the dual goals of offering libraries an exit ramp from Transformative Agreements and providing great support and sustain- ability for Diamond Open Access Pub- lishing. The vision for OJC was created in part by Chris Banks, former Director of Library Services at Imperial College London, asserting that the sector needs “a ‘Big Deal’ for diamond open access”, with the size and scale of commercial big deals, but based on a different ethos and business model and with a lower cost. In the words of OJC’s Executive Director, Professor Caroline Edwards, “another publishing world is possible – it’s within our gift to build it collectively”. OJC works by fundraising through library memberships, with that money being redistributed as grant funding to journals in the collection according to set criteria. There are already many excellent diamond OA publishers, and we are not seeking to replicate what they already do. The Collective exists to support and ‘super charge’ existing diamond publish- ing, to bring it into the mainstream as a large-scale and strategic challenge to the model of the large multinational com- mercial publishers.
Funding is provided as a top-up model to complement the income already available to journals and aims to support their operations, build sustainability and tackle the prevalence of unpaid activities within academic publishing. Libraries can be confident that by supporting OJC they will not inadvertently duplicate funding or cause ‘double dipping’.
Culture component
A key part of the Open Journals Collec- tive is not just the alternative publishing model and the lower costs for libraries. We’re also building a culture of collabora- tion and partnership within the Collective, that is in stark contrast to the transaction- al vendor/customer relationship in the major commercial world. Indeed, in our experience, it is not uncommon to have no contact from a vendor until a year has passed and it’s time to pay another invoice. We’ve set ourselves the task of building a culture and an operating model that is the opposite of that. Governance of the organisation consists of a series of working groups which feed into three Boards: Publisher, Academic and Library. The Library Board ensures that library members are directly involved in how their investment is spent. Board members help to set our strategic direction and hold our Executive team to account. Crucially, if they think we are making the wrong decision about some- thing at OJC, they are able to tell us, face to face on a video call! No one in the OJC community is a mere customer, they are our colleagues and collaborators. OJC was built by librarians, academics and small nonprofit publishers, and we
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models being too powerful to change. This sense of powerlessness has been compounded by Transformative Agree- ments failing to deliver any genuine transformation, and recent opportunities for large scale sector walkaways from negotiations with big publishers in the UK having failed to materialise. Yet the OJC demonstrates that we
Sally Bell, Scotland’s Library & Information Professional of the Year for 2026 award from CILIP in Scotland.
are run by and for these groups, with no shareholders and no larger parent organisation.
Change is possible
Initiatives like the OJC also send a pow- erful message about the ability to effect change. They demonstrate that librarians and others within research, academic publishing and libraries, do have agency and have viable routes to build alterna- tives. There can sometimes be a sense of despondency, of the existing publishing
don’t have to feel powerless. Just as in popular music, small, independent record labels have challenged the dom- inance of the major record labels and driven innovation, the early success of OJC shows what can happen when those involved in the sector decide to build an alternative themselves at a grassroots level, rather than waiting for the major publishing organisations to change. The initial response to OJC from librar- ies has been overwhelmingly positive, and we now have 47 library members globally, covering the UK, USA, the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium and Australia. We’ve been genuinely struck by the desire of libraries to join, especially in challeng- ing budgetary circumstances. We’ve raised £1,974,355 for the current year, representing 74 per cent of our income target. And we’ve recently secured a major award of $711,900 from the Gates Foundation, that will enable us to scale our operations in 2027 and 2028. But we need more members to grow OJC into a large-scale alternative to com- mercial big deals. If you are interested in joining us or would like to know more, please visit
www.openjournalscollective.org or email
info@openjournalscollective.org. BG
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