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Diamond open-access journals are too reliant on unpaid academic labour and the goodwill of university libraries to remain financially sustainable, according to the founding editor of a well-regarded social science journal who has blamed the switch to the free-to-read, free-to-publish model for her publication¡¯s demise.

Announcing her decision to wind up?Work Organisation, Labour and Globalisation, which has been published twice a year since 2006, Ursula Huws said the ¡°well-meaning but naive¡± decision by her publisher, Pluto Journals, to move the journal to diamond open access (DOA) in 2021 had removed crucial sales and subscription income?that covered editorial costs and labour.

¡°I cannot continue to invest some 2,000 hours of unpaid work in the journal each year without some hope of reimbursement,¡± explains Huws in an open letter signalling her intention to close the journal on changing labour practices at the end of 2026.

¡°The utopian idea behind diamond open access is that librarians will be prepared, voluntarily, to pay fees for their users to access articles that are freely available. Unfortunately, at a time when universities are cutting their budgets, the numbers willing and able to do so are likely to be infinitesimal,¡± explains Huws.

¡°The hard-won base of subscribers that we put together so laboriously during the first decade of our work, like Humpty Dumpty, once broken cannot be put back together again.¡±

With academic publishing now dominated by ¡°large profit-making global publishers, whose reputations for rapacity rub off onto other, smaller, publishers¡±, it is increasingly difficult for smaller publishers to persuade libraries to financially support their titles, Huws adds.

Speaking to?Times Higher Education, Huws, a former professor of employment and globalisation at the 51¹ú²úÊÓƵ of Hertfordshire, explained that the journal¡¯s transition to?DOA had been facilitated by a grant but such interim funding could not be relied on in the long term.

¡°People pushing for DOA seem to come from a non-governmental organisation background ¨C they assume that ¡®because we are doing good, someone will pay for it¡¯,¡± said Huws, who argued that the insistence on not collecting article processing charges (APCs) or submission fees was misguided.

¡°We¡¯ve had authors saying they are able to pay APCs ¨C with their universities budgeting for this ¨C but the diamond model means you can¡¯t accept this income,¡± she said, adding: ¡°It¡¯s ridiculous to throw out scarce income in this way.¡± Pluto Journals, an independent press focused on the social sciences, was contacted for comment by?THE.

Diamond journals have been championed in recent times as a low-cost alternative to commercial publishing dominated by the ¡°Big Five¡± companies, with the European Commission throwing?its weight behind this model as part of its relaunched Plan S strategy.

However, with budgets so tight, diamond journals are only able to offer small bursaries rather than sums that properly compensated publications for editorial costs, including staff, software and fees, said Huws.

¡°The whole model is based on gift labour and publishers seem to enter a world reminiscent of Jane Austen where terms like ¡®small stipends¡¯ are used,¡± she said.

Huws said she had received offers from other larger publishers keen to acquire the journal but only on condition that it massively increase the volume of articles published and the frequency of publication. Acceding to these requests would endanger the quality of output and the ability to commit time and resources to revision and editing, she said.

¡°I would rather see it close down than it become formulaic and superficial,¡± explained Huws, who said she was dismayed by the falling editorial standards in many journals?that increasingly relied on untrained editorial staff in the Global South, automated requests for reviewers and submissions and the use of artificial intelligence (AI) for review purposes.

¡°Academics are now being too often contacted by a robot asking if they want to review a paper which itself has been written with extensive help from AI ¨C which no one will read in any case,¡± said Huws. ¡°The whole sector is collapsing in this way.

¡°Our ethos was that some papers might be written in bad English but you can turn these into great papers with editorial care and assistance. Unfortunately there is only a token recognition of the costs of doing this.¡±

jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com