The Platform Developers in a Federated Model of Diamond Open Access | the diamond papers

by John Willinsky and Juan Pablo Alperin, Public Knowledge Project

In their recent discussion paper “Towards a Federated Global Community of Diamond Open Access,” Pierre Mounier (OpenEdition, OPERAS) and Johan Rooryck (cOAlition S, Glossa) propose a means of organizing various Diamond Open Access initiatives inspired by a number of current factors shaping open access (OA) today. These include the long-standing Diamond OA publishing models that prevail in Latin America; the findings of the OA Diamond Journals Study (2021); the Action Plan for Diamond Open Access (2022); and growing political support from UNESCO, as well as actors in Europe, for Diamond OA.

Having endorsed the Action Plan for Diamond Open Access, as well as participating in key DOA events, PKP welcomes Mounier and Rooryck’s admirable leadership in proposing a Global Diamond Federation. Their efforts have given a name and global prominence to a model of OA that we have supported and have been deeply involved in for over two decades. Based on this experience, we’d like to contribute by articulating a place for an initiative like ours, the Public Knowledge Project (PKP), within a Global Diamond Federation (GDF) model. In doing so, we hope to provide additional considerations in bringing forward a federated approach to strengthening DOA on a global scale. We are raising PKP’s place in the GDF because we believe that we can help Mounier and Roorcyk (M&R) extend and strengthen their plans for Diamond OA by taking advantage of what we bring and what we’ve learned about this community. 

PKP “Should Have a Role”

It is not that we have been left out of the GDF plans. M&R write in their discussion paper of how the GDF’s Board “should have a role for organizations that serve Diamond OA as global infrastructures, e.g., SCOSS, DOAJ, and PKP.” As to that role, they go on to note that “representatives [of such organizations]… should be able to participate in the [GDF’s] special interest committees.” While the opportunity for such representation is appreciated – whether it involves setting metadata standards or deciding on licensing choices – we think much is to be gained by building on the role we and the other organizations are already playing in Diamond OA, much as M&R hold up the examples of Redalyc and others. 

For while M&R have set out to “propose to establish a global research infrastructure for Diamond Open Access… [that] will aim at providing resources and services to Diamond Open Access communities worldwide to strengthen their role in scholarly communication,” these three organizations – along with many others (including, among open source publishing platform developers, Coko, Janeway, Lodel, and PubPub) – have a claim to already offering resources and services to such communities on a global scale. 

Federated Model Alignment

With so many moving parts (read, organizations) in the “community-driven Diamond scholarly communication ecosystem,” as the Action Plan for Diamond Open Access aptly calls it, it will be no small feat to articulate for Diamond OA both the current and the desired global infrastructure. To assist, we’ll address in this paper the scope and nature of PKP’s place within the Diamond OA community, offer an example of what its active research program brings to the table, and suggest how our integration into the proposed GDF might be portrayed,[...]