Publishing open access without paying: diamond journals that are in Scopus

Most open access journals do not charge an article processing charge. That surprises people, because the ones that do are the ones with advertising budgets. By title count, the no-fee model is the majority. These journals are called diamond, or sometimes platinum, open access: free to read, free to publish, funded by a society, a university, a ministry, or a consortium of libraries that decided this was cheaper than the alternative.

Free is not a quality signal in either direction

The assumption that a journal without a fee must be a journal without standards does not survive contact with the list. Society journals that have run for decades, national journals that are the record of a discipline in its own language, university-press titles with editorial boards you would recognise: many charge nothing because someone already pays. Indexing in Scopus or Web of Science is the external check that matters, and a diamond journal that has it has passed the same review as the one charging three thousand dollars.

The reverse assumption is also wrong. A fee does not buy rigour. Some of the journals discontinued from Scopus for publication concerns charged full price.

The trade-offs, stated plainly

Diamond journals are often smaller. Their readership can be regional, their production slower, their platforms less polished, their language not English. For some work that is the right home: applied research with a regional audience, a first paper, work that belongs to a national conversation. For other work it is the wrong one, and no fee saving changes that. Scope fit and who will read the paper come first. The fee comes after.

How to find them

The Directory of Open Access Journals lets you filter for journals with no APC. Cross that with the Scopus source list of active titles and you have the set that is both free and indexed. The field pages on this site do that intersection for you, sorted by indexing and filtered to journals with continuous coverage.

What to check before you submit

Coverage in Scopus that runs to the present, not to a specific year. An editorial board whose members exist and are where the page says they are. A licence stated on the site, and CC BY if your funder requires it. DOIs on articles. A digital preservation arrangement, such as CLOCKSS, Portico or the PKP Preservation Network, because a journal funded by a ministry can lose its funding. A stated time to first decision. The DOAJ Seal, where a journal has it, covers most of this list at once.

One more thing

The model runs on labour nobody invoices for. If a diamond journal publishes your paper, review for it when asked. Cite it when the work deserves citing. If you are ever asked to join its board, consider saying yes. It is the only part of the system where the people who do the work are also the people who decide what it costs, and that is worth keeping.