CASRAI Dictionary

Tag: open access

  • Diamond OA at the inflection: SciELO + Latindex + AmeliCA

    The Diamond OA conversation in 2026 is increasingly framed as a new direction for global scholarly publishing. From a Latin American perspective, this framing is roughly two decades late. SciELO, launched in Brazil in 1998, Latindex operating since 1995, Redalyc from 2003, and AmeliCA consolidating the regional infrastructure from 2018 — together these have operated a working Diamond OA ecosystem at regional scale for a quarter-century. This post looks at what the rest of the world is finally learning from this experience.

    The Latin American model

    The Latin American scholarly-communication model emerged from a different starting position than the Anglo-American one. Subscription publishing never dominated; commercial publisher penetration was limited; learned societies, universities, and national research councils operated journals as a public-good function. When the open-access conversation arrived in the 2000s, the question for Latin America was not how to flip a subscription system to OA but how to strengthen and federate the already-open infrastructure.

    SciELO emerged from FAPESP (the São Paulo research funder) and BIREME (the regional Pan American Health Organisation library) as a quality-controlled regional federation of journals with shared technical infrastructure, peer-review standards, and indexing. Latindex emerged from UNAM as a regional catalogue of scholarly journals with quality criteria. Redalyc emerged from the Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México as a full-text repository of Latin American journals. AmeliCA, launched in 2018, federated the three with explicit Diamond-OA positioning.

    The model is community-led, publicly funded, multilingual (Spanish, Portuguese, English, with growing Indigenous-language presence), and operates without article-processing charges. It indexes thousands of journals; the federated catalogue holds over a million articles; the technical infrastructure (XML production, DOI registration, COUNTER-compliant usage statistics) meets international standards.

    What worked, and why

    Three structural features explain the model’s durability.

    First, institutional anchoring. SciELO, Latindex, Redalyc, and AmeliCA are each hosted by major research institutions (FAPESP, UNAM, UAEM) with stable funding. The infrastructure is not project-grant-dependent; it is institutionally sustained. This is the contrast with the European Diamond OA conversation, which has struggled with project-grant precarity, and one of the lessons that the 2024 Plan Diamond declaration explicitly acknowledged.

    Second, quality through federation. The journal-level quality criteria (Latindex’s catalogue criteria, SciELO’s collection criteria) are operated as community-standards bodies, not as gatekeepers. A journal that meets the criteria is indexed; the criteria are public; appeals are possible. The federated catalogue is the quality signal; reputation is built through inclusion rather than through individual journal brand.

    Third, technical infrastructure shared at scale. The SciELO publishing infrastructure (XML production, web hosting, DOI registration) is offered as a service to participating journals. Journals do not each reinvent the technical layer. This reduces per-journal cost dramatically and is the model that the European Diamond OA capacity centre is now trying to replicate.

    What the global North is learning

    Three lessons are being absorbed, slowly.

    First, institutional funding is the sustainable model. APC-based gold OA reproduces commercial publishing’s economics; transformative agreements concentrate funding in well-resourced consortia; Diamond OA funded by institutions is the cost-effective alternative for the scholarly-communication public good. The OPERAS network in Europe, the cOAlition S 2024 strategic refresh, and the MIT Framework on principles for scholarly communication all explicitly endorse institutional funding for OA infrastructure.

    Second, bibliodiversity is a feature, not a bug. The Latin American model publishes in multiple languages, with regional editorial leadership, addressing regional research priorities. The dominant-language, Global-North-centred model that emerged from the subscription era is a historical accident, not a quality standard. The bibliodiversity framing from the Jussieu Call (2018), the Helsinki Initiative on Multilingualism in Scholarly Communication (2019), and the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science (2021) all draw on the Latin American experience.

    Third, regional infrastructure is legitimate research infrastructure. The bibliometric assessment patterns that treated SciELO and similar venues as second-tier indexing did so on assumptions (Web of Science and Scopus as global standards) that are themselves historically and geographically specific. The 2024 Helsinki Initiative implementation guidance and the CoARA reform agenda push assessment systems to recognise regional infrastructure on its own terms.

    What still needs work

    The Latin American model is not without its tensions. Three deserve mention.

    First, discoverability beyond the region. SciELO is indexed in major international databases; Latindex and AmeliCA less so. Articles published in regional Diamond OA venues are findable to those who know to look there; less findable to those defaulting to Web of Science or Scopus. The integration with Crossref and DataCite has improved this, but the discovery-default question remains.

    Second, discipline coverage. The Latin American Diamond OA ecosystem is stronger in humanities, social sciences, and applied health than in laboratory natural sciences and engineering, where researchers under bibliometric pressure publish externally. The model needs reinforcement in disciplines where it is currently thinner.

    Third, language equity within the region. Indigenous-language and Portuguese publication is growing but is still well behind Spanish. The 2024 AmeliCA strategic refresh prioritises multilingual expansion.

    What CASRAI recommends

    For Global North funders and institutions considering Diamond OA investment, the operating advice is to learn from the Latin American experience and to support, where possible, integration with the existing regional infrastructure rather than build parallel structures. The 2024 Plan Diamond signatory commitments include several explicit channels for funding regional infrastructure; the CASRAI Diamond OA funder guide walks through the options.

    For institutions evaluating their researchers’ contributions, the operating advice is to recognise publication in regional Diamond OA venues on the same terms as publication in international venues. This requires updating bibliometric tools to include the regional indices, updating promotion-and-tenure committees’ reading lists, and treating responsible assessment commitments seriously rather than performatively.

    For researchers, the operating advice is to publish where the work fits the venue, not where the bibliometric pressure points. A regional-language paper in a SciELO or Redalyc journal is a legitimate scholarly output and should be claimed and cited as such. The CASRAI bibliodiversity for authors guide discusses the practicalities.

    The longer arc

    The next ten years of scholarly publishing will be shaped by whether the global system absorbs the Latin American lessons or continues to treat them as regional exceptions. The signs are tentatively positive. cOAlition S’s strategic refresh, the OPERAS work in Europe, the institutional re-investment as transformative agreements expire — all point toward a less commercial, less APC-centred, more bibliodiverse system. The infrastructure to operate that system already exists in Latin America; the rest of the world is catching up.

    Related dictionary entries

  • Plan S and Diamond OA: where the open-access conversation is going

    Seven years after Plan S was announced and five years after its 2021 implementation deadline, the open-access conversation in 2026 looks meaningfully different from what its architects expected. The APC-plus-Read-and-Publish trajectory that dominated 2019-2023 is now competing with a much louder Diamond OA movement, with Subscribe-to-Open playing a quiet but important supporting role, and with sharp critique of the inequity that APC-based OA has reinforced. This post walks through the current state of the conversation and what we expect to see settle by 2027.

    Plan S compliance in 2026

    Plan S, the policy framework launched by cOAlition S in 2018, required that recipients of cOAlition S funder grants make their resulting publications immediately open access under a CC BY licence, via one of three routes: publication in a fully OA journal, publication in a hybrid journal under a transformative agreement, or self-archiving in a repository (the green route) without embargo and with retained rights.

    By 2026 the picture is mixed but not in the directions originally feared. Compliance among cOAlition S funder grantees is high (above 90% in the most recent monitoring report) but the modal route is no longer transformative agreements; it is rights-retention deposit. The Rights Retention Strategy, in which authors apply a CC BY licence to the accepted manuscript regardless of journal policy, has been quietly successful. By 2026 most major publishers have either explicitly accommodated RRS or stopped fighting it.

    The transformative-agreements track did not transform the publishing economy as cOAlition S had hoped. Read-and-Publish deals at the consortium and country level moved a lot of money from subscriptions to APCs but did not significantly change the underlying cost or the publisher consolidation. The funder-led price transparency requirement (Plan S has required publishers to disclose service-based pricing for some years now) has produced data but not yet pressure.

    The Diamond OA inflection

    The biggest shift in 2024-2025 was the move of significant funder attention from APC-based Gold OA to Diamond OA: journals that charge neither authors nor readers, funded instead by institutions, learned societies, libraries, and consortia. The 2023 Action Plan for Diamond Open Access from Science Europe, cOAlition S, OPERAS, and the French ANR, followed by the 2024 launch of the Diamond Open Access Capacity Centre, materially changed the funding landscape for community-led journals.

    By 2026 the visible result is a wave of new and renewed Diamond OA journals, particularly in the humanities and social sciences where APCs have always sat uncomfortably with the discipline’s economics. The OPERAS DOAB and DOAJ now flag Diamond OA journals explicitly. The 2024 Plan Diamond joint declaration committed signatory funders and institutions to channelling a defined fraction of OA-related spending into Diamond OA infrastructure.

    The structural challenge for Diamond OA remains sustainability. A journal funded by a single consortium is one budget cycle away from disappearing. The current direction is to pool funding across consortia and to professionalise the support layer (production, hosting, copy-editing, indexing) rather than reinventing it per journal.

    Subscribe-to-Open

    Subscribe-to-Open deserves more attention than it receives. The S2O model, pioneered by Annual Reviews and now adopted by EDP Sciences, Berghahn, and a growing list of others, asks the existing subscribers to continue paying their subscriptions; if enough do, the journal flips to open access for that year. If the threshold is not met, the journal stays subscription. The mechanism preserves a sustainable revenue model while flipping content to OA without APCs.

    S2O has been remarkably durable. Annual Reviews has hit the threshold every year of the programme; Berghahn flipped over thirty journals to S2O across humanities and social sciences. The model is constrained: it works for journals with a substantial existing institutional subscriber base, less well for new journals or for those without an institutional market. But where it fits, it works, and it sidesteps the APC-inequity problem entirely.

    Read-and-Publish agreements: the messy middle

    Read-and-Publish (also called Transformative Agreements) bundle subscription access and APC publishing into a single contract between a library consortium and a publisher. They peaked in deal-volume around 2022-2023 and have plateaued since.

    The criticisms have sharpened. R&P deals concentrated OA publishing capacity in well-resourced consortia (Germany’s Project DEAL, the UK’s JISC deals, the Dutch and Swedish consortia). Authors at unsupported institutions, particularly outside the wealthy world, faced full APCs while their better-resourced peers published OA “for free” under their consortium’s deal. The result was an inequity that the OA movement explicitly set out to remove and instead repackaged.

    cOAlition S’s commissioned review in 2023 concluded that transformative agreements had not produced the cost decrease that would justify their continued central role and recommended a transition away from them. By 2026 several major consortia are renegotiating R&P deals into a hybrid of capped APC pools, fee waivers for unaffiliated authors, and Diamond OA investments. The direction of travel is clear; the speed is slow.

    The equity reframing

    The phrase bibliodiversity entered the open-access conversation in 2018 via the Jussieu Call and has steadily gained traction since. It captures something the Plan S framing missed: openness alone does not address the dominance of English-language, Global-North-headquartered, APC-funded publishing. A genuinely equitable scholarly communication system needs multiple languages, multiple regional infrastructures, and multiple economic models, not just open access to the existing system.

    The 2024 UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science, and the 2024-2025 work by the cOAlition S successor strategy group on “equity in scholarly communication,” both center bibliodiversity. The practical translation is that funders are increasingly willing to count regional-language publication, Diamond OA, and community-led infrastructure as legitimate research outputs, not as second-tier venues.

    The push intersects with responsible assessment: as long as assessment privileges high-impact English-language journals, no amount of OA policy will rebalance global publishing. DORA, CoARA, and the Hong Kong Principles all argue for that broader reform, but the mechanics of changing institutional promotion and tenure committees lag the policy by years.

    Where the global South is going

    SciELO (Latin America), AJOL (Africa), J-STAGE (Japan), and similar regional infrastructures are the underacknowledged backbone of global Diamond OA. They have operated for decades on a model that flagship Plan S signatories are belatedly endorsing. The 2024-2025 conversation has shifted from “how do we bring Global South authors to Global North journals” to “how do we recognise and resource the regional infrastructures that already publish them.” cOAlition S has begun direct funding agreements with several regional infrastructures.

    The peer-review and quality-assurance question that historically dogged regional infrastructures has not gone away, but it has changed shape. AJOL and SciELO have invested heavily in DOAJ-aligned editorial practice; the data show their journals’ peer-review rigour comparable to similarly-scoped Global North journals. The reputational gap that remains is mostly a function of bibliometric assessment patterns, not editorial quality.

    What’s coming in 2026-2027

    Three things to watch. First, the second wave of Plan S: cOAlition S has signalled that its next-phase strategy (drafted through 2025, expected in mid-2026) will pivot toward Diamond OA, equity, and the de-prioritisation of transformative agreements. Second, institutional re-investment: as R&P deals expire, libraries are increasingly redirecting their formerly subscription budgets into open infrastructure (Diamond OA, preprint servers, institutional repositories). The MIT Framework and similar institutional principles are influential here. Third, cross-funder coordination: the gap between cOAlition S funders and the major North American funders (NIH, NSF, the Tri-Agencies in Canada) has narrowed; OSTP’s 2022 memo and its 2026 implementation are pushing the US system in a similar direction, though through different mechanisms.

    For authors, the practical advice is unchanged: deposit your accepted manuscript in your institutional repository under a CC BY licence using the rights-retention model; choose Diamond OA where it exists and serves your community; choose Gold OA in journals with transparent pricing where it does not; resist the assumption that the journal-impact-factor ladder is the path to a sustainable career.

    Related dictionary entries

    References

    cOAlition S, Plan S Principles and Implementation Guidance (2018, revised 2020). Science Europe, cOAlition S, OPERAS, ANR, Action Plan for Diamond Open Access (2023). Jussieu Call for Open Science and Bibliodiversity (2018). UNESCO, Recommendation on Open Science (2021, with 2024 implementation report). Suber, Open Access (MIT Press, revised 2024).