Canada's Quiet Superpower: Diamond Open Access at Scale

Why This Matters in Canada
In a country where research spans two official languages, English and French, large urban universities and small regional campuses, and disciplines from Arctic ecology to Indigenous studies, paying to publish isn't an equal-opportunity proposition.

Canada's most distinctive Open Access (OA) story is not another big “read-and-publish” deal; it's the rise of Diamond OA, where neither authors nor readers pay, and costs are covered collectively by libraries and public funders.

In practice, this approach has kept humanities and social sciences (HSS) journals, often smaller, bilingual, and scholar-led; both sustainable and open. It also aligns with Canada’s equity goals: waiving article processing charges (APCs) removes a barrier for early-career researchers, community partners, and authors in less-funded disciplines.

What’s Happening on the Ground
The backbone is Coalition Publica, a partnership between Érudit (the Montréal platform that disseminates hundreds of Canadian HSS journals) and the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) at Simon Fraser University (developers of Open Journal Systems (OJS)). Coalition Publica provides a coordinated pathway for journals to publish without APCs while maintaining professional standards in editorial workflows, indexing, and digital preservation.

The model is reinforced by the Partnership for Open Access (POA), through which Canadian university libraries make multi-year contributions that directly sustain scholar-led journals. Rather than funding openness one article at a time, libraries invest in the journals themselves, stabilizing operations and enabling immediate OA.

Software infrastructure is a big part of the story. OJS, a Canadian open-source platform, powers tens of thousands of journals globally. Its ubiquity lowers technical and financial barriers, especially for small titles that might otherwise struggle with submissions, peer review, or compliance. In other words, Canada didn’t just build a funding model; it built the infrastructure that allows community journals to scale sustainably.

Policy also plays a crucial role. The Tri-Agency Open Access Policy on Publications mandates that federally funded articles be made openly available within 12 months, through either a publisher or repository. Québec’s Fonds de recherche du Québec (FRQ) has gone further by aligning with more ambitious openness principles. These policies don’t enforce a single OA route, but they nudge institutions and publishers toward models, like Diamond, that promote equity and compliance simultaneously.

Importantly, Canada has not abandoned hybrid strategies. The Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN) continues to negotiate selective transformative agreements with commercial publishers (e.g., SAGE, Elsevier) to waive or discount APCs for affiliated authors. In Canada’s mixed OA ecosystem, those deals complement, not compete with the Diamond OA model, creating a pragmatic blend: community-funded Diamond OA for scholar-led portfolios and negotiated routes for commercial ones.

Why the Model Holds—Despite Headwinds
No model is frictionless. Diamond OA relies on steady library funding, robust governance for scholar-led journals, and ongoing platform maintenance. Yet Canada’s bilingual landscape, strong library consortia, and dense network of HSS journals make the collective-action model economically viable.

Coalition Publica’s integration of Érudit (for dissemination) with OJS (for publishing workflows) reduces per-journal overheads and channels support where it matters most. The model also supports Canada’s cultural policy objectives: it protects journals that publish in French, cover regional and community issues, or serve non-commercial audiences where APCs would be exclusionary.

In short, Diamond OA in Canada is not just a finance framework; it’s a pluralism mechanism that keeps diverse scholarly voices visible and valued.

Challenges remain. Library budgets face tightening, journal teams require training and succession planning, and infrastructure must evolve to support data linking, persistent identifiers, and machine-readable rights. Yet, the Canadian ecosystem has already demonstrated remarkable adaptability through consortial coordination, shared technical development, and transparent cost models.

What Others Can Learn from Canada’s Experience

“Build the plumbing, not just the policy.”

Build the plumbing first.

Open infrastructure like OJS is a prerequisite for scalable community publishing. It allows small journals to operate professionally and globally without commercialization. Countries that invest in open-source tools and the people who maintain them gain leverage for equitable OA.

Fund in the middle, not just the ends.

Instead of paying only at submission (APCs) or at consumption (subscriptions), Canada’s POA shows the power of funding the journals themselves. This approach spreads financial risk, stabilizes operations, and ensures an APC-free author experience.

Let policy set the floor, community set the bar.

National mandates ensure steady movement towards openness while community programs like Coalition Publica raise the ambition, from “eventual OA” to immediate, no-fee OA for both readers and authors, particularly in fields underserved by commercial publishers.

A Quiet but Radical Blueprint
Canada’s Diamond OA ecosystem may not make headlines like billion-dollar, “read-and-publish” bundles. But as high-impact, low-cost infrastructure that keeps scholarship open without shifting costs onto researchers, it offers a quietly radical blueprint for the global research community.

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Disclaimer

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of their affiliated institutions, the Asian Council of Science Editors (ACSE), or the Editor’s Café editorial team.