Bregt Lameris, Assistant Professor at Open Universiteit

When I was publishing my first book in 2017, Open Access (OA) was becoming increasingly important, and my publisher, Amsterdam University Press (AUP), was a forerunner in the process. I applied for an open access fund at my university and paid a still-reasonable fee that covered the e-book's production costs. However, between the moment I received the funding and the book was released, AUP was sold to a private party and publishing the open-access version of the book got stuck in the process. I asked the publisher several times to speed up the process to no resolution. Only when I threatened to publish my book as a pre-print on my website did they agree with publishing it open access. In all, it took AUP a year to finally make the ebook open access. 

Right after this, the book got much more exposure, book reviews and many more readers. It made me think, though, that the fee was used badly, not fair, not OA and I felt betrayed in a way. Because of this I was already a bit upset by AUP, but not as upset as when in 2024 my book was sold to Taylor & Francis, which is one of the bigger commercial profit-makers, and is now presented as Routledge. 

As a result, when I finished the manuscript for my second book, I decided to go directly to Open Book Publishers, the one international and truly Diamond Open Access publisher. Working with them was a pleasure; they put a lot of effort into the book, which has over 100 colour illustrations, which usually takes a lot of time for the graphic design and type-setting. This book has received many more downloads and readers in six months than my first book did in five years. Furthermore, when publishing in Diamond Open Access, the copyright stays with you as an author, meaning that your book cannot be sold to a party you ethically disagree with. 

I know that many scholars are still hesitant to hand their manuscripts to such a new, fairly unknown publisher. All your hard work on your manuscript deserves special care for quality and distribution  

Routledge might still sound prestigious and important in the Humanities field, but in reality makes big profits on our free labour.

 Of the €13.200 (minus taxes) you pay them to publish your book in open access, a large percentage goes to shareholders rather than to quality and care. 
Now, I am a Diamond Open Access advocate, and work for the expertise centre Diamond Open Access. I am building my CV around truly equitable publishing, avoiding reviewing and publishing for commercial publishers.