Gates Foundation Funds U.S. Diamond Open Access Initiative

Mapping U.S. Diamond Open Access Journals

The funded initiative, titled Mapping U.S. Diamond Open Access Journals, runs through February 2027. According to the Big Ten Academic Alliance, the project will build a foundational study to strengthen the domestic community of Diamond Open Access publishers. The work aligns with global efforts to establish sustainable, academy-owned publishing solutions that bypass traditional commercial barriers.

“We’re very excited about this opportunity to advance Diamond OA work in the US and deepen this very important work in alignment with the global effort to develop sustainable, academy-owned solutions for scholarly publishing,” said Maurice York, Vice President for Library Programs for the Big Ten Academic Alliance.

Diamond Open Access journals operate on a completely non-commercial basis. They remain free for authors to publish in and free for readers to access.

The Gates Foundation grant follows a broader strategic refresh of the foundation’s open access policies announced in March of this year. According to Chemical & Engineering News reporting, the foundation previously paid traditional gold open access publishing charges for grant recipients. The foundation discontinued support for APC fees to address persistent financial inequities in scholarly publishing.

In place of fee-based models, the Gates Foundation introduced policies requiring preprints and encouraging open preprint review. To support research integrity alongside this shift, the foundation partnered with F1000 to launch VeriXiv, a verified preprint platform designed to conduct twenty pre-publication ethics and integrity checks covering plagiarism, image manipulation, and data availability.

The broader movement toward non-commercial publishing models has gained international momentum. In July of this year, the Global Diamond Open Access Alliance was announced at a UNESCO event, following strategic steps taken by the open access group cOAlition S.

Project Goals and Expected Impact

Kate McCready, Program Director for Open Publishing at the Big Ten Academic Alliance, noted that the study will create greater alignment with the global Diamond OA community to solve persistent structural problems in scholarly communications.

By removing commercial barriers, project leaders aim to expand the reach of academic research and broaden the range of perspectives represented in the scholarly research landscape. The collaboration pools resources from Lyrasis, the Big Ten Academic Alliance’s Center for Library Programs, and the California Digital Library to support community-governed publishing infrastructure.