Mainstreaming Diamond: Regional perspectives, Shared Futures
When:
—
Venue:
Online
Reflecting on this year’s Open Access Week theme, Who Owns Our Knowledge? the Open Library of Humanities has invited key voices from the diamond open access community to share what their respective organisations are doing to support and advance diamond OA.
Much has been said about “alternative models” for open access, particularly in the context of diamond OA. However, if we are to advance equity in scholarly publishing, the goal must go beyond offering alternatives; diamond open access must become the mainstream. While diamond OA is already well-established in certain regions, such as Latin America, it remains on the margins in much of the Global North, despite increasing advocacy and institutional support over recent years.
Democratising scholarly publishing means making it more accessible, inclusive, fair, and open, both for those who wish to publish and those who wish to read. And this transformation can only take place when diamond open access is no longer the exception, but the norm.
In this webinar, we will hear from leaders across the diamond OA community including publishers, infrastructure providers, and collectives who are driving the advancement of diamond open access. Confirmed participants include the Open Book Collective, Open Journals Collective, DOAJ, the Open Library of Humanities, Open Book Publishers and Opening the Future.
Confirmed speakers
Kira Hopkins is a Scholarly Publishing Outreach Officer at Copim Open Book Futures (Birkbeck College, University of London). In this capacity they implement Opening the Future, a Diamond OA revenue model for books. Alongside this, they are also assisting in the ongoing set up of the Open Journal Collective, a collective funding initiative for OA journals. They previously worked at Ubiquity Press, an open access publisher and publishing service provider, as a book editor, journal manager and partner account manager, and also work as a freelance book editor and copyeditor. They completed my PhD at the University of Oxford in 2019.
Joanna Ball is the Managing Director of the Directory of Open Access Journals, a community-led open infrastructure that curates a unique index of over 22,000 diverse open access journals from around the world. She joined DOAJ in 2022 after spending over 25 years in academic library management and leadership roles in the UK and Denmark.
Caroline Edwards is Professor of Contemporary Literature and Culture at Birkbeck, University of London and Executive Director of the Open Library of Humanities. She is author of Utopia and the Contemporary British Novel (Cambridge University Press, 2019), editor of The Cambridge Companion to British Utopian Literature and Culture since 1945 (Cambridge University Press, 2026) and co-editor of China Miéville: Critical Essays (Gylphi, 2015) and Maggie Gee: Critical Essays (Gylphi, 2015). Caroline is currently writing her second monograph, Hopeful Inhumanism: The Elemental Aesthetics of Ecocatastrophe.
Caroline is also widely known as an open access advocate, having co-founded the Open Library of Humanities (OLH) with Professor Martin Eve in 2013. She is currently leading a team of 12 staff at the OLH expanding the publisher’s portfolio of leading humanities journals and overseeing the growth of the OLH’s open-source publishing platform, Janeway. In 2025, Caroline launched the Open Journals Collective (OJC), an international collective of academics, librarians, and university-based publishers. The OJC will launch in 2026, with diamond OA journal portfolios in the arts, humanities and social sciences as well as science, technology, engineering, and maths.
Joe Deville is Managing Director of the Open Book Collective and Professor in Science and Technology Studies at Lancaster University. He is currently leading the Copim Open Book Futures project, which is developing a fairer, more sustainable and more diverse ecosystem for the production, funding, and preservation of Open Access books. He is also a co-founder and co-editor of Mattering Press, a Diamond Open Access book publisher and UK-registered charity, and a co-founder of ScholarLed, a consortium of scholar-led, not-for-profit, open access book publishers.
Dr. Rupert Gatti is a co-founder and director of Open Book Publishers (a Diamond OA publisher) and has been involved in the COPIM/OBF projects and the creation and development of several open and non-profit infrastructures supporting open access publishers, including Thoth Open Metadata, the Open Book Collective, the Open Journals Collective and the OPERAS Metrics Service. He is a Fellow in Economics at Trinity College, Cambridge.
The panel discussion will be chaired by Paula Clemente Vega, Community Outreach Manager at the Open Library of Humanities.
About OLH: The Open Library of Humanities (OLH) is an award-winning, academic-led publisher of 34+ diamond open access journals based at Birkbeck, University of London. With initial funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and subsequent support from Arcadia, a charitable fund, the OLH covers its costs by payments from an international library consortium rather than any author fee. This funding mechanism enables equitable open access in the humanities disciplines, with charges neither to readers nor authors.
Contact name: Paula Clemente Vega
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