Diamond open access initiatives

Diamond open access initiatives operate on a smaller scale compared to commercial players and their operating costs are usually a fraction of those associated with pay-to-publish open access. These initiatives rely on external funding to remain operational, with funds mostly coming from university libraries, academic institutions, research funders or government grants.

The UB provides financial support to several international diamond open access initiatives.

• Direct to Open (MIT Press) - Initiative aimed at realizing a sustainable transition to open access for books.
• Language Science Press - An open access scholarly publishing house specializing in linguistics books.
• Open Book Publishers - Not-for-profit and academic-led open access publisher of academic monographs. UG/UMCG staff and students can download e-books for free and get a discount on the purchase of print-on-demand titles from the OBP catalogue.
• Open Library of Humanities - Charitable organization dedicated to publishing open access scholarship with no APCs charged to the author.
• Opening the Future - A novel variant of the subscribe to open model (S2O) aimed at realizing a sustainable transition to open access for books.
• Punctum Books - Not-for-profit open-access book publisher in the humanities. Punctum Books does not charge Book Processing Charges (BPCs) and is funded via a library partnership subsidy model, subscriptions and individual donations.
• SCOAP 3 - Partnership of over 3,000 libraries, funding agencies and research centres in 44 countries and 3 intergovernmental organizations. Working with leading publishers, SCOAP 3 has converted key journals in the field of high-energy physics to open access at no cost for authors.
• SciPost - Scholarly-led, not-for-profit, open access publication portal focused on Physics. SciPost is now expanding also to the fields of Mathematics, Astronomy, Biology and Chemistry. Publishing in SciPost does not involve author-facing charges. SciPost is financially backed by national granting agencies, universities, foundations and individuals.