CASRAI Dictionary

Tag: benefits of open access publishing

  • Diamond Open Access vs Gold Open Access in 2026

    Diamond open access vs gold open access comes down to who pays: diamond OA charges neither author nor reader, funded instead by institutions, funders, or learned societies, while gold OA typically requires an author-facing article processing charge (APC) to make the published version free to read. Since cOAlition S’s 2026-2030 strategy stopped funding transformative agreements and redirected support toward diamond models, authors now face a genuinely different set of funder incentives when choosing a route.

    Diamond open access is a scholarly publishing model in which a journal or platform makes the version of record freely available to readers immediately on publication, without charging authors any fee, because publication costs are covered by non-commercial funders, universities, or community consortia rather than by the researcher.

    What is the difference between diamond and gold open access?

    Gold open access “embraces both journals supported by APCs or by other means of funding,” according to the definition used across the scholarly-communications literature — it is defined by immediate, free-to-read publication, not by any single funding mechanism. In practice, most gold OA venues from commercial and society publishers do charge an APC, often running into thousands of pounds per article.

    Diamond open access is narrower and stricter: no author fee, no reader fee, ever. The 2021 Open Access Diamond Journals Study, commissioned by cOAlition S and Science Europe, found that diamond journals make up roughly 73% of all open access journals registered in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), yet account for only 8–9% of total OA articles published each year — most are small, discipline- or region-specific titles, with 54.4% publishing 25 or fewer articles annually.

    Feature Diamond open access Gold open access
    Author fee (APC) None Usually charged (commercial/hybrid publishers)
    Reader fee None None (once published)
    Typical funder Institutions, learned societies, government, consortia Author/institution APC, Read & Publish deals
    Ownership model Community-led, non-profit Often publisher-owned, for-profit
    Median cost per article (2021 study) ~$200 (in-kind + volunteer labour) Frequently £1,500–£3,000+ APC
    Regional strength Latin America (~95% of OA journals are diamond) Europe, North America (APC-funded)

    What did cOAlition S’s 2026-2030 strategy actually change?

    cOAlition S launched Plan S in 2018 with an ambitious 2021 compliance deadline for full, immediate open access. From 31 December 2024, cOAlition S stopped financially supporting transformative agreements and transformative journals — the “Read & Publish” deals that funders had previously used to help subscription publishers transition to gold OA. That withdrawal is the single biggest practical change for authors: funder money that once flowed toward APC-based Read & Publish deals is being redirected instead.

    The coalition’s 2026-2030 strategy, run in two phases (2026-2027, then 2028-2030), commits to “enhancing the focus on sustainable and equitable models, such as PRC, diamond open access and preprints” and explicitly names the dominance of APCs, book processing charges, and Read & Publish agreements as having “contributed to a growth in open access publishing but also led to increasing costs” — costs the coalition says fall hardest on researchers at less-resourced institutions.

    Coalition-wide infrastructure has followed the policy shift. The European Diamond Capacity Hub (EDCH) launched on 15 January 2025 in Madrid, offering diamond publishers a shared registry, guidelines, training platform, and publishing tools. This builds on the Horizon Europe-funded DIAMAS project (2022–2025) and the March 2022 Action Plan for Diamond Open Access, co-authored by cOAlition S, Science Europe, OPERAS, and the French National Research Agency (ANR).

    None of this abolishes gold OA. Independent tracking cited alongside the new strategy shows gold open access articles grew from 14% of publications in 2014 to 40% in 2024, while subscription-only access fell from 70% to 54% over the same decade — gold remains the largest single OA route by volume. What has changed is funder appetite for underwriting its APC costs through transformative deals.

    Which route should authors choose now?

    For most authors, the decision now turns on three questions: does a credible diamond venue exist in your field, does your funder mandate immediate OA with a specific route, and can you or your institution absorb an APC if gold is the only realistic option.

    • Funder mandate first. Check whether your funder is a cOAlition S signatory (e.g. UKRI, several Horizon Europe funders) and whether its post-2024 policy still counts a Read & Publish deal as compliant, or whether it now favours diamond/PRC routes and rights retention instead.
    • Field coverage. Diamond OA is strongest in humanities, social sciences, and Latin American-led research; it is thinner in high-volume STEM fields still dominated by commercial gold and hybrid titles.
    • Cost exposure. If no diamond venue fits, gold OA via an institutional Read & Publish deal (where one still exists) or the Rights Retention Strategy — depositing the author accepted manuscript under a CC BY licence regardless of the publisher’s OA status — remains a compliant fallback.
    • Journal vetting. Confirm DOAJ listing and peer-review standards before submitting to any unfamiliar diamond title; volume and prestige metrics vary far more widely across diamond journals than across established gold titles.

    Institutions and research administrators should treat this as a policy-tracking task, not a one-off decision: funder OA policies, APC caps, and diamond eligibility lists are being updated through the 2026-2027 phase of the cOAlition S strategy, and guidance that was compliant in 2024 may no longer be by the time a manuscript is accepted.

    What are the practical requirements and deadlines?

    The clearest hard deadline already passed: 31 December 2024 was the cut-off after which cOAlition S funders stopped paying into transformative agreements and transformative journal arrangements. Any Read & Publish deal negotiated after that date does not carry cOAlition S financial backing, though individual funders retain discretion over their own compliance rules.

    There is no equivalent single deadline forcing authors into diamond OA — the 2026-2030 strategy is a funding-and-infrastructure redirection, not a new mandate with a compliance date. Authors should check their funder’s current policy page rather than assume coalition-wide rules apply uniformly, since cOAlition S members retain latitude in implementation.

    Common author questions, answered

    What is the difference between gold and diamond open access?

    Gold open access makes the published article free to read immediately, usually funded by an author-facing APC. Diamond open access also gives immediate free reading but charges neither author nor reader, with costs instead covered by institutions, societies, or public funders.

    What does diamond open access mean?

    Diamond open access means a journal or platform publishes research with no fee to the author and no fee to the reader. It is typically community-led and non-profit, run by academic societies, universities, or consortia rather than commercial publishers, and is sometimes called “platinum” open access.

    What is golden open access?

    “Golden” open access is simply another name for gold open access — the model where the final, published version of an article is made freely readable on the publisher’s own platform immediately, most commonly funded through an article processing charge paid by the author or their institution.

    What is the difference between open access and gold open access?

    “Open access” is the umbrella term covering any route to free-to-read research, including green (repository self-archiving), gold, diamond, and hybrid models. Gold open access is one specific route within that umbrella: publication directly on the journal’s own platform, typically APC-funded.

    What this means for research administrators and institutions

    Institutional OA teams should expect three practical consequences: fewer new Read & Publish deals carrying funder co-financing, more DOAJ-listed diamond venues to vet for approved-journal lists, and a continued need to track funder-by-funder policy pages rather than treat cOAlition S guidance as one uniform rulebook.

    The direction of travel is clear even without a single deadline: cOAlition S investment is moving toward diamond and away from APC-financed transformative deals, while gold OA keeps growing in absolute volume via direct APC payment and Rights Retention. Authors who map their funder’s current policy — not the 2018 Plan S baseline — against real venue options in their field make the more durable choice.

    Research administration teams coordinating institutional OA compliance can find related definitions and workflow context in CASRAI’s research administration resources and the CASRAI Dictionary.

  • Why Publish Open Access? A Case for Researchers, Funders and Institutions

    Why publish open access? Because immediate, paywall-free publication increases a paper’s readership and citation potential, satisfies funder mandates from cOAlition S, UKRI and Wellcome, keeps outputs REF-eligible, and extends publicly funded research to readers who cannot access subscription journals — benefits that typically outweigh the cost of article processing charges.

    Open access is a publishing model in which the final, peer-reviewed version of a research output is made freely available online at the point of publication, without a subscription or paywall, under a licence that permits reuse. That single design choice — removing the paywall — is what drives every benefit and every trade-off discussed below.

    Why does open access matter for visibility and citation?

    Removing a paywall expands a paper’s potential readership beyond subscribing institutions to independent scholars, clinicians, policymakers and researchers in lower-income countries. Publisher-commissioned meta-analyses report open-access citation advantages in the region of 18–40%, a range corroborated by Taylor & Francis and Springer Nature author-services data. Independent bibliometricians caution that part of this gap reflects self-selection — authors tend to pay for open access on papers they already judge to be their strongest — so the advantage should be read as a correlation, not a guaranteed multiplier.

    Visibility gains are strongest for interdisciplinary and applied fields, where readers outside a paper’s home discipline or sector are less likely to hold a subscription. For research administrators tracking impact, unrestricted access also improves the reliability of usage metrics reported to funders and REF impact case studies, since download and view counts are not artificially depressed by paywall friction.

    Why do funders require open access?

    A growing share of research funding now carries a binding open-access condition, not a recommendation. Non-compliance can mean ineligible outputs, clawed-back grant funds, or exclusion from future funding rounds — which is why open access has shifted from an ethical preference to a compliance requirement for most UK and European researchers.

    • cOAlition S / Plan S — launched in 2018, this consortium of research funders requires immediate open access with no embargo, typically under a CC BY licence, for all funded research articles.
    • UKRI — UKRI’s open access policy has applied to journal articles and conference proceedings from grants awarded since 1 April 2022, and extended to monographs, book chapters and edited collections from 1 January 2024.
    • Wellcome — Wellcome’s open access policy requires immediate open access under a CC BY licence for all research articles arising from Wellcome funding, with no embargo permitted.
    Funder Embargo permitted Preferred licence Route accepted
    cOAlition S (Plan S) No CC BY Gold or green with no embargo
    UKRI No (journal articles) CC BY Gold or green via repository deposit
    Wellcome No CC BY Gold, with preprint posting expected

    These mandates are the practical reason many researchers no longer treat open access as optional: the funding itself is now conditioned on it.

    Why is open access so expensive?

    The commonest objection to open access is cost. Gold open access is usually funded through an article processing charge (APC) paid by the author, institution or funder rather than by the reader, and APCs at established hybrid and fully open-access journals frequently run into several thousand pounds per article. That cost has not disappeared — it has moved from the reader’s library subscription to the author’s grant budget, which is precisely why the objection persists even as access improves.

    Three developments are making that cost more visible and, in places, avoidable:

    • Price transparency requirements — cOAlition S’s Price and Service Transparency Framework requires participating publishers to disclose a cost breakdown behind their APCs, rather than setting a single opaque list price.
    • Transformative and Read-and-Publish agreements — many UK institutions now hold deals with major publishers that bundle subscription and publishing costs, so individual authors at those institutions pay no APC directly.
    • No-fee routes exist — green open access (self-archiving the accepted manuscript in a repository) and diamond open access (journals that charge neither reader nor author) both avoid APCs entirely; a substantial share of journals indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals charge no APC at all.

    The honest answer to “why is open access so expensive” is that the cost of publishing has not fallen — it has been reallocated and, under frameworks such as Plan S’s transparency requirement, made auditable in a way subscription pricing never was.

    Is open access REF-ready — and who else benefits?

    For UK institutions, open access is also an assessment-eligibility issue. REF’s open-access policy, first applied in REF 2021 and carried forward into REF 2029 preparations, requires eligible journal articles and conference proceedings to be deposited in an institutional or subject repository within three months of acceptance to count towards the exercise. An output published open access but deposited late, or not deposited at all, can be ruled ineligible regardless of its quality — making the deposit step, not just the publishing decision, the compliance-critical action.

    Beyond assessment mechanics, open access serves the public-benefit case that funders increasingly require research to articulate: publicly funded findings reaching the clinicians, teachers, small businesses, patient groups and policymakers who funded them through taxation but who never held a university library card. This is the same accountability logic behind open metadata and contributor-transparency standards more broadly. CASRAI originated the CRediT contributor role taxonomy in 2014 as one such standard; it is now stewarded by NISO as ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022, and, like open access itself, exists to make the research record more usable to people beyond the original authorship team.

    Common questions about publishing open access

    Should you publish open access?

    In most cases, yes — and increasingly it is not discretionary. If your funder is part of cOAlition S, or is UKRI or Wellcome, open access is a condition of the grant. Even without a mandate, the visibility, compliance and public-benefit case generally outweighs the APC cost, particularly where a transformative agreement or green route removes that cost entirely.

    What are the benefits of open access publishing?

    The core benefits are wider readership, a documented (if contested) citation advantage, compliance with funder mandates, REF eligibility when deposited correctly, and public access for readers outside subscribing institutions. Authors publishing gold open access also typically retain copyright under a CC BY licence rather than assigning it to the publisher.

    Do authors pay for open access?

    Often, but not always. Gold open access is usually funded via an APC paid by the author’s institution or funder. Green open access (repository self-archiving) and diamond open access (no-fee journals) both let authors publish openly without paying an APC at all.

    What are the disadvantages of open access publishing?

    The main drawbacks are APC cost where no waiver or agreement applies, uneven journal-quality perceptions in some fields, and the administrative burden of tracking funder-specific licensing and deposit requirements. Predatory journals exploiting the APC model are a further, separate risk that authors should screen for via journal vetting tools.

    What this means for authors going forward

    The direction of travel is unambiguous: funder mandates are expanding, not retreating, and REF-style assessment exercises are tightening deposit compliance rather than relaxing it. Researchers, institutions and publishers who treat open access as a compliance and visibility strategy — choosing the route (gold, green or diamond) that matches their funder’s requirement and their budget — are better positioned than those who treat each publication decision in isolation. The cost objection remains real, but transparency frameworks and no-fee routes mean it is no longer the unanswerable objection it once was.