OACIP Spotlight: Advancing Diamond Open Access Through Radical Interdependence - Lyrasis

"It can be easy to take diamond open access journals for granted precisely because these journals do not charge reader or author fees. Often, free-to-read and free-to-publish journals are celebrated for their principled commitments to removing barriers without acknowledgement of the need to find other ways to collectively shoulder the financial burden of these commitments. Even for diamond open access journals that partner with a library publisher, university press or learned society, it is a recurring challenge to articulate production costs and raise funds to sustain operations.

The Lyrasis Open Access Community Investment Program (OACIP) is intended to help make these costs more visible and enable libraries, academic departments, research centers and other organizations to collectively fund diamond open access journals. In this way, OACIP is intended to help strengthen the radical interdependence that is essential to so many open access initiatives. Like Lyrasis as a whole, OACIP has been designed to serve as connective tissue, with the ultimate aim of bringing together journals, their publishing partners, and a diverse community of supporters to advance more sustainable, principle-aligned publishing. 

To illustrate how radical interdependence sustains diamond open access publishing, Duke University Press Journals Director Rob Dilworth shares the following perspective on the renewing OACIP journal Environmental Humanities."