diamond open access – Techdirt (original) (raw)

Gates Foundation Shows That ‘Gold Open Access’ Was A Mistake, And ‘Diamond Open Access’ Is The Future

from the proper-open-access dept

The Gates Foundation is one of the most influential funding bodies in the world. According to one ranking, it is the second largest charitable foundation, and as of 31 December 2023 had an endowment of around $75.2 billion. That makes a shift in its publishing policy hugely important.

An article in Chemical & Engineering News explains that hitherto the Gates Foundation has paid the publication charges of work carried out using its grants, provided the final version is available freely. That’s what is known as gold open access. A number of Walled Culture articles have explained why that approach has failed. In March of this year, the Gates Foundation announced a “refresh” of its open access policies to “address ongoing challenges and advance systemic change in scholarly publishing”. From January 2025 the Foundation will be:

Requiring preprints and encouraging preprint review to make research publicly available when it’s ready. While researchers and authors can continue to publish in their journal of choice, preprints will help prioritize access to the research itself as opposed to access to a particular journal.

Discontinuing publishing fees, such as APCs [Article Processing Charges]. By discontinuing to support these fees, we can work to address inequities in current publishing models and reinvest the funds elsewhere.

Along with many other open access supporters, Walled Culture has been advocating a move to preprints as the primary publication medium for research. But the approach is not without its problems, notably in terms of the risk that bad players can use them to disseminate flawed research or intentional misinformation. In an attempt to deal with that issue, a new “verified preprint platform”, VeriXiv, has been launched by the Gates Foundation together with F1000, part of the Taylor & Francis group:

While preprints make the latest research available more quickly, their growing use in sharing findings ahead of peer review has added to concerns about the potential for disseminating misinformation. To support greater research integrity, VeriXiv will conduct rigorous pre-publication checks. Each VeriXiv submission will undergo twenty ethics and integrity checks to assess a range of issues, including plagiarism, image manipulation, author verification, and competing interests.

In addition, open research transparency checks will also check whether the data is available in an appropriate repository and whether methods have been included to support reproducibility. Each preprint will have clear labeling so that readers know the level of verification conducted on the article and which levels have been passed.

Preprints are a key element of diamond open access, where there are no charges for either the reader or the researcher. The momentum behind what was once a fringe approach seems to be growing. Last year, the open access group cOAlition S made an important move towards diamond open access based around preprints. In July of this year, the Global Diamond Open Access Alliance was announced at a UNESCO event. The switch by the Gates Foundation from supporting gold open access to requiring preprints is another important signal that diamond open access is the way forward for the widespread, free dissemination of academic knowledge – something that copyright has prevented for too long.

Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon and on Bluesky. Originally published on Walled Culture.

Filed Under: diamond open access, gold open access, open access, preprints, research
Companies: gates foundation, verixiv

Another Reason Why Diamond Access Makes Sense: No Economic Barriers To Publishing Rebuttals

from the helping-science-progress dept

Walled Culture has written numerous posts about the promise and problems of open access. An important editorial in the journal Web Ecology raises an issue for open access that I’ve not seen mentioned before. It concerns the fraught issue of rebuttal articles, which offer fact-based criticism of already-published academic papers:

Critical comments on published articles vary in importance; they can simply point to an aspect absent from a published article or offer an alternative interpretation or perspective. In some cases, they can point to fundamental flaws that undermine the published conclusions. The nomenclature of these – comments, replies, rebuttals – is variable, but their importance to scientific progress is unquestionable.

Rebuttal articles are a vital part of the scientific publishing process, since they help weed out mistakes made by other researchers, usually honest errors, but sometimes not. As the Web Ecology editorial notes, writing rebuttal articles is hard enough because of their necessarily confrontational nature. But anyone wanting to publish rebuttals in open access titles that are funded through article processing charges (APCs), generally paid by the researcher’s academic institution, has to contend with an additional problem. In this case, as well as writing cogent explanations why published research is faulty, people who wish to publish a rebuttal must generally pay an APC to do so. The Web Ecology editorial gives details of a particular case where several scientists spent considerable time and effort rebutting an article in the open access journal Ecosphere, about spiders that allegedly preyed on bats:

Their rebuttal article was peer-reviewed in Ecosphere, where it was accepted for publication (Daniel Montesinos has seen copies of the submitted rebuttal and of its acceptance letter). However, the authors of this reply were requested to pay an APC of USD 2100/GBP 1300/EUR 1700 for a rebuttal article that largely disproved the original publication. The authors of the reply, who had altruistically devoted significant time to writing their rebuttal, refused to pay. They felt that they were doing the journal – and science – a service and that it was unreasonable to charge them for it.

Because these authors’ APC request was denied, the original Ecosphere article, which they claimed was flawed, remained uncontested, while the rebuttal was not published there. Instead, the editors of Web Ecology stepped in and published it themselves. As they comment:

Clearly, charging authors for brief, well-founded criticism of published articles creates a highly problematic disincentive to fruitful scientific discussion. This uncontroversial stance should enjoy universal support, but it currently does not. This might be excused as a simple oversight. Historically, this had never been an issue because most journals did not charge any publication fees. However, today more than 40 % of all Web of Science publications are open access (Basson et al., 2022). It is time to consider the damaging effects of charging authors for critical comments in open-access journals.

Drawing on their experience here, they go on to make an important point:

When a clear error is detected, it is for the best interest of all to find a reasonable and ethical solution in the shortest possible time. For platinum/diamond open-access journals, this is not an issue. Web Ecology has charged no APCs since its creation in 2000, which shows the viability of making science truly available to the whole scientific community at a moderate cost while maintaining the highest scientific and publishing standards.

As Walled Culture has written, diamond open access journals (also known as platinum open access) charge neither the people who read their papers, nor the researchers who publish them. Instead, they are funded through other sources, something made easier by the minimalist kind of publishing that they typically engage in. The fact that they can publish rebuttals quickly and without demanding a payment to do so is yet another reason they are the best form of open access available.

Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon. Originally published to Walled Culture.

Filed Under: diamond open access, open access, rebuttals, research, science

Diamond Open Access Gets Real: 'Free To Read, Free To Publish' Arrives

from the here's-how-it's-done dept

A couple of years ago, we wrote about a new kind of open access. Alongside the traditional “gold” open access, whereby research institutions pay publishers to make academic papers freely available to all readers, and “green” open access, which consists of posting papers to an institutional repository or open online archive, the mathematician Tim Gowers came up with something he called “diamond” open access. At its heart lies arXiv.org, one of the earliest attempts to open up academic publishing in the early 1990s using the (then) new Net — basically, it’s an online server, where preprint papers are posted for anyone to read. Here are the key features of a diamond open access title:

> While in most respects it will be just like any other journal, it will be unusual in one important way: it will be purely an arXiv overlay journal. That is, rather than publishing, or even electronically hosting, papers, it will consist of a list of links to arXiv preprints. Other than that, the journal will be entirely conventional: authors will submit links to arXiv preprints, and then the editors of the journal will find referees, using their quick opinions and more detailed reports in the usual way in order to decide which papers will be accepted.

That comes from a Gower’s latest blog post, which announces the creation of a new diamond open access journal called “Discrete Analysis”. It’s not the first to adopt this model — Gowers mentions a couple of others already in existence ? but the post is interesting because it spells out in detail how this new kind of academic publishing works:

> The software for managing the refereeing process will be provided by Scholastica, an outfit that was set up a few years ago by some graduates from the University of Chicago with the aim of making it very easy to create electronic journals. However, the look and feel of Discrete Analysis will be independent: the people at Scholastica are extremely helpful, and one of the services they provide is a web page designed to the specifications you want, with a URL that does not contain the word ?scholastica?. Scholastica does charge for this service — a whopping $10 per submission. (This should be compared with typical article processing charges of well over 100 times this from more conventional journals.)

It’s that two orders of magnitude reduction in costs that is so revolutionary here. It means that with a very small grant from someone — in the case of Discrete Analysis, the money is coming from Cambridge University — a journal can be created that is not only completely free for everyone who reads it, but free for the academics who publish in it too. This gets around a problem with the gold open access model: the fact that academic institutions have to find quite serious sums in order to adopt it. Diamond open access is not just cheap but hugely cheaper, so this cost issue pretty much goes away. As Gowers writes:

> In theory, this offers a way out of the current stranglehold that the publishers have over us: if enough universities set up enough journals at these very modest costs, then we will have an alternative and much cheaper publication system up and running, and it will look more and more pointless to submit papers to the expensive journals, which will save the universities huge amounts of money. Just to drive the point home, the cost of submitting an article from the UK to the Journal of the London Mathematical Society is, if you want to use their open-access option, ?2,310. If Discrete Analysis gets 50 submissions per year (which is more than I would expect to start with), then this single article processing charge would cover our costs for well over five years.

Finally, for those who are wondering what advantages this kind of overlay journal offers over using arXiv on its own, Gowers makes three important points:

> An obvious partial answer to this question is that the list of links on our journal website will be a list of certificates that certain arXiv preprints have been peer reviewed and judged to be of a suitable standard for Discrete Analysis. Thus, it will provide information that the arXiv alone does not provide. > > However, we intend to do slightly more than this. For each paper, we will give not just a link, but also a short description. This will be based on the abstract and introduction, and on any further context that one of our editors or referees may be able to give us. The advantage of this is that it will be possible to browse the journal and get a good idea of what it contains, without having to keep clicking back and forth to arXiv preprints. In this way, we hope to make visiting the Discrete Analysis home page a worthwhile experience. > > Another thing we will be able to do with these descriptions is post links to newer versions of the articles. If an author wishes to update an article after it has been published, we will provide two links: one to the ?official? version (that is, not the first submitted version, but the ?final? version that takes into account comments by the referee), and one to the new updated version, with a brief summary of what has changed.

All-in-all, this is an exciting development, and one that could have a major impact on scholarly publishing if it is taken up more widely. However, the fact that it took even its inventor over two years to create his first diamond open access title shows that it is likely to be a while before that happens.

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Filed Under: diamond open access, free to read, knowledge, open access, publishing, sharing, tim gowers
Companies: discrete analysis

Re-inventing Academic Publishing: 'Diamond' Open Access Titles That Are Free To Read And Free To Publish

from the web-native dept

As Techdirt has been reporting, the idea of providing open access to publicly-funded research is steadily gaining ground. One of the key moments occurred almost exactly a year ago, when the British mathematician Tim Gowers announced that he would no longer have anything to do with the major academic publisher Elsevier. This then turned into a full-scale boycott: today, over 13,000 academics have pledged not to work with the company.

Despite the growing acceptance of open access, there remains a key challenge. Unlike traditional academic journals, which require readers to pay, open access titles provide free access to all. But even though produced in a digital form, open access journals still have editing and production costs associated with them, and these are typically met by the funding institutions of the researchers when their papers are accepted for publication.

This is the so-called “gold” form of open access; another is “green”, which consists of posting papers to an institutional repository or open online archive. In an interesting development, a new form, dubbed “diamond” open access, has just been announced by Tim Gowers:

> a platform is to be created that will make it very easy to set up arXiv overlay journals. > > What is an arXiv overlay journal? It is just like an electronic journal, except that instead of a website with lots of carefully formatted articles, all you get is a list of links to preprints on the arXiv. The idea is that the parts of the publication process that academics do voluntarily — editing and refereeing — are just as they are for traditional journals, and we do without the parts that cost money, such as copy-editing and typesetting.

arXiv.org was one of the earliest attempts to open up academic publishing in the early 1990s using the (then) new Net — basically, it’s an online server, where preprint papers are posted for anyone to read. Preprints are the draft form of papers before they appear in journals, although often they are highly finished, and require few changes for publication. The innovation of “diamond” open access is that these preprints, held on the arXiv servers, will be the main form of publishing. Indeed, the new journals, whose titles have not yet been announced, will consist largely of links to those preprints.

The huge advantage of this approach is that it costs almost nothing to produce one of these “overlay” journals, since it re-uses the work already done in first preparing the preprint, and then in posting it to arXiv. This means that as well as making the journals freely available to readers, it won’t be necessary to charge the academics to appear there — zero-cost open access.

As Gowers notes, building on arXiv in this way not only saves money, but opens up new ways of extending published articles:

> One possibility being discussed, which I am very much in favour of, is each accepted article having not just a link to the arXiv but also a web page for (non-anonymous) comments and reviews. For example, the editor who accepts an article might wish to write a paragraph or two about why the article is interesting, a reader who spots a minor error might write explaining the error and how it can be fixed (if it can), and an expert in the area might write a review that could be very useful to hiring committees. > > This may even go further, with comment pages being set up for other preprints and journal articles — not just the ones that have appeared in epijournals [the provisional name for these new kinds of publication.]

What’s interesting here is the thoroughgoing way these “epijournals” exploit the power of the Web’s key feature of linking — through pointing to articles held on arXiv, and the use of ancillary pages for comments, corrections and reviews. In a sense, this moves on the open access revolution, which so far has contented itself with using the Net to free up conventionally-published articles. Diamond access to epijournals goes further, and seeks to re-imagine academic publishing more completely for the digital age — without the publishers.

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Filed Under: diamond open access, journals, open access, publishing, research, tim gowers