We see the diamond open-access model as the only long-term sustainable model for scholarly publishing. For-profit publishing creates conflicts of interest that undermine the integrity of scholarship, whether the business model is based on charging readers or on charging authors.
When publishers charge readers, there is competition to publish exciting findings that make news and lead to greater sales. Consequently, researchers are incentivized to exaggerate their results and overstate the impact of their findings in order to get published. The net result is that work published in the highest-impact journals (sometimes called “glamor magazines”) like Science and Nature is much more likely to be retracted than work published in other journals.
When subscriptions are replaced by author-facing article-processing charges (APCs), a different threat to scientific integrity arises. In this model the standards for acceptance can quickly become very lax, owing to the commercial publisher’s profit motive. Many of us have reviewed for journals that operate on this model and have recommended rejection for an article, only to see it accepted anyway. Furthermore, APCs are inherently unfair to scholars from lower-income institutions and countries.
A decentralized system of modestly sized scholar-controlled journals allows for much greater ability to experiment and to be responsive to the particular research community, compared to what large commercial publishers do.