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 gower's
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