Abstract
<p>Diamond Open Access (OA) is frequently defined in the negative—no fees for readers, no fees for authors—but this characterization captures only the financial surface of a model whose deeper ambition is community-led, nonprofit stewardship of scholarly knowledge as a public good. What distinguishes diamond OA from other fee-free publishing models is not only how journals are financed, but also how they are institutionally organized—who owns them, who publishes them, who governs them, and how these responsibilities are distributed among the actors involved in journal publishing. Yet the institutional arrangements of diamond OA journals remain among the least studied dimensions of the diamond landscape—in part because they resist easy categorization and in part because they are difficult to observe from the outside. Drawing on 1070 responses to a global survey of journals using Open Journal Systems (OJS)—the most widely adopted publishing platform in the diamond OA ecosystem—we examine how journals identify owners and publishers, allocate governance authority, and describe the institutional relationships through which publishing is organized. We find that the institutional organization of Diamond OA journals varies substantially by region and often does not conform to conventional models. Although academic departments are the most commonly reported owners, and editorial teams most often hold authority over editorial appointments and operational decisions, journals frequently identify multiple owners and/or publishers, while ownership and decision-making authority do not consistently coincide. Respondents also report organizations serving as owners and publishers outside their usual functions. Drawing on institutional bricolage, we interpret these patterns not as signs of organizational deficiency or incomplete formalization, but as adaptive configurations of informal arrangements, institutional dependencies, and negotiated responsibilities that make diamond publishing possible. We discuss the implications of these findings for how diamond OA journals are classified, understood, and supported through policy.</p>