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Commodities or Collectives? A response to the OpenAlex Colors Working Group proposal
Pierre Mounier & Johan Rooryck
The OpenAlex Colors Working Group has proposed to move away from the traditional Open Access (OA) color taxonomy – Gold, Green, Hybrid, Bronze, and Diamond – to replace it with a data model that is based on three clear work-level dimensions: Access, Location, and License. Instead of assigning a single color status to a publication, the OpenAlex proposal distinguishes three distinct components in the metadata:
1. **Access** : Is the individual work free to read right now?
(e.g., Immediate, Embargoed, Restricted).
2. **Location** : Where is the open text being hosted?
(e.g., Publisher site, Repository, Preprint server).
3. **License** : Under what conditions can the text be reused?
(e.g., CC-BY, public domain, or restrictive all-rights-reserved).
The proposal has been opened up for a community consultation managed by the OpenAlex Community Advisory Board. It is in that context that we wish to react here.
We understand the desire of OpenAlex to deliver simple and transparent information to the research community about what they can do with a research output and how they can access it. However, we believe that this proposal is too reductive to replace important aspects of the current color scheme in general and the Diamond OA publishing model in particular. Most importantly, the proposal fails to take into account the conditions of production of research outputs, which matter as much as _Access, Location,_ and _License_. We believe that a reduction to these three components reinforces a view of research outputs as mere commodities, and readers and scholars as mere users of these commodities. _Access_ is about how the commodity can be acquired and consulted; _Location_ is about where the commodity can be found, and _License_ is about how it can be used and exploited. In other words, these three components could equally well apply to any other traded commodity, from coffee beans to crude oil: where can we get it, how easy is access to it, and how can we use it. It seamlessly fits into a market-driven logic of accessibility, acquisition, and exploitation.
Articles, journals, books, books series, and publishers are not commodities or brands, they represent _collectives_ of knowledge workers engaged in intellectual production. An article is produced by the collective of authors, reviewers, and editors; a journal or a book by a collective of authors, reviewers, readers, editors, submission system engineers, copy-editors, typesetters, and publishers. Failing to recognize the importance of these collectives is to invisibilize and depreciate the notion of the actual mode of production of scholarly knowledge, and of its role as a fundamental pillar of self-governance and scholarly autonomy.
The OpenAlex proposal also fails to acknowledge a gradual shift in the nature of discussions around Open Access that was recognized at OASPA 2026. At the start of this year’s edition in Zagreb, Andrea Chiarelli reports, it was noted that OASPA discussions in the last 13 years have slowly moved away from questions of how research can be made open, how it can be measured, paid for, and made possible technically to focus instead on issues of ownership and governance of the open access infrastructure, of barriers and gateways to participation in open Access, rewards and recognition, and who should pay. _Autonomy_ (i.e. ownership and governance), _Participation_ , and _Recognition_ are dimensions that go well beyond a commodity-oriented perspective. Relegating these dimensions to a discussion about business models is not a viable option, in our view, because they are not about business models, but about the social values that we believe are an inherent part of knowledge production.
It is crucial to increase the visibility of who _controls_ the infrastructure and the outputs of publishing. This is in the interest of both the autonomy of the scholarly community and of digital sovereignty. _Participation_ is an equally important dimension: who is allowed to participate in the scholarly conversation? Who is excluded because of article processing charges, admission fees of scholarly societies, or nation-based exclusivity? These notions help the scholarly community unpack the social relations that condition and affect the production of the ‘commodity’ (the article, book, etc.). They enable ‘users’ to move away from a consumer attitude where they do not care how a publication was produced, as long as they can ‘consume’ (access, acquire, exploit) it freely. In the same way we want to know whether tropical wood has been responsibly and sustainably sourced via FSC Certification, we should care about whether research outputs are responsibly owned and governed, and whether their mode of production responsibly enables participation by all researchers worldwide. These components – legal ownership, mission and governance, as well as Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging (EDIB), multilingualism and gender equity – are central dimensions of the quality assurance sought by the Diamond OA Standard (DOAS), developed in the DIAMAS project and adopted by the European Diamond Capacity Hub.
The OpenAlex proposal explicitly includes Diamond OA among business models: “[the proposal] says nothing about business models: APCs, diamond, hybrid agreements, subscribe-to-open, transformative agreements”. Diamond OA is emphatically not a business model, as extensively argued by Gatti, Mounier and Rooryck 2025, who argue that the purpose of Diamond OA goes beyond how publishing costs are covered. Diamond OA represents a broader approach to scholarly communication based on community ownership, academic values, and scholarly sovereignty. It is therefore misleading to define it only in commodity-oriented terms as “free to read and free to publish.” Diamond OA is most definitely about who directs the publishing infrastructure and the research outputs, who organises and participates in scholarly work, and what values underpin the publishing system. In this context, it is important to refer to the 6 operational criteria for Diamond OA that define the European Diamond Capacity Hub’s criteria for journals to be admitted to the Diamond Discovery Hub, the authoritative list of Diamond OA journals in Europe. These criteria make it clear that the most important conditions are _Autonomy_ , i.e. ‘community ownership’ of the journal and _Participation_ , i.e. the journal must be ‘open to all authors’ and cannot charge fees to authors or readers.
OpenAlex is not just an index for researchers. It also develops dashboards for institutional leaders, funders, and policy makers who use this information to monitor the impact of their policy. As such, it has a responsibility to inform these stakeholders about the social aspects of publishing that go beyond the accessibility and exploitability of publications. This information should at least include the dimensions of _Autonomy_ and _Participation_ , in the interest of a truly sovereign and participatory open science. We believe that it is important to organize an open discussion to identify controlled values for these dimensions that can be easily and transparently represented in a metadata scheme.
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The text only may be used under licence Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) are “All rights reserved”, unless otherwise stated.
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OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Johan Rooryck, Pierre Mounier (October 5, 2026). Commodities or Collectives? A response to the OpenAlex Colors Working Group proposal. _the diamond papers_. Retrieved October 5, 2026 from https://thd.hypotheses.org/650
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