Behind the Scenes: How to Set Up a Diamond Open Access Journal?

In this post, we explore the practical steps and considerations involved in setting up a Diamond Open Access (OA) journal. From securing funding to obtaining ISSNs and DOIs, and building the necessary infrastructure: we provide a comprehensive guide for researchers and institutions interested in scholarly-led, freely accessible publishing. Whether you’re starting a new journal or looking to improve an existing one, this FAQ offers insights drawn from our real-world experience with JOTE.

Q1 - What is Open Access, and what does it mean?

Open Access (OA) is a movement that provides immediate, free, online access to scholarly research. It removes financial barriers (paywalls) or legal barriers and allows anyone to read, download, reuse, and share academic publications and data. This significantly increases knowledge dissemination and societal impact of scholarly research. In short, Open Access aims to transform scholarly communication from a restricted, pay-per-view system to a free, open, and collaborative model for the benefit of science and society.

However, this may not be the case for some types of Open Access. Open Access exists in several models. Green Open Access allows authors to deposit a version of their work in institutional or subject repositories, such as university libraries. Gold Open Access ensures articles are immediately available on the publisher’s website, but usually requires authors to pay article processing charges. Hybrid Open Access offers optional open access within subscription-based journals for a fee, while Diamond Open Access provides full open access without any costs for authors or readers, relying instead on institutional and community support.

Q2 - How can you fund Diamond Open Access?

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to making academic content freely available. If there were, we recognize many more people would do it. The truth of the matter is, funding Diamond OA journals requires ingenuity, persistence, and the willingness to sacrifice one’s own time in service of something you believe in. Funding can come from a variety of sources; if we were to name a few, the most notable would be local or international grants and subsidies, strategic partnerships with other entities, crowdfunding, and the reallocation of funds from non-publishing activities. Note that currently almost no structural grants or subsidies exist for Diamond OA journals, so another source of income is crucial. If you run your journal as a non-profit organization, you might be eligible for free services from big tech companies.

We recommend applying for some one-time grants and contacting universities and university libraries to get the initial funding needed to set up a Diamond OA journal, as well as making use of free services available to non-profits.

We are seeing an increase in ‘researcher-driven’ journals managed entirely by researchers as part of their university commitments. This could be a feasible path towards greater publishing sovereignty for universities. In addition, a lot of Diamond OA journals are run by scientific societies, which is another way to ensure scholarly-led publishing as well as procure funding through membership fees.

It is important to note that operating a Diamond OA journal requires significant personal time sacrifices. Many unpaid hours are required to manage and arrange open-access content. However, as briefly mentioned earlier, Open Access is a movement that is just beginning to gain recognition at the institutional level. It is our hope that in the future this work will bring more and more monetary and non-monetary value to academia and society.

It is our mission to ensure access for researchers, students, and the public, regardless of their institution’s budget.

Q3 - What is a DOI? How do I get one, and why might a DOI be useful?

A DOI (Digital Object Identifier) is a permanent, unique identifier assigned to scholarly works, for example, journal articles, datasets, books, and even blogs like this one. It ensures that research outputs can always be found and cited, even if their web locations (URL) change. Unlike a regular URL, DOIs remain accessible when a website changes its structure or moves content to a new server. DOIs are essential for proper scholarly attributions, long-term accessibility, and integration into academic indexing and citation systems.

To obtain a DOI, you need to join a DOI registration agency! The most popular agency is Crossref, but there are competitors such as DataCite. Once registering with them, you’ll then receive a unique DOI prefix that can be connected to the articles you publish through your publishing platform. You’ll also need to obtain an International Standard Serial Number (ISSN) to assign DOIs to your articles. For more information on this aspect, please see the FAQ on ISSNs. Whichever DOI registration agency you use will require that you submit metadata for each journal so that the article is reliably identified.

Q4 - What is an ISSN and how can you obtain an ISSN (in the Netherlands)?

An ISSN consists of eight digits: seven digits plus a check digit. The number sequence makes serial publications, such as newspapers, magazines, and series, available for sale and easy to find for retailers and consumers. Good news - obtaining an ISSN is a straightforward process in the Netherlands. You can request an ISSN from the ISSN Center Netherlands at https://www.kb.nl/uitgevers/issn-aanvragen. The ISSN Centre Netherlands is housed within the Royal Library of the Netherlands. You can apply for a free International Standard Serial Number (ISSN) with them. They recommend including the ISSN in the colophon of each issue of the publication.

This brings us to some of the benefits of an ISSN, such as the ISSN remaining the same for all issues within the series, as long as the title remains the same. It also helps you gain international visibility for your journal (other examples include a newspaper, magazine, or series). ISSNs also live and are collected in an international database, ISSN.org. This simplifies the processes for searching digital files and processing and exchanging data.

Q5 - How do you register a DOI?

The Journal has created a step-by-step guide for how to register a DOI. Please note that this guide is specific to our journal, and that we use PubPub as our publishing platform. The guide is as follows:

1. Navigate to https://manage.crossref.org/records and log in to your account
2. Navigate to ‘New record’, then select ‘Journal Article’ and continue
3. Fill in the first set of fields according to the following example. Pay close attention to these points:
   1. The DOI follows your proper format, and you are absolutely sure it is correct.
   2. You have named your PubPub page already, so the link is definite.
   3. Remove/draft from the end of the PubPub link.
4. Next, add contributors.
   1. These are only the listed authors.
   2. Make sure the ORCiD IDs are correct, and affiliations are complete.
5. For other fields:
   1. The published online date is the date on which you make the article available online
   2. Page and article number are optional, add funding only if applicable
   3. We do not use a similarity check URL, as license we use: [https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/]
6. If applicable, we enter the relationship between the article and other articles. These relationships are documented one-way on the supplement. For example, when we have a main article and a reflection, we add the relationship ‘IsSupplementTo’ the reflection article, and relate it to the DOI of the main article. When it is a commentary, we add the relationship to the commentary, relating to the main article. We do not add these relationships to the DOI of the main article.
7. Simply paste in the reference section from the article. The cleanest way to do this is by copying it from the finalized PubPub article.
8. You can now move to the next page, adding the journal data (ISSN, title, and abbreviation). We do not add a crossmark update policy.
9. On the next page, you can add the issue data if this is already known. If the article isn’t part of an issue yet or soon, this can be left blank.
10. And you’re done! Review your data, and submit when ready.

Q6 - What infrastructure is needed to create an OA journal?

To build your infrastructure, you will need a publishing platform in which the publication process unfolds. This is where authors submit papers, editors record decisions, peer reviewers submit reviews, and copyediting is posted. There are great open-source solutions available, for example Open Journal Systems. It is important not to rely on emails and Excel files, as it is incredibly difficult to scale without some sort of dedicated platform.

You should also use an archiving service like LOCKSS to ensure that your published material is available in the future. An ISSN and Crossref membership are essential to this as discussed in previous questions.

You will then need a website where your journal lives. On this website, you will publish all of your policies which also need to be designed in order to achieve academic or industry standards. You must also write up policies on your licenses, copyrights, OA approach, editorial guidelines, peer review standards, etc. While this can feel overwhelming, rest assured that in recent years, some excellent services have emerged to make the process of establishing an OA journal much easier. We recommend interested people to check out the OA Journals Toolkit.

Q7 - What is the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and how do you get into it?

The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is an independent, curated database of high-quality, peer-reviewed open-access journals. Being listed in DOAJ increases a journal’s visibility, credibility, and trustworthiness within scholarly communities. The DOAJ sets strict and diverse standards for transparency, licensing, and editorial quality, and only indexes open-access journals that meet these criteria. For simplicity, we have provided a list including all of the criteria at the end of this page.

In addition, we wish to highlight some elements that are required of such an OA journal: it must be open access, have an internationally accessible website, and transparently list a host of policies related to licensing, copyrighting, and quality controls. Journals must also have a proven history of publication, either by publishing at least 10 OA articles, or by publishing at least 1 edition a year for 1 year minimally. The standards demanded by DOAJ ensure that the indexed journals are of a high quality, lending prestige and reliability to smaller and newer publishers. Lastly, we recommend you check out the guidance page on their website here for more information.