I am persuaded by the observation that hybrid models can be harmful and by the call to flip journals to diamond models. Only journals that are not owned by the publisher can flip with the journal’s name intact. There are a handful of such journals in the field (for example, The Modern Language Journal belongs to NFMLTA; Language Learning to the Language Learning Research Club at the University of Michigan; Foreign Language Annals to ACTFL). If I had been physically and mentally able – after three years with a new manuscript submitted almost daily – to extend my term as journal editor, I would have argued to move to a diamond model when the next Wiley contract expired. I will continue to encourage the board of directors to consider this option carefully. But this requires some very hard choices, lying in tension with activities that need money: offering research grants for students and early career researchers (a very rare funding source); appropriately compensating the editorial team; and paying for high quality copyeditors. The answers are not easy. And journals that are not owned by a publisher are not the only ones that could act: The many journals that are owned by their publishers also face a choice. They could take their editorial teams and reputations to re-establish themselves under a different journal name with a diamond model.

The vast majority of senior academics’ work is co-authored with early career researchers who need to progress in their careers, which largely involves publishing in ‘high-quality’ venues. To improve the perceived quality of diamond journals, senior academics publishing in them can enhance the visibility and citations of the journal. But publishing in those venues, as they stand, is not usually in the best short-term interests for our early career co-authors, yet publishing in them is in the best long-term interests of the future profession. The “Catch-22” is clear. To illustrate, when my early career colleagues are job searching, they want – with some good reason – articles in ‘Q1’ journals (with impact factors in the top quartile). As a result, we sometimes agree to submit to hybrid journals, some of which embargo post-prints for 12 or 24 months – two of the very characteristics that can impede progress towards field-wide diamond publishing.

A second illustration of the challenges is as follows: A PhD student and I decided to submit an article to a special issue which was an excellent fit for our work, to be published by a Sage journal (Pan & Marsden, 2024). Once accepted, we learned that the publishers’ deal to pay the APC s is only applicable if the first or corresponding author’s primary affiliation is an institution included in the deal. The student’s home institution in China – upon which the student relies for career progression and project funding – demanded to be the primary affiliation. As Chinese institutions are not covered by the publishers’ deal and the publisher would not make an exception to their policy, the article must sit behind a paywall.

A final challenge that I frequently encounter is when I am invited to write about open scholarship in venues that are paywalled – the irony is obvious. What to do? On the one hand, the community (a) needs to read about these issues, (b) is still effectively reached by commercial outlets, and (c) arguably, readers of commercially published material constitute the very audience that needs to be reached. On the other hand, publishing in these venues perpetuates the problem. Luckily, my WEIRD (Western, Educated, from Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic; Henrich et al., 2010) institution can pay APC s for books and chapters to be made open access. But, as argued by Andringa et al. 2024, this model exacerbates the commercial publishers’ hegemony.

In these situations, one approach is to go ‘green’ – make pre and post prints available, as Al-Hoorie & Marsden (in press) recently had to, and see publications flagged * in the References. To facilitate this approach, groups of universities in England (e.g., ‘the N8’) stipulate that all employees retain the rights to their publications, allowing them to make all pre- and post-prints available systematically on cross-institutional, fully open repositories (e.g., White Rose Research Online). However, the green route also has problems. First, publishers can sometimes impose embargoes on postprints (though to my knowledge publishers have not historically challenged such Right Retention policies). Second, and more critically, pre- and post-prints further exacerbate impediments to establishing diamond journals, partly because they increase citations to the existing commercial journals whose model thrives upon those very citations.