A new agreement among supporters of open access underscores the importance of embracing scholarly knowledge as a public good.
The Toluca-Cape Town Declaration, signed by representatives from countries around the world in December, clearly defines the Diamond Open Access model as “community-owned, community-led, and non-commercial.” It emphasizes the value of amplifying diverse voices and tailoring communication to address local and global needs.
The document was the culmination of discussions at both the Diamond Open Access Summit in Toluca, Mexico, in 2023, and the Summit in Cape Town, South Africa, in 2024. The second gathering brought together more than 1,000 in-person and virtual delegates representing 73 countries – including 36 African countries. It emphasized the centrality of the local communities that have nurtured the success of Diamond Open Access and that are behind its increasing momentum today.
Reggie Raju, director of research and learning at the University of Cape Town Libraries, said the declaration was driven by representatives from the Global South, who face challenges getting published and affording traditional journals.
Reggie Raju, director of research and learning at the University of Cape Town Libraries addresses participants at the 2nd Global Summit on Diamond Open Access.
“Too much of the talk about access had been one directional: Global North to Global South. Now, we are saying it is a human right to have it be bi-directional,” Raju said. “We have much to share with the Global North. That, for me, was at the core.”
Also significant in the language of the declaration was embracing knowledge sharing owned by the community rather than by large corporations, Raju said, and naming the issue as a matter of social justice.
“I think, unconsciously, people do not see the barriers of exclusion that we in the Global South have to endure,” Raju said. “If you’ve been through it, you can feel the pain and why it needs to be broken down.”
Arianna Becerril-García, executive director of Redalyc and a host of the inaugural summit in Toluca, Mexico, said the declaration is a “huge milestone for the Diamond Open Access movement” that reflects new common ground.
“To make the concept of what we mean by Diamond Open Access more explicit is very helpful to the community and for decision makers because we need clarity about what strategies are aligned with the values of open access,” Becerril-Garcia said.
It was critically important for the declaration to underscore science as a public good because it makes non-commercial mandatory, she said. When for-profit players are involved, elements of equity can be lost. Diamond Open Access can help disadvantaged, marginalized communities bring diverse voices and research content. Bercerril-Garcia highlighted language that called for addressing both local and global challenges. “Sometimes we forget the local needs and traditions that need to be respected. We all can learn from local cultures,” she said.
Too often, there is a tendency for researchers to do research involving a community, but not to ensure that the community is fully able to access and benefit from that same research. The declaration addresses the need to fully engage indigenous communities, said Lorraine Haricombe, a South African and director of the University of Texas Libraries at Austin. It also speaks to the value of inclusive citizen science.
“It’s important to have open science infrastructures to capture the research, preserve it, and make it accessible and useful to all others,” she said.
Haricombe said she was encouraged by the enthusiasm of the Global South participants who are ready to embrace the responsibility of advancing the principles of the declaration.
“This is a beautiful thing to see that the African community realizes both the economic development and the cultural implications of claiming their own scholarship and making it available through Diamond Open Access,” Haricombe said.
Beyond being community-owned and community-led, Stéphanie Gagnon said she likes the declaration articulating commitment to science as a public good to improve society. Linking the conversation to decolonization and marginalization also deepened her perspective on Diamond Open Access.
As a French speaker, Gagnon, directrice générale at Université de Montréal’s Libraries who works on Canadian projects in Quebec, said she appreciated the declaration committing to regional and language diversity. “It really is something to respect the local language and scholarly publication needs that are very specific to a region,” she said. “It brings together different realities and needs around a common perspective.”
Reggie Raju of the University of Cape Town Libraries with participants of the Diamond Open Access Summit in Cape Town, South Africa in 2024.
Agreement was possible at the second summit with a diverse representation from participants, said Nokuthula Mchunu, manager of International Collaborative Research Grants in Pretoria, South Africa. The declaration aims to decentralize scholarly communication, ensuring it benefits the broader community.
“At a holistic level, we want to have outputs that are free to access and free to publish,” Mchunu said. “However, the driving force for me personally, is the issue of equity. By promoting that, you then have equitable participation of all scholarly participants within the knowledge community.”
The declaration is carefully worded to emphasize a community- and locally-driven ecosystem of scholarly communication that must be non-commercial, she said. “It’s the community itself that uses the knowledge and can determine for itself the quality,” she said.
Traditionally, the system has been centered in the West and very colonial, she said, so the conference included difficult discussions of decolonization. “We need to think of [Diamond Open Access] as a way to address this issue,” she said. “It was an important moment to finally get a declaration that has this nuance without having to compromise.”
Moving forward, Mchunu said the time is right for the community to take back scholarly communication. “We hope this adoption and the community makes Diamond Open Access the mainstream way of communicating knowledge.”
Emily Choynowski, founder and director of the Forum for Open Research in MENA (FORM), a non-profit initiative supporting the advancement of open science policies and practices across the Arab world, said she welcomed the Declaration’s explicit emphasis on Diamond Open Access as a community-led movement promoting scholarly decolonisation and bibliodiversity. Too often, scholars in this region publish and present in English as a matter of prestige, she said, and Arabic-language research vehicles are dismissed as being of lesser merit by local as well as international communities.
“Regional representation on the global stage is more important than ever,” Choynowski said. “The community-centric nature of the Declaration – encompassing a plurality of views and voices, often marginalised or ignored – ensures that the needs of every community are included.”
The Declaration stresses the vital need for greater localization in scholarly communications, she added. “My hope is that the Declaration will encourage the emergence of a global network of autonomous but collaborative communities, each formed according to local needs and local priorities – empowering local research networks to reclaim their scientific authority and regain control of their scholarly outputs.”
Toluca-Cape Town Declaration
Following the 2023 Toluca Global Summit, we, the 2024 Cape Town Global Summit participants, affirm that scholarly knowledge is a public good.
We advocate for access to knowledge to be free of prejudice and bias. It must be accessible to all communities, including readers and authors, without barriers and paywalls.
We further affirm that diamond open access is driven by social justice, equity and inclusivity.
We commit to advancing diamond open access to ensure equitable, inclusive, and sustainable production, dissemination, and access to information and knowledge, fostering inclusion, diversity, decolonisation and demarginalisation.
We respect regional diversity in scholarly communication and reiterate that the implementation of diamond open access needs to be tailored to address local and global challenges.