How much money do government agencies spend yearly on diamond open access?

Question

I read on blog.orvium.io:

Diamond Open Access is an open-access publishing model where scholarly articles are made freely available to readers without cost or barrier. In the Diamond Open Access model, the entire publishing process, from peer review to publication, is funded by non-profit organizations, research institutions, or government agencies rather than by charging fees to authors or readers.

This made me wonder: how much money do government agencies spend yearly on diamond open access? If too broad, I'm mostly interested in the USA.

Answer 1

I don't have a satisfying number answer. I think you would have to search for an compile this info yourself. You might consider looking at DOAJ or cOAlition S. There was a report written up on this a while ago but it doesn't include hard funding numbers.

As far as I know there isn't any public, centralized database with funding info (like NIH RePORT) for journals. In any case, many diamond open access journals are not funded by grants in the same way that research might be. Funding comes from all sorts of places and is not uniform from journal to journal. So it would be tough to figure out specifics across the entire country.

The truth is that the cost of starting a journal these days is negligible. A budget conscious group could start a journal for next to nothing. There are free systems, for instance PKP's Open Journal System, that are open source and easy to implement. Web hosting is very inexpensive, Gmail business emails are too, and most journals rely on volunteer work from editors and reviewers.

The low cost (potentially) of running a diamond open access journal, combined with the fact that they are not as prevalent in the United States as elsewhere in the world means that the amount of government money spent directly on diamond open access is probably relatively low.

Answer 2

I found some numbers on https://english.elpais.com/science-tech/2023-11-21/scientists-paid-large-publishers-over-1-billion-in-four-years-to-have-their-studies-published-with-open-access.html. It's not specific to diamond access, but still interesting.

Scientists paid large publishers over $1 billion in four years to have their studies published with open access [...] Stefanie Haustein’s team from the University of Ottawa (Canada) has spent “years” collecting data from the period 2015-2018. According to their calculations, Springer Nature took the lion’s share, with $589.7 million, followed by Elsevier ($221.4 million), Wiley ($114.3 million), Taylor & Francis ($76.8 million), and Sage ($31.6 million). The fees required for a study to be made available with open access are officially called “article processing charges,” and on average, authors or their institutions have to pay more than $2,500 per study. French sociologist Pierre Bataille refers to the publishers’ charges as “research vampirization.”