Diamond Open Access: The AMR Experiment | The Mathematical Intelligencer | Springer Nature Link
peter.suber's bookmarks 2026-03-21
Summary:
"Creating a “real” journal from scratch—even one that exists only online—requires solving many small but nontrivial problems: DOIs, ISSNs, editorial management systems, hosting, indexing, archiving, and long-term continuity. Each component is manageable in isolation, but assembling them all without an existing template is daunting enough to deter most editorial boards from trying.
In the fall of 2021, the fledgling Association for Mathematical ResearchFootnote1 (AMR) contacted me. Its founders were interested in whether the technologies mathematicians had grown accustomed to during the pandemic might change how mathematics is practiced and communicated. This provided a golden opportunity to attack the problem I had been thinking about for so long.
Over the next year, I interviewed about a hundred mathematicians around the world to understand whether this was a problem people genuinely wanted solved and what it would take to solve it. The result was the AMR’s first journal, the Journal of the Association for Mathematical Research (JAMR),Footnote2 and more importantly, the development of a replicable process. After three years of operation, JAMR is now indexed by Scopus and reviewed by MathSciNet, reflecting its status as a fully established research journal. With this process in place, a group of mathematicians can now come to the AMR with a proposal, and we can provide a turnkey diamond open access journal, as we have already done for five further journals.
This article explains what we have learned and what we have built. The hope is that others will join these efforts. But even for those who prefer to build independently, everything here is documented so that they can do so...."