Towards a New Era of Journal Publishing: The Coalition of Diamond

Since the early 1990s, the term Open Access has been synonymous with the principle of publishing the scientific results of taxpayer-funded research at low cost and making them available to the public free of charge. In response to increasing academic demand for at least some degree of unrestricted access to research results, this idea of Open Access has been taken up by commercial publishers and harshly altered to accommodate finance models that allow global access to scien-tific and scholarly articles on payment of a publication fee. This has exacerbated the financial burden on universities with a strong publishing portfolio while the annual balance sheet for publishing houses remains unaffected. The new charging models merely transfer the costs incurred from the end of the publication process to the start. A sustainable university-internal, regional or even international reallocation of funds to finance these commercial Open Access models has so far proved unrealistic. In response to these developments, we would like to present The Coalition for Diamond Open Ac-cess Publishing (COAP), an international support network for the publication of Diamond Open Ac-cess Journals at universities. As a cooperation of scientists, academic associations and libraries, COAP creates the necessary technical and organizational conditions, infrastructure and standards for the publication of competitive diamond open access articles. While there are already numerous initiatives pursuing the goal of low-cost publishing, many of these projects are limited by region or subject specific. Some set methodological priorities, others are developing models to increase the efficiency of Open Access publications. All of these show how extensive, but also disparate the interest in restructuring the Open Access market is. What is lacking is a concentrated networking of the respective service providers in the Diamond Open Access sector with scientists and their representatives, and of the service providers in the Open Access sector with each other. It is, however, only in this combination that a sustainable restructuring of the publication landscape would be possible. This is where COAP comes into play. Providing a decentralized publication infrastructure supported by a collaborative network of academic institutions and scientists, COAP aims to shape a new era of independent scholar-led publishing. We would be pleased to present COAP to a broad international audience at the 42nd IATUL Conference