The theme of International Open Access Week 2026, The Cost of Knowledge, asks us to consider the true costs of creating and sharing knowledge, and invites us to rethink – collectively – who pays for and supports open access.
The Lyrasis Open Access Community Development Program (OACIP) is an example of how we can do things differently. OACIP is an innovative new method for funding open access journals with direct support from their communities.
We spoke with Sharla Lair, Lead Strategist for Open Scholarship at Lyrasis and Melissa Seelye, OACIP Community Engagement Strategist, to discuss OACIP and community-funded open access.
What is OACIP?
The Lyrasis Open Access Community Investment Program (OACIP) is a community-driven framework for sustaining diamond open access journals. Launched in 2020, OACIP brings together libraries, academic departments, institutions, research centres, museums, funders and other stakeholders to support journals that provide free access to readers and free publication for authors.
OACIP provides information about each participating journal, including its mission, community, operations, publishing practices and funding needs, so that potential supporters can make informed decisions about where to direct their resources. The programme facilitates funding for individual journals as well as across the OACIP portfolio.
Importantly, OACIP does not assume that every institution should support every journal. Each journal serves a particular community, and institutions can consider these communities when deciding where to direct their resources. At the same time, looking across the portfolio makes it possible to see where funding gaps exist, allowing other institutions to step in.
In this way, OACIP creates a framework for distributed investment. It gives institutions a way to act as stewards of their resources while contributing to the sustainability of the particular scholarly communities they serve.
Why did you decide to build a community funding framework?
We were influenced by the work of , who have argued that the value of a journal is not simply the papers it publishes, but the knowledge community it creates and sustains. They have encouraged us to think about journals as forms of social production, where authors, readers, editors, reviewers and others participate in creating a community around a shared area of knowledge.
That perspective led us to ask a different question: If a journal serves a particular community, could that community have a role in sustaining it?
OACIP is an attempt to create a framework for doing that. Each journal has a different community, and we draw from journals’ existing connections with institutions and other organisations to develop outreach strategies. In this way, we enable supporters to make choices based on the communities they serve and the journals relevant to those communities.
The goal is not to create a single funding community for diamond open access. It is to help individual journals build sustainable funding communities around the knowledge communities with whom they interact.
When we talk about the ‘cost’ of open access, what costs are we actually talking about?
From the perspective of OACIP, we are focused on helping diamond open access journals offset their operational costs. Like any other academic journal, OACIP journals have fixed costs such as hosting or platform fees and software subscriptions as well as fees related to best practices, including DOI registrations and digital archiving. Those are the costs that tend to be the easiest to quantify.
We also encourage participating journals to consider their labour costs when applying to OACIP. These costs may include copyediting, proofreading, translation, production and layout work, project management, and marketing and outreach in support of the journal. For diamond open access journals published by a university press or learned society press, much of this work tends to be performed by staff associated with that organisation. Costs can be estimated for a particular journal, but there is variability based on the number of submissions received and publication output.
In the case of diamond open access journals that operate more independently, they have often been mostly or entirely reliant on the voluntary labour of scholars. We have found that by seeking modest labour compensation through OACIP, such journals can make great strides in streamlining their operations.
Looking past the fact that authors don’t have to pay to publish, what are the other benefits of diamond open access?
When a journal commits to having no financial barriers to readers and authors, this often has a transformative effect on how and what the journal publishes. It becomes much easier to centre inclusivity in a journal’s operations when editors are not limited to interacting with those who can pay to engage. We have observed this with OACIP journals that evolved from commercially published journals with paywalls or author fees, as the editors have intentionally sought to diversify their editorial boards and author communities. For example, this may take the form of increasing participation from underrepresented geographical regions and providing mentorship and robust copyediting support to authors.
We have also worked with journals that have been diamond open access since they got started, and in these cases, we have seen wonderful partnerships take shape. Such journals frequently publish and amplify the work of subject experts outside the academy, including activists, artists, journalists, healthcare workers and other practitioners. Another journal in the OACIP portfolio has prioritised publication opportunities for undergraduate students, and the development of open access course materials.
By broadening the scope of who can publish, these journals are also continually re-envisaging what scholarly communication is and can be.
What does ‘equity’ look like in practice when it comes to funding scholarly publishing?
Equity in funding scholarly publishing means looking beyond who can read or publish for free. It also means asking who bears the costs, whose labour is recognised, who has a voice in decisions, and who benefits from the resources being sustained.
That includes making the often invisible work of scholarly communication visible and adequately supported. Editors, reviewers, copyeditors, production staff and others contribute essential labour, much of it historically undercompensated or performed as a service.
It also means recognising that institutions have different capacities to contribute. A community funding model should not assume that every institution can participate in the same way or that those with greater financial resources should automatically have greater influence. Clear information about costs, needs and contributions, along with flexible participation and meaningful community governance are therefore important.
For OACIP, equity means creating conditions in which the communities that create and rely on scholarly resources can participate in sustaining them, while recognising that participation, contribution and decision making will look different across communities. The goal is not simply to remove a price from publishing, but to build a funding system that more fairly recognises the people, institutions and relationships that make scholarly communication possible.
How does OACIP change the relationship between journals and the communities that rely on them?
OACIP helps make the people behind a journal more visible. In conversations about scholarly publishing, librarians and publishers often talk about ‘the scholars’ or ‘the researchers’ as the people we are ultimately serving, yet those people are not always included in conversations about how publishing should work or what it takes to sustain a journal.
A journal is a community, and that community is made up of people: editors, reviewers, authors, readers and often practitioners and others who contribute to and rely on the journal. OACIP creates an opportunity to bring those people and their work into the conversation about sustainability.
When a journal seeks support through OACIP, it has to articulate who its community is, what role the journal plays in that community, and what resources are needed to sustain the work. Institutions can then make funding decisions based on the communities they serve rather than treating journals simply as units of content.
That makes the relationship more reciprocal. Instead of institutions simply paying for access or publishing, they have an opportunity to understand and invest in the people, relationships and work that make a journal valuable to their communities.
Why did you select the Global Social Challenges Journal (GSCJ) for the programme?
We view the GSCJ as a journal that epitomises principle-aligned publishing, which is one of OACIP’s principles. For example, we have been inspired by how the GSCJ maps articles to United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which BUP Senior Development Editor Katie Foxall described in one of our 2026 LyrOpen Fair sessions. Many journals based in the United States are not yet engaging with the SDGs, and we hope that other journals will follow the GSCJ’s lead.
Additionally, we value the journal’s work to maintain a diverse author community, which enables more inclusive approaches to research on pressing global challenges. We see this commitment in BUP’s Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Statement for Journals as well as in the GSCJ’s emphasis on research that addresses intersectional themes with real-world impact. Breaking through disciplinary, institutional, geographic and other constraints in these ways illustrates the transformative potential of diamond open access publications.
We also know how challenging it can be to sustain journals, like the GSCJ, that seek to broaden their author communities beyond scholars affiliated with well-funded institutions in the Global North. It is a privilege to be able to partner with BUP to raise awareness of the need for community investment in such journals.
What are the biggest challenges for a community-funded OA model, and who can help overcome them?
One of the biggest challenges for OACIP has been developing successful strategies for communicating the value of investing in diamond open access. While open access research is widely appreciated as a common good, it can be difficult to make the case for an organisation to invest in a journal that does not charge reader or author fees. This is especially true for academic libraries, which are facing increasing pressure to demonstrate the local return on their institutional funding investments.
We celebrate the transformative potential of diamond open access and argue that OACIP journals contribute to the evolution of a more equitable scholarly communication ecosystem. Still, many of our supporters must be able to articulate how their investment will benefit faculty and students at their particular institution. Often the answers to this question may not fit neatly into existing evaluation frameworks that have been developed in response to subscription packages and read-and-publish agreements.
To overcome these challenges, we have found faculty editors to be one of our most effective allies. When scholars inform their institutions that a diamond open access journal matters to them, they bridge the disconnect between theory and practice that so often exists in conversations about open access.
Could community funding become a sustainable alternative to commercial OA models, and what would need to change for that to happen?
Community funding is already a viable and sustainable model. Programmes such as SCOAP3 and the Open Library of Humanities have demonstrated for more than a decade that institutions can collectively sustain scholarly resources through community investment. The question is less whether the model works than whether we are willing to recognise what it makes possible.
The most important difference is not simply who receives the money, but the social architecture of the funding model. Commercial OA models, such as those that use Article Processing Charges, organise funding around individual articles, authors or institutions and their transactions with publishers. Community funding can instead organise investment around the broader network of relationships that sustains a resource.
We have spent considerable effort asking how to make scholarly publishing more open, affordable and sustainable. We have spent less time asking what kinds of relationships our funding models create among the people and institutions that make scholarly communication possible.
For community funding to become more established, it needs to become part of the normal infrastructure of scholarly communication rather than an exceptional alternative. That means sustained participation, shared understanding of costs and needs, and governance structures that give participating communities a meaningful role in shaping what they collectively support.
Sharla Lair is the Lead Strategist for Open Scholarship at Lyrasis, where she oversees initiatives to support sustainable, community-driven funding models for open journals, books, and infrastructure. She also contributes to several advisory boards within the global open access community.
Melissa Seelye is the OACIP Community Engagement Strategist at Lyrasis where she works to broaden support for programme.
You can learn more about the Open Access Community Development Programme and how to pledge support for Global Social Challenges Journal on the Lyraris Website.
Global Social Challenges Journal is available on Bristol University Press Digital.
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