Trump’s war on knowledge requires re-inventing academic publishing as diamond open access – Walled Culture

"All these moves to restrict access to knowledge make re-inventing academic publishing even more urgent. The big publishers will doubtless implement any demands that Trump makes in an effort to preserve their healthy profits. Those could include refusing to publish scientists that have fallen foul of the Trump administration by daring to raise objections to the new approach, or by pointing out the harm it will cause.

Smaller open access publishers might step in and provide a global platform for those who have been banned in this way. However, they too are subject to commercial pressures, and may not want to take on the Trump administration. This underlines once more the importance of diamond open access, where no charge is made either to the researchers writing the papers, or to readers. Because of the underlying business model, diamond open access journals tend to be run on a shoestring, supported by grants from independent foundations. That makes them largely immune to even Donald Trump at his most vindictive. As the US war on knowledge sharpens, we can probably expect to see diamond open access titles emerge as the samizdats of the digital age."