A fresh wind is blowing through the world of open access: diamond open access instead of APCs, public infrastructures instead of transformative agreements. However, this welcome development for scholar-led publishing has one major gap.

How did this turnaround in the debate on open access come about? In recent years, considerable funds have been invested in making the transition to open access publishing attractive for scholarly publishers. However, criticism is growing in the scientific community and among open access experts. For in very few cases do transformative agreements result in the actual transformation of the participating journals to full open access (Farley et al., 2021; Ghamandi, 2020; Kiley, 2024; Nous, 2021). The DEAL agreements stabilise the market power of the publishing corporations; whether they lead to sustainable cost reductions remains an open question (Brembs et al., 2023a). In addition to the resulting frustration, there are increasing concerns about the digital sovereignty of science (Saunders, 2023). The fact that publishing corporations engage in “science tracking” and data trading (Altschaffel et al., 2024; Beetham et al., 2022; Clark, 2016; Holzer, 2022; Pooley, 2022; Siems, 2022, 2023) is becoming more explosive as a result of the increasing use of artificial intelligence in the publishing sector (Wood, 2024).

Key actors such as cOAlition S, the Council of the European Union, and several German science organisations have addressed this problem in recent statements and are focusing on an alternative approach to open access publishing, namely not-for-profit, scholar-led open access publishing, where, with the help of publicly funded open access infrastructures, scholarly publications are free to publish for authors and free to access for readers.

From the perspective of the scholar-led.network, this development is logical and welcome. As a network of scholars and scientists who collaboratively run their own publication projects independently of the traditional publishing industry, we are pleased that the models developed and tested in our communities are to be broadly funded and adapted in the future, as called for by us in the scholar-led.network manifesto (scholar-led.network, 2021). However, as experts in scholar-led, non-commercial publishing, we also see the gaps in the current discussion, which focuses primarily on technical questions regarding new publishing platforms for open access and calls for the dismantling of established peer review structures (Brembs et al., 2023b). These new approaches are often informed by an understanding of science that is widespread in quantitative research fields (STEM). However, the fact that scholarly publishing, especially in the humanities and social sciences, is a deeply socio-technical process is often overlooked.

In our view, the key weakness is that the tasks of scholarly editors are largely ignored. Just to remind you: Scholarly editors organise quality assurance. They decide on desk rejections in order to ensure quality and reduce the burden on the peer review system. They select reviewers and assess possible biases. They study the reviewers’ comments and support the authors in productively implementing their suggestions. And finally, they check whether contributions meet the quality criteria. Furthermore, they are committed to recruiting submissions, developing new formats, and advising early-career researchers. To perform these tasks, scholarly editors must be professionally competent and well connected.

In the case of scholar-led publication media beyond the realm of established, commercial publishers, further tasks must be performed: The activities of editors call for a comprehensive understanding of publishing infrastructures. They have to map the specific processes of their publication medium in digital editorial systems, recognise errors that occur, and support authors and reviewers in their work with the editorial system. Editors manage the budgets of diamond open access projects, raise funds, and coordinate cooperation with the infrastructure providers and external service providers. They conduct internal discussions about the approach to be taken in the case of retractions, and they decide themselves about publishing ethics standards. When doing so, they take into account the specific demands of their own discipline. From clarifying legal questions, through engaging with new, experimental forms of publishing in the digital age, to target-group-specific marketing, their remit includes tasks that commercial publishers organise on a division-of-labour basis. Scholar-led publishing projects carry out these tasks themselves because that breathes life into what we mean by “scholar-led”. Although the operators of technical open access infrastructures at libraries and new, non-commercial university presses provide support in this regard, inter alia in the form of guidelines and advice, they do not usually have the mandate or the resources to take care of all tasks that arise.

That this diverse range of tasks and the key role of editors are completely ignored in many of the current contributions to the debate is no coincidence. Good and fair editorial work can be outsourced or scaled like soft- and hardware only to a limited degree. Solutions must be found to organise this work under the current, increasingly precarious working conditions in academia, with fixed-term contracts and uncertain career progression. What is needed are academic freedoms within paid positions and incentive systems, so that it is worthwhile to become part of an editorial team and build competencies. That is the only way these competencies can also be passed on through networking, collaboration, and non-competitive exchange of knowledge, so that scholarly publishing can be further developed as a decentralised network – an approach that Adema and Moore (2021) described with the concept “scaling small”. This challenge is complex and will have to be responded to differently in different disciplines. However, those who call for scholar-led, non-profit open access publishing will have to face up to this question sooner or later because authors and reviewers do not interact only with infrastructures. They interact mainly with people.

There is currently a yawning gap that will not be filled by more and more science organisations and science policy actors stressing that funds should be shifted from acquisitions to the promotion of open access publishing infrastructures. It goes without saying that editorial systems, repositories, preprint archives, and basic infrastructure services such as Crossref and DataCite are of paramount importance for a scholar-led publishing system. By comparison, each of the 246–298 diamond open access journals that are based mainly in Germany may have less systemic character, as noted in the study “Kartierung und Beschreibung der Open-Access-Dienste in Deutschland” [Mapping and Describing Open Access Services in Germany] (Biela et al., 2024, p. 10). However, all of these journals together, and the people who operate them, are extremely systemically relevant – precisely because of their plurality. A “large-scale open access research publishing service” (Council of the European Union, 2023), as envisioned by the Council of the European Union, will not promote the necessary transformation unless active editorial collectives breathe life into it. And the redefinition of the role of editors suggested in the Plan-S proposal “Towards Responsible Publishing” (Stern et al., 2023) also appears to be too shortsighted. According to Principle 1, editors should cede decision-making power over the publication to the authors but should still organise the peer-review process. However, the proposal leaves open the question of what incentive schemes for scholarly editors are effective in that system.

From the point of view of the scholar-led.network, initiatives that reduce the problem to the provision of primarily technical infrastructure and that present one-size-fits-all solutions without taking sufficient account of disciplinary diversity are technocratic smokescreens. A system change will not work without qualified scholarly editors. Therefore, it is high time that their work was recognised and remunerated (see also Adema & Moore, 2024). This could be achieved, for example, by embedding it in a meaningful way in a fundamental reform of personnel structures in the German higher education system. Various proposals in this regard already exist, for example in the context of the #IchbinHanna-Initiative (see, e.g., Bahr, 2023). Unfortunately, however, there appears to be little inclination on the part of higher education policymakers at either federal state or federal level to undertake an urgently needed implementation.

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Header picture: Nic McPhee, Titel: 2008-01-26 (Editing a paper) - 14, CC BY-SA 2.0, Via Flickr https://flic.kr/p/4zGJzN