Jan Erik Frantsvåg transitioned from a background in banking and economics to become a leading open access advocate and researcher at UiT The Arctic University of Norway. His subsequent research using DOAJ metadata explored publishing structures, scale, and the sustainability challenges facing under-resourced diamond journals. In Part 1 of this interview, he asserts that universities must invest in community-owned publishing infrastructure rather than relying heavily on commercial publishers and article processing charges.
Background and career
I’m a book person. I’ve always been.
So no one was really surprised when I ended up in the library, except perhaps me, because I don’t really have a library background. I started my working life in banking. My education is in economics and computing, and I trained as a bank economist. Nothing in that background should really have led me to what I’m doing now.
After a few years in banking, and after a period of turmoil in Norwegian banking, I was offered a position as deputy manager of a remote branch in a small village, and I said, “No, this isn’t for me. Fire me.” So they did.
After that, I found refuge in the finance department at the university. There, I was asked to look at the university’s copying and publishing activities. I wrote a report, and this was back in 1995. By then I had discovered the internet and had begun looking into how scholarly publishing worked.
As a student, you encounter textbooks and journal articles, but you don’t really think about scholarly publishing itself. When I began investigating it and talking to researchers, trying to understand how the system worked, I realised it didn’t make sense. In the age of the internet, the existing subscription-based model seemed completely outdated.
One of the conclusions in my report was that universities should publish their research on the internet for free. That would be the most efficient way to distribute knowledge. At the time, that was considered quite radical. The report was shelved and never made it to the university board.
But it sparked my interest in scholarly publishing. I later completed further studies in documentation science, eventually earning a master’s degree focused on open access.
During this time, I was still working outside the library. I moved from the finance department to the computing department. Then, in 2006, the library created a position to help populate a new institutional repository. I applied.
Despite being the only applicant without either a master’s degree or a doctorate on my CV, I got the job because I was the person most interested in the area.
For the last twenty years, my work has essentially been advocating for and supporting open access in various roles. It all started because I was given a task that happened to ignite a passion. So for nearly thirty years now, I’ve been an open access advocate.
I was simply in the right place at the right time. The fire started then, and it’s still burning.
It’s a long time for the fire to keep burning. Advocacy is hard.
Yes, it is.
When I look back, the changes in scholarly publishing have been enormous.
Open access has gone from being a marginal idea to becoming mainstream, at least at my university. More than 90% of our research output is now available open access in some form, and it has been for several years.
I’d like to think I deserve some of the credit, though certainly not all.
I’ve been fortunate to work at a university library that invested heavily in open access, and at a university with a leadership level that recognised its importance and committed resources to it. We’ve been lucky, but we’ve also worked hard to educate institutional leaders about open access, what it can achieve, and why it matters.
On his role and research
I’m interested in your title, Jan Erik. You’re known as an Open Access Adviser at the university.
It’s an interesting journey because I came into the library from university administration, so I originally had administrative titles. That created some complications when I started publishing research myself around fifteen or sixteen years ago.
My library directors made it clear that when I spoke publicly, I wasn’t speaking on behalf of the university, I was speaking as a researcher. But an administrative title can imply that you’re representing the institution.
Getting the academic librarian title actually made things easier. It signalled that I was part of the academic community, free to express my own views and publish my own research. It clarified that my opinions were my own, not necessarily those of the university.
You’ve talked about how the open access landscape has changed over time. Can you tell us more about your research?
My research began through a Nordic project many years ago. One of the ideas circulating at the time was that advertising could become an important revenue source for open access journals.
I wanted to investigate that claim properly.
Around that time I had become familiar with DOAJ. I first met Lars Bjørnshauge at the Munin Conference in 2006, and over the years we had many discussions about open access, often over a beer or two.
When I began my study, I needed a sample of open access journals to survey. DOAJ was the obvious place to start. I selected a sample of journals from DOAJ, distributed a questionnaire, and received a substantial number of responses.
That then led to another question: was DOAJ actually representative of the open access publishing landscape? Were the journals in my sample mostly large publishers, or small ones?
I began analysing the size structure of open access publishers listed in DOAJ and discovered a highly skewed distribution. A small number of publishers controlled large numbers of journals, while most publishers operated only one or a handful of titles (87.9 % had only one title.).
To understand whether this was unique to open access, I compared the findings with data from Ulrichsweb and discovered that the subscription publishing industry showed very similar patterns.
After publishing my article on advertising as a source of revenue for open access journals, where my conclusion was essentially that advertising was neither well understood nor a particularly viable revenue source, I turned my attention to the structure of open access publishing itself.
I wrote an article examining the size distribution of open access publishers and explored whether this concentration was beneficial or problematic. Since then, I’ve continued using journal-level metadata from DOAJ in much of my research.
Most of my publications have relied on those data in one way or another.
On scale and sustainability
One argument I’ve returned to repeatedly is that open access publishing is often operating at too small a scale.
My background is in economics, and one of the basic principles of economics is that larger-scale operations can generally reduce costs per unit. In publishing, scale can reduce the cost per article significantly.
What I see in many small publishing operations is that they spend a disproportionate amount of time maintaining publishing expertise and infrastructure. They either devote too many resources to building and sustaining that expertise or they ignore important publishing requirements altogether.
As a result, journals are not always serving authors as well as they could. Distribution may be limited, visibility may be poor, and publishing practices may not meet modern standards.
The reality is that scholars are trained to conduct research. They are not trained to run publishing operations.
Of course, some researchers become excellent publishers and editors, but generally speaking, if you haven’t been trained in something, you won’t be particularly good at it.
That’s one of my enduring concerns. We need to operate publishing infrastructure at a different scale.
That’s interesting because you’ve also been heavily involved in Septentrio Academic Publishing. How does that fit into your thinking around scale?
The name actually has a history. “Septentrio” comes from the Latin word relating to the seven stars of what we call the Big Dipper. Historically, it became associated with “the North.”
It doesn’t specifically refer to Tromsø (Northern Norway), which I think is an advantage. Institutions change and merge, but “the North” remains stable.
Had we called it “Tromsø Academic Publishing”, we might have needed to rename it during later institutional mergers. Septentrio gave us something broader and more enduring.
Septentrio is an example of an institution investing in both a technical platform and personnel that specialises in scholarly publishing; teaching, advising and supporting editors and removing some of the need to spend much resources on creating and maintaining publishing competence among the editors. Today, a dozen scholarly journals over a wide range of subjects are published through Septentrio, and an even higher number of “grey matter” series, i.e., content that has not been through formal peer review but is of scholarly or popular interest.
On what makes institutional publishing successful
You’ve also been involved with projects like DIAMAS. What do you see as the key factors that make institution-led publishing successful? What actually works?
To be honest, I’m not entirely convinced we’ve solved that question yet.
One of my more recent publications was effectively an obituary for First Monday, which was one of the earliest and most successful diamond open access journals.
They didn’t call it “diamond” at the time because neither “diamond open access” nor even “open access” were established terms when the journal launched in 1996.
It was a highly successful journal. At its peak it published around 70 to 90 articles annually and had a significant international reputation.
Yet it eventually ceased publication.
That example demonstrates something important: if institutions don’t recognise their responsibility to provide sustainable resources, even successful diamond journals can disappear.
Diamond publishing may not charge authors or readers, but it isn’t free to operate.
Institutions need to fund publishing support structures. They need to establish semi-professional publishing services, like Septentrio, that provide a core of publishing expertise.
Our role isn’t to replace editors. It’s to support them.
We help them understand good publishing practice, navigate indexing requirements, improve workflows, implement standards, and ensure their content is discoverable.
Too many people think open access simply means putting content on the internet.
Open access means ensuring content can actually be found and used by readers.
That requires infrastructure. It requires DOIs. It requires inclusion in DOAJ. It requires metadata standards, preservation systems, indexing services, and all of the technical elements that make scholarship discoverable.
Researchers shouldn’t have to become experts in all of those things. They should have support staff who can either do that work for them or help guide them through it.
That’s what makes an institutional publishing model sustainable.
On resilience, community and journal quality
Thinking about ‘First Monday’, what operational practices make some journals more resilient than others?
That’s a difficult question.
One thing I have never seen is a clear connection between scholarly quality and financing. A journal can be expensive and still be a poor scholarly journal. We subscribe to journals that are not recognised as legitimate scholarly publishing venues within the Norwegian research system, yet we still pay for access to them because they’re bundled into larger publisher packages.
So quality and sustainability are different questions.
Sustainability is largely about politics and community. It depends on the relationship between a journal and the institution that supports it. It also depends on whether there is an active scholarly community willing to contribute as editors, reviewers and authors.
In the humanities especially, community is absolutely essential.
A journal that is not seen as part of a scholarly community lives a very precarious existence.
Then there is visibility, and visibility is largely a technical matter. Which licence does a journal use? How discoverable is its content? Is it using recognised standards?
One of my analyses of journals rejected from DOAJ found that more than ten per cent used their own home-made licences rather than recognised licences like Creative Commons.
That doesn’t work well.
You need licences that both people and computers can understand. Whether a licence is more restrictive or less restrictive is a separate question, but journals need to understand that restrictive licences can limit how widely their work is distributed and reused.
Fewer opportunities for reuse generally mean fewer readers.
You also have to recognise that those who deliberately ignore copyright restrictions will do so regardless of which licence you choose. Most journals do not have the resources to pursue legal action against misuse. So why create barriers for the legitimate users who want to share, translate, teach with or build upon your work?
It’s better to enable responsible reuse than to make life difficult for your colleagues.
Can I ask about your recent paper on DOAJ rejection data? Was there anything in the findings that surprised you?
One was how small the pool of “hidden” open access journals appears to be.
People often claim that DOAJ contains only a small fraction of all open access journals that exist. But when you look at the numbers, DOAJ has actually rejected more journals than it currently contains.
If you compare DOAJ with ROAD and other directories, there isn’t a vast, undiscovered population of quality open access journals waiting to be found. The idea that there is some enormous hidden reservoir of journals outside DOAJ is largely fiction.
The data certainly confirmed that many editors struggle with the practical side of publishing administration. Scholars, who spend their careers reading and interpreting information, weren’t reading the information they were being sent (from DOAJ).
I was also somewhat surprised that the balance between APC and non-APC journals among rejected journals looked broadly similar to the balance within DOAJ itself.
There were some geographical patterns that were expected. Countries such as Türkiye appeared prominently in the rejection data, but people like Ramazan Turgut (DOAJ) have done a tremendous amount of work helping journals understand the application process, and as a result the acceptance rate of Turkish applications has improved significantly.
The challenge is that many editors see the application process very differently from how DOAJ sees it.
Editors often think: “We have content and we want it listed.”
DOAJ asks: “What are your policies? What are your preservation arrangements? What are your licensing practices?”
For many editors, these questions explore territory they’ve never had to think about before.
Support structures for editors
My research suggests that the typical open access publisher manages only a single journal. That means they don’t have colleagues to learn from. They don’t have publishing teams. Every challenge is something they must solve from scratch.
Over the years, DOAJ has expanded the amount of information it collects. That’s a positive development because the resulting data are more useful and more informative.
But it also means the application process has become more demanding.
Editors encounter new terms, new concepts and new requirements. Naturally they ask: “What does this mean? Why is this important?”
In that sense, the burden has increased, even though the benefits have also increased.
It’s a necessary evolution, but it reinforces the need for support structures.
People like Ramazan Turgut in Türkiye provide valuable assistance by helping journals bridge the gap between publishing practice and DOAJ requirements.
I’d like to see similar support networks elsewhere.
The interview was transcribed and subsequently reviewed by both the interviewer and Jan Erik, who worked collaboratively to enhance the clarity, readability, and flow of the discussion. DOAJ is grateful to Jan Erik for providing early photographs for inclusion, and all images are reproduced with kind permission.
In the second part of this interview, Jan Erik Frantsvåg discusses the vital community-building role of smaller society journals and the ongoing need for institutional support in diamond open access publishing. He also examines the continued dominance of commercial publishers, the flaws of academic rankings and impact factors, and the disruptive potential of artificial intelligence on scholarly communication. Part 2 will be published in late October 2026.
