It can be easy to take diamond open access journals for granted precisely because these journals do not charge reader or author fees. Often, free-to-read and free-to-publish journals are celebrated for their principled commitments to removing barriers without acknowledgement of the need to find other ways to collectively shoulder the financial burden of these commitments. Even for diamond open access journals that partner with a library publisher, university press or learned society, it is a recurring challenge to articulate production costs and raise funds to sustain operations.
The Lyrasis Open Access Community Investment Program (OACIP) is intended to help make these costs more visible and enable libraries, academic departments, research centers and other organizations to collectively fund diamond open access journals. In this way, OACIP is intended to help strengthen the radical interdependence that is essential to so many open access initiatives. Like Lyrasis as a whole, OACIP has been designed to serve as connective tissue, with the ultimate aim of bringing together journals, their publishing partners, and a diverse community of supporters to advance more sustainable, principle-aligned publishing.
To illustrate how radical interdependence sustains diamond open access publishing, Duke University Press Journals Director Rob Dilworth shares the following perspective on the renewing OACIP journal Environmental Humanities.
Guest Perspective: Rob Dilworth, Journals Director, Duke University Press
Environmental Humanities offers a good example of the many forms of collaboration required to sustain a diamond open access journal. While the journal is published by Duke University Press, its success depends on an extended network of contributors that includes editors, peer reviewers, editorial board members, librarians and funding partners.
Behind every issue is a complex infrastructure supporting submissions, peer review, copyediting, production, digital hosting, indexing and long-term preservation. This labor often remains invisible to readers, even though it is essential to maintaining the quality and integrity of the scholarship. Sustaining this work requires interdependence and a recognition that equitable access to scholarship depends on ongoing collaboration among many partners.
Environmental Humanities is a peer-reviewed, international, open-access journal that publishes interdisciplinary scholarship bringing humanities disciplines into conversation with one another and with the natural and social sciences around pressing environmental issues. The journal has a particular mandate to publish work that does not fit neatly within established environmental disciplines while also highlighting scholarship from across these fields that seeks to reach a broader readership. This commitment to intellectual exchange across disciplinary boundaries echoes the collaboration that sustains diamond open access publishing.
OACIP helps sustain the infrastructure that makes this work possible. Community-supported initiatives help ensure that the labor, technology and editorial expertise required to produce a scholarly journal remain viable without shifting costs onto readers or authors. Thanks to this collective support, the journal’s newest issue — volume 18, issue 1 — has just been published and is available to read in its entirety at no cost to readers anywhere in the world.
For a journal like Environmental Humanities, OACIP represents an important expression of the shared responsibility that sustains diamond open access publishing. By enabling libraries and institutions to invest directly in the infrastructure that supports journals like this one, the program strengthens the networks of support that make open scholarship possible.