Guest Post — Diamond Open Access Needs Institutions, Not Heroes - The Scholarly Kitchen

"Diamond open access is often described as “community-led,” and implicitly sustained by goodwill. While that may be viable on a small scale, it is not viable at the scale suggested by current policy ambitions.

This raises a specific and more practical question: what would it mean to support community-led publishing as infrastructure, rather than as a collection of heroic individual efforts?...

If diamond open access is to function at scale, responsibility must move upstream.

For funders, this means treating community-led publishing as part of the research infrastructure they already support, rather than as a special case. The challenge is that such support is often time-limited, fragmented, or framed as experimental, rather than embedded as a durable part of the research system. Supporting platforms, preservation, and governance is not an optional add-on; it is a prerequisite for sustainability....

Libraries already play a central role here, often acting as hosts and stewards of diamond publishing initiatives. Strengthening that role — through stable funding, shared services, and institutional mandates — would do more to support diamond open access than any single technical fix....

If funders and institutions want diamond open access to move beyond admirable exceptions, they must design environments in which commitment is supported rather than taken for granted, and responsibility is shared rather than individualized. The question is not whether scholars are willing to contribute.

The question is whether institutions are willing to take ownership."