Response to Curt Rice, 'Diamond Open Access Needs Institutions, Not Heroes’
Friday, February 20, 2026 at 10:54AM Response to Curt Rice, 'Diamond Open Access Needs Institutions, Not Heroes’, The Scholarly Kitchen, 18 February, 2026.
---
Reading the argument that ‘Diamond Open Access needs institutions, not heroes’, it’s hard not to notice how much the question of institutions is also a question of who those institutions are structurally built to serve. As Gary Younge shows in his new book Pigeon Holed: Creative Freedom As An Act of Resistance, the publishing world - in Britain at least - remains strikingly conservative and elitist in its social composition:
the Police Evidence Centre found publishing and architecture the most elitist within the creative sector, with more than 58 per cent of those working within it coming from privileged backgrounds compared to 37 per cent of British workers as a whole. Since non-white people are more likely to be working-class, racial exclusion was, of course, compounded and enabled by class elitism. Using raw data from a 2019 Labour Force Survey, PEC researchers could show that publishing was the whitest within the creative sector with only 5 per cent minorities.
Meanwhile, a report by the Sutton Trust and the Social Mobility Commission found that newspaper columnists are more likely to have attended private school and Oxbridge than even High Court judges or members of the House of Lords. This leads Younge to conclude that in ‘an era of polarisation and populism, it is a reasonable, if not quite provable, assumption that the unrepresentative nature of the media has some bearing on publishing and journalism’s struggles to be relevant.’
These patterns matter for open-access debates, too, because they reveal a structural paradox: organisations and institutions are indeed important for sustaining diamond OA and its infrastructure. Yet the existing organisations and institutions, including those associated with publishing, are themselves deeply shaped by differences and hierarchies of class and race. Simply relying on them to scale diamond open access, without also transforming their structures and social composition, risks reproducing the same (white, middle-class) norms, values and exclusions under the guise of a more sustainable model.
The real challenge, then, is not ‘institutions vs heroes’, but how to design and build community-led organisations and institutions that redistribute not only publishing infrastructure but also cultural funding, resources, opportunities and authority – so that forms of committed, resilient (rather than sustainable) and responsible open access are possible that are open in terms of participation, not merely content.