Open access was supposed to be an equity project. Removing the paywall meant a researcher in a poorly resourced institution could read the same literature as one at a wealthy university. In large part that promise has been kept on the reading side. But the dominant route to it — author-pays open access — has quietly reintroduced inequity on the writing side, and the response to that problem is reshaping how we think about an equitable scholarly record. This article sets out the landscape, drawing on the knowledge-equity domain.
The flavours of open access, and where the barrier moved
The vocabulary of open-access routes is worth getting straight, because the equity argument turns on the differences between them.
- Gold open access makes the article openly available immediately at the publisher, typically funded by an Article Processing Charge (APC) — a fee charged to authors.
- Green open access achieves openness through author self-archiving of a manuscript in a repository, at no charge to the author.
- Diamond open access is open to both authors and readers at no charge: no APC, no subscription. The costs are met by institutions, libraries, funders, or scholarly societies rather than by the individual author.
The shift to gold open access solved the reader’s paywall but erected an author’s paywall in its place. An APC of several thousand pounds is trivial for a well-funded lab and prohibitive for an unfunded researcher, a Global South institution, or a humanities scholar without grant money for publication. APC waivers exist for authors meeting low-income-country or financial-need criteria, but a waiver is a discretionary favour, not a structural fix, and the burden of asking falls on exactly the researchers least able to bear it.
Diamond open access as the structural answer
Diamond open access is the model that removes the barrier rather than waiving it. Because neither author nor reader pays, the equity question does not arise at the point of publication at all. The model is not new or marginal — a large share of the world’s open-access journals already operate this way, particularly those run by universities, societies, and national infrastructures — but it has historically been invisible in policy discussions dominated by the APC economy.
That is changing. Plan S, the initiative of the funder coalition cOAlition S, mandates full and immediate open access to funded research and has increasingly recognised diamond routes as fully compliant, not merely tolerated. The significance is that the most influential open-access policy lever now actively legitimises the model that does not charge authors, which begins to correct an incentive structure that had quietly privileged the APC route.
Bibliodiversity: more than one way to publish
Diamond open access is one expression of a larger principle: bibliodiversity, the diversity of publication venues, languages, business models, and ownership in scholarly communication. The argument for bibliodiversity is that a scholarly record dominated by a handful of large commercial publishers, a single business model, and one working language is fragile and exclusionary. Resilience and equity both come from plurality.
Concretely, bibliodiversity means valuing multilingual publishing rather than treating English as the only legitimate language of record; it means recognising community-owned and society-run venues alongside commercial ones; and it means counting infrastructures built outside the global North as first-class scholarly infrastructure rather than as regional curiosities. A bibliodiverse record is one where the language of original publication is metadata to be preserved, not a deficiency to be corrected.
The Global South was here first
It is a common misconception that diamond open access is a recent northern invention. The most mature diamond infrastructures in the world are in Latin America. SciELO — Scientific Electronic Library Online — has operated a region-wide, no-fee open-access infrastructure since the late 1990s, and AmeliCA articulates an explicitly community-controlled, non-commercial vision of open access for Latin America and the Global South. AfricArXiv extends preprint infrastructure to African scholarship. These are not pilots; they are working demonstrations that a scholarly record can be open to authors and readers alike, at scale, without an APC economy.
The lesson the Global South infrastructures offer is not that the North should build its own diamond journals from scratch, but that an equitable scholarly record already exists in places that northern policy has been slow to recognise — and that recognition, not reinvention, is the first task.
Why this is a metadata problem too
Equity is not only an economic question; it is also an infrastructural one, and infrastructure is where CASRAI’s mission touches it. A diamond journal, a multilingual output, or a Global South venue is disadvantaged whenever the metadata systems that index, count, and reward scholarship cannot represent it cleanly. If a discovery system assumes one language, if an assessment exercise counts only venues in a northern-centric index, if an output’s persistent identifier ecosystem is thin, the bibliodiverse record is penalised by the plumbing even when policy intends to support it.
Representing the full diversity of venues, models, and languages in shared, structured metadata — with DOAJ as the curated registry of open-access journals, persistent identifiers for outputs in every language, and vocabulary that does not assume the APC model is the default — is part of what makes equity operational rather than aspirational. This connects to responsible assessment: an evaluation system that values contribution and context over venue prestige is one that bibliodiversity can survive.
Where shared vocabulary fits
The terms in this domain carry real consequences, and they are easy to muddle: gold is not diamond, a waiver is not the same as no-fee, bibliodiversity is more than “some journals are open”. A shared, federated vocabulary that defines these precisely — pointing to cOAlition S for Plan S compliance, to DOAJ and OASPA for the publishing landscape, and to the Global South infrastructures for the diamond model in practice — is what lets equity goals be stated and measured without ambiguity. Supplying that definitional layer is the role the CASRAI dictionary is designed to play.
What to do now
For funders: recognise diamond routes as fully compliant and fund the infrastructures, not just the APCs. For institutions and libraries: invest in community-owned and Global South infrastructure as scholarly infrastructure. For standards work: ensure metadata and vocabulary represent multilingual, no-fee, and community-owned venues as first-class, so the plumbing does not penalise the bibliodiverse record.
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