societies, library consortia, or public research funders. In 2026, funders including cOAlition S and national research councils are actively steering journals toward Diamond OA as an alternative to Gold OA’s rising article processing charges, which now average around $2,600 and can exceed $12,000 at some flagship titles. For publishers, the switch changes who pays for production, not how much production actually costs — which is why editorial and production planning matters more here than for a typical pricing change.
What Diamond OA Is (and How It Differs from Gold and Green)
Diamond Open Access (Diamond OA) is an open access publishing model with no author-facing article processing charge and no reader-facing subscription or paywall. Production and editorial costs are instead covered by an institution, scholarly society, consortium, or public funder, making the journal free to publish in and free to read.
Diamond OA sits alongside two more familiar models. Gold OA makes an article freely available immediately on publication, but funds that through an article processing charge paid by the author or their institution. Green OA keeps the traditional subscription model in place but allows the author to self-archive a version of the manuscript in an institutional or subject repository, usually after an embargo period. Diamond OA is often described as a subset of Gold OA — immediate and free to read — but distinguished by who absorbs the cost of production.
The scale of Diamond OA is larger than most publishers assume. A 2021 study commissioned by cOAlition S and Science Europe identified between 17,000 and 29,000 Diamond journals worldwide, together publishing roughly 356,000 articles a year — around 8 to 9 percent of global scholarly output, concentrated heavily in the humanities and social sciences. Most of these titles run on modest budgets, often under €10,000 annually, and publish fewer than 50 articles a year.
| Model | Author Pays? | Reader Pays? | Who Funds Production | Typical Cost Signal (2026) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gold OA | Yes, an APC | No | Author or their institution/funder | Average ~$2,600; up to $12,850 at some flagship journals |
| Green OA | No | Yes, for the version of record | Subscription revenue continues as normal | No direct author cost; embargo periods typically apply |
| Diamond OA | No | No | Institution, society, consortium, or public funder | Most Diamond journals run on budgets under €10,000/year |
Why Funders and Institutions Are Pushing It in 2026
The pressure behind Diamond OA’s growth in 2026 comes from two directions at once: cost and equity. Global spending on article processing charges nearly tripled between 2019 and 2023, rising from roughly $910 million to $2.538 billion annually, driven by funder mandates and the continued dominance of a small number of commercial publishers. For funders paying those charges indirectly through grants, that trajectory is now a budgeting problem as much as a policy one.
cOAlition S has backed this shift with direct investment. Through Horizon Europe, it co-funded the €3 million DIAMAS project, mapping institutional Diamond OA production across Europe, alongside the €5 million CRAFT-OA project focused on improving the technical and organisational infrastructure behind these journals — an €8 million combined investment aimed squarely at making Diamond OA a durable alternative rather than a niche one. National funders have gone further still: in Canada, journal-subsidy programmes are requiring roughly 175 funded journals to move to Diamond OA by 2028 as a condition of continued support.
The economics funders point to are stark at the infrastructure level. The combined annual operating budget of the twelve Diamond OA infrastructures endorsed by SCOSS comes to approximately €6 million — total, globally — while a single country can spend €100 million or more per year on journal subscriptions and APCs combined. That gap is the core argument funders are making: shared, community-funded infrastructure costs a fraction of what fee-based publishing currently costs the same research system.
Production and Editorial Cost Implications
Diamond OA removes the fee, not the cost. Every task a Gold OA journal pays for through its APC — copyediting, typesetting, proofreading, metadata creation, indexing, and long-term archiving — still has to happen on a Diamond OA title. The difference is where that budget line sits: instead of being recovered per-article from authors, it has to be planned as a fixed, recurring institutional cost.
This has three practical implications for a publisher or society considering the move:
- Volume becomes a planning constraint, not a revenue lever. A Gold OA journal can, in principle, scale article volume to grow APC revenue. A Diamond OA journal has a fixed production budget, so editorial teams need to plan article throughput against that ceiling rather than against demand alone.
- Production efficiency has a direct, visible payoff. Because the budget per article is fixed rather than recovered per submission, reducing the manual effort behind copyediting, typesetting, and metadata tagging translates directly into either lower cost per article or higher sustainable volume — there’s no APC to absorb inefficiency.
- Metadata and discoverability work still has to be funded explicitly. Indexing in PubMed, CrossRef, and DOAJ, and maintaining clean structured metadata for discoverability, is often bundled invisibly into a commercial publisher’s overhead. A Diamond OA title, especially one run by a society or small editorial board, needs to budget for this work directly rather than assume it happens automatically.
Editorial and Production Changes Publishers Need to Plan For
Moving an existing subscription or Gold OA title to Diamond OA is an editorial and financial transition, not just a pricing change on the journal’s website. Four areas typically need active planning.
Funding continuity. A Diamond OA journal’s production budget usually comes from a university, society, or consortium rather than variable per-article income, so the editorial board needs a funding agreement that covers several years, not a single budget cycle — interruption mid-year is far more disruptive without APC income to fall back on.
Production consistency at a fixed cost. Because there’s no per-article fee to absorb variation, journals moving to Diamond OA benefit from locking in predictable production costs before the switch, rather than discovering after the fact that manual formatting and copyediting effort varies too much article to article to budget accurately. Our Books and Journals Production services are built around exactly this kind of predictable, per-title production planning.
Editorial capacity and reviewer management. Many Diamond OA titles are run by volunteer or society-employed editors rather than a large commercial editorial office, so the practical capacity to manage peer review, author queries, and proofs at existing quality standards needs an honest capacity check before volume increases. Editorial support services can absorb exactly this kind of capacity gap without requiring a journal to hire in-house staff.
Metadata and indexing continuity. Any change in publishing model risks a gap in DOAJ, CrossRef, or PubMed indexing if metadata isn’t carried across consistently, which can quietly damage discoverability right when a journal is trying to demonstrate the model works.
Is Diamond OA Right for Your Journal?
Diamond OA tends to suit journals with a stable institutional or society backer, a manageable article volume, and a research community where APCs are already a genuine barrier to publishing — conditions common in the humanities, social sciences, and research communities in the Global South. It’s a harder fit for high-volume journals used to APC revenue funding significant production infrastructure, where the fixed-budget model requires either a large institutional commitment or a meaningful reduction in per-article production cost to remain sustainable.
The honest planning question isn’t just “can we afford to remove the fee” — it’s “can our production budget hold steady at the article volume we actually publish, every year, regardless of submission demand.” Journals that can answer that clearly are usually the ones for whom Diamond OA works well.
FAQs
Is Diamond OA the same as free-to-publish Gold OA?
Not quite. Diamond OA is technically a subset of Gold OA — both make the article free to read immediately — but Diamond OA specifically means there’s no author-facing fee either. Some journals describe themselves as “no-fee Gold OA,” which is functionally the same as Diamond OA.
How do Diamond OA journals fund production without an APC?
Funding typically comes from a university, scholarly society, library consortium, or public research funder, often as an annual institutional commitment rather than per-article income. Shared infrastructure, like the platforms endorsed by SCOSS, also lowers the cost each individual journal needs to cover on its own.
Why are funders like cOAlition S promoting Diamond OA in 2026?
Largely on cost and equity grounds. Global APC spending nearly tripled between 2019 and 2023, and funders are increasingly paying that cost indirectly through research grants. Diamond OA also removes APCs as a barrier for researchers at institutions that can’t afford them, particularly in the Global South.
Does switching to Diamond OA reduce production costs?
No. It changes who pays, not how much the work costs. Copyediting, typesetting, metadata creation, and indexing still have to happen; the difference is that the budget for that work has to be secured directly from an institution or funder rather than recovered per article through an APC.
What size of journal is best suited to Diamond OA?
Journals with a stable institutional or society backer and a manageable, relatively predictable article volume tend to fit best. High-volume journals that currently rely on APC revenue to fund significant production infrastructure typically need a larger funding commitment or lower per-article production costs to make the switch sustainable.
Diamond OA changes who funds a journal’s production, not what that production requires. The journals making the switch successfully in 2026 are the ones treating it as a production-budget and capacity decision first, and a policy statement second — securing stable, multi-year institutional funding, locking in predictable per-title production costs, and making sure editorial capacity and metadata discoverability don’t quietly slip during the transition.
Talk to our academic publishing production team
