Lowering the Cost of Diamond Open Access Journals

Abstract: Many scholarly societies face challenges in adapting their publishing to an open access model where neither authors nor readers pay any fees. Some have argued that one of the main barriers is the actual cost of publishing. The goal of this paper is to show that the actual costs can be extremely low while still maintaining scholarly quality. We accomplish this by building a journal publishing workflow that minimizes the amount of required human labor. We recently built a software system for this and launched a journal using the system, and we estimate estimate our cost to publish this journal is approximately \$705 per year, plus \$1 per article and about 10 minutes of volunteer labor per article. We benefited from two factors, namely the fact that authors in our discipline use LaTeX to prepare their manuscripts, and we had volunteer labor to develop software and run the journal. We have made most of this software open source in the hopes that it can help others.