Diamond Open Access (OA) is a community-led scholarly publishing model without financial barriers for authors or readers, making knowledge available as a global public good.
Diamond OA publishing promotes the values of knowledge as a global public good, community governance, equity for readers and authors, multilingualism, and bibliodiversity in the service of global, sustainable knowledge sharing. It is closely aligned with the principles of the Budapest Open Access Initiative (2002) and its 20th Anniversary recommendations (2022). It also resonates with the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science (2021) and the Action Plan for Diamond Open Access (2022). Increasingly, Diamond OA is being recognized as a fair and sustainable pathway for scholarly communication.
Diamond OA advances the vision of knowledge as a global public good, contributes to inclusive digital public goods, and supports the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development as well as the UN Global Digital Compact (2024). Both of these global frameworks highlight the need for equitable access to information, participatory digital ecosystems, and robust, community-driven infrastructures. In this sense, Diamond OA embodies community-led and community-owned models of scholarly communication that are equitable, multilingual, and firmly grounded in the public interest.
The Global Diamond OA study (2021) identified more than 29,000 Diamond OA journals, though only 13,856 are currently indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). This gap underscores challenges in infrastructure, visibility, and sustainable funding that require coordinated action. UNESCO’s Global Consultation on Diamond OA (2023–2024) reaffirmed widespread global support for a model grounded in equity, multilingualism, and public infrastructure.