The European Council’s recommended open, equitable and sustainable scholarly publishing system, free to readers and authors, has been dismissed as unsustainable and too costly (see Nature https://doi.org/kjwj; 2023). However, institutional repositories run by research institutions offer an inexpensive and sustainable route to realizing this aspiration.
Such non-profit repositories are ubiquitous and capable of hosting ‘diamond’ open-access academic journals, which are free to publish and to read. In Spain, for example, the journal Psicológica is owned by the Spanish Society for Experimental Psychology and published on DIGITAL.CSIC, the institutional repository of the Spanish National Research Council (see go.nature.com/3jxaw9z).
Transferred in 2022 from a commercial publisher, Psicológica publishes about 50 articles, preprints and peer reviews annually. Publication costs are shared between the journal — which is financially supported by the society — and the publicly funded repository, which provides services such as archiving, DOI assignation and metadata curation. At an estimated cost of €30 (US$34) per publication, Psicológica can increase its output without incurring substantial extra costs. This underscores the sustainability of such models.
