Coalition Publica Response to Action Plan for Diamond Open Access
Ce texte est disponible en version française ici.
Coalition Publica partners, Érudit and the Public Knowledge Project, are pleased to announce their endorsement of the Action Plan for Diamond Open Access (OA) prepared by cOAlition S, OPERAS, ANR, and Science Europe.
As purveyors of national and regional infrastructure for scholarly publishing supporting thousands of Diamond Open Access (OA) scholarly journals from around the world, Coalition Publica, the Public Knowledge Project, and Érudit are extremely pleased to witness the momentum growing in Europe supporting Diamond Open Access.
In large part, through the efforts of cOAlition S, OPERAS, ANR, and Science Europe, an emerging European community understands why journals have to be made available for free to both authors and their readers. Over the span of two decades, there has often been limited resources allocated to the growing needs of Diamond OA journals.
We are now seeing funders and institutions increasingly investing in OA using market mechanisms like Article Processing Charges and so-called Transformative Agreements, while simultaneously imposing new requirements on existing publishers. As such, we support the efforts to build this community and to take collective action that ensures Diamond OA journals (journals that are fulfilling the ideals of OA to knowledge as a commons) continue to thrive.
It is in the spirit of supporting a community that wishes to explore collective actions that we have signed the Action Plan proposed by Science Europe and cOAlition S. However, while doing so, we must emphasize that the challenges facing Diamond OA journals are not contained within any one country or region. What appears as a solution in one place may cause additional challenges in another. As such, we believe that the actions proposed need to be taken with the full participation of scholarly communities from around the world. Actions that do not directly support the wide-range of institutional, national, and cultural contexts in which Diamond OA journals already operate may end up inadvertently diminishing the most diverse and inclusive form of scholarly publishing that exists today.
We all benefit from the diversity that exists in Diamond OA journals and from the bespoke ways in which they are financed. We therefore sign this letter in support of taking action, but call on those who will act on them to do so in inclusive ways. Similarly, we call on funders and other organizations who support Diamond OA to adapt and extend these efforts to the rest of the world. If Diamond OA journals cannot thrive globally, the knowledge they contain will end up locked away, either in paywalled journals, or in the minds of those who were excluded from publishing due to a lack of resources.
Further Reading:
Willinsky, J. & Alperin, J.P. (2021). PKP Enables Diamond Open Access.
CLACSO. (2015). CLACSO ́s Declaration on open access to knowledge managed as a commons by the scholarly community