Most journals that responded to our survey are relatively small in terms of their annual output: 64.8% of the responding journals published up to 20 articles and 31.7% published 11–20 articles in 2023.
About 60% of the respondents rely on volunteer work fully or partially. More than half of the respondents who do have a dedicated unit responsible for publishing with employed staff (30.2%), still rely on volunteer work. Interestingly, a comparison with data relating to staff size shows that those with 2–5 team members (38 of 61) and those who have more than 30 team members (10 of 18) mostly rely on volunteer work, either fully or partially.
Institutional funding: 45.7% of the respondents have institutional funding provided either through permanent (24.6%) or periodically negotiated subsidies (21.1%) from the journal’s primary institution’s base.
The study outlines other sources of funding for Diamond OA journals that could be aspirational, e.g. donations, membership and partner support, training income or, (depressingly) personal money.
Sustainability: Almost equal numbers of respondents see their funding sources as stable or very stable (40.1%) and unstable or very unstable (39.2%). Most journals (71.4%) do not have an annual approved budget. The majority of the respondents (56.8%) have a journal sustainability plan. The study describes major financial sustainability challenges that also include global reach and visibility challenges, human resources and volunteer work challenges, administrative and organizational challenges, lack of strategic and sustainability planning skills, technical challenges and training needs.
Institutional in-kind support: The most common types of support from journal host organizations include general IT services (used by 52.3% respondents), service-specific IT services - publishing platforms, websites and other tools (45.7%), and facilities and premises (45.7%). The majority of journals (57.8%) rely on multiple forms of support provided by the host organization, while 7% report receiving no support.
Institutional incentives: Almost a quarter of the responding journals reported that their institutions provided incentives for journal personnel, e.g. additional points during evaluation/promotion, allowances, bonuses and honoraria, and reduction in regular work and working hours (including teaching load and institutional administrative work).
Collaborations: More than three quarters of the respondents (77.4%) would consider collaborating with other organizations, with the most popular areas for collaboration being training, support and/or advice on publishing policies and best practices, IT services, production, communications and editorial services.
Peer review and editorial boards: 96.7% of the respondents have some form of anonymous peer review. Double-anonymized peer review prevails among 83.9% of the respondents. 85.9% of the respondents have specific policies/guidelines/instructions on editorial quality (with definition of quality criteria, compliance, peer review process and editorial independence commitment) and research integrity/publication ethics. A vast majority of the surveyed journals have manageable editorial boards: 79.9% of respondents have up to 20 members in their editorial boards or other editorial bodies, with almost equal shares of those having up to ten board members (40.2%) and those with 11–20 members (39.7%). Approximately one quarter of the respondents (24.6%) have more than 50% of editorial board members from outside of the journal’s country and nearly half (48.7%) of the respondents have more than half of editorial board members from outside their institutions.
Technical service efficiency: Nearly half (49.2%) of the respondents rely solely on in-house infrastructure, almost one-third use outsourced services (31.2%), while about 10.1% combine various in-house and outsourced resources. For more than half of the respondents (56.3%), the publishing infrastructure supports all publishing workflows online (e.g. a journal’s online platform is used to submit manuscripts, review them and make them openly available after approval for publication). Public Knowledge Project’s open-source software Open Journal Systems (OJS) is by far the most popular publishing software used in the surveyed sample (68.3%). Almost three quarters (74.4%) of the respondents assign unique persistent identifiers. The most commonly used is Crossref DOI: more than half of the surveyed journals (56.8%) use Crossref DOI. ORCID is used by 25.6%.
Visibility and discoverability (including indexation): More than half or the respondents (53.3%) have said that their journals are indexed in African Journals Online (AJOL) and half of them are discoverable via Google Scholar. Those indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) account for nearly one third (32.7%), while the share of those indexed in the Web of Science and Scopus is considerably smaller – 10.1% and 13.1%, respectively. The most common challenges faced by journals when applying for indexing include meeting the technical criteria and membership fees (21.11%), followed by satisfying the metadata requirements (17.1%) and non-technical participation criteria (15.1%). Although insufficiently detailed, free-text responses provide more information about the challenging non-technical requirements: some journals are rejected because of their local, i.e. African focus, low citation rates in citation databases, authors coming from limited geographic areas and endogeny (too many papers authored by editorial board members or the reviewers working for the journal). A few respondents also mentioned the unresponsiveness of the indexing services, who have never provided feedback about their applications.
Overall challenges: Financial constraints are by far the most pressing challenge that affects three quarters (74.87%) of the respondents, while nearly half of them (45.2%) are struggling with the lack of human resources. Infrastructure-related and administrative challenges affect more than 30% of the respondents. Additional challenges include recruiting reviewers and the slow pace of their work, low submission rates, registration in journal databases, marketing, geographic diversity of authors, but also the fact that African journals are expected to adopt ethical principles and guidelines coming from the West, though these are not necessarily relevant in the African context.
Unmet funding needs: We grouped unmet funding needs in the topics of editorial quality challenges, administrative constraints, funding, collaboration and partnerships challenges, technology challenges, visibility and indexation challenges and interoperability challenges.
Support required: Human resources and technical support ensuring interoperability would make Diamond OA journals more sustainable and would strive to solve the visibility challenges. Advocacy for Diamond OA publishing and knowledge sharing and training support have also been requested by respondents.
This study also provides some information on institutional, national and continental platforms that host Diamond OA journals, their unmet funding needs and support required to make these platforms more sustainable. Platforms differ in size measured by the number of hosted journals (ten platforms host 1–5 journals; seven - 21–30 journals, one - 100–200 journals, while one hosts more than 500 journals) and the number of published articles (seven platforms have up to 1,000 articles, six - 1,000–5,000, two - 5,000–10,000, two - 10,000–50,000, and two - 100,000–500,000 articles). While nine platforms host only Diamond OA journals, others also host journals that charge author fees. Altogether, the surveyed platforms host 302 Diamond OA journals. Although the stability of funding sources also varies, the majority of the respondents see their funding sources as either stable or very stable. Platform host organizations provide facilities and premises, salaries, general and service-specific IT services. Most platforms rely on multiple types of support. Platforms are open to different types of collaborations on training, production services and communication services. Ten respondents have a platform sustainability plan. In most cases the platform's technical infrastructure is maintained and updated in-house. And in most cases (16) the platform supports all publishing workflows online. Financial and human resources are the main challenges faced.
Country reports provide more context to the diverse Diamond OA publishing landscape and describe the operations of major national and institutional Diamond OA publishing initiatives and Diamond OA journals, their challenges and funding needs. Recommendations are made in the areas of funding, training and capacity building, infrastructure and technology, advocacy and awareness raising, recognition and incentives, quality assurance, inclusivity, diversity and international collaboration. This online version does not include highlights from the country reports, which can be found in the full report (PDF).