Stanford University Press (SUP) — which has a long and storied history in book publishing — has branched out into journal publishing in association with the Public Knowledge Project (PKP). The initiative was developed in consultation with Standford Libraries’ Office of Scholarly Communications in response to the mounting burdens on the research community imposed by commercial publishers including, but not limited to, diminishing affordability of article processing charges (APCs) and increased publication rates. https://www.sup.org/journals/press-release-original

The SUP+PKP portfolio now includes four titles. The first journal, launched in April 2025, is Reviews of Economic Literature (REL). They have now added three additional titles: Biogeography (BIOG), Population Biology Modeling & Theory (PBMT), and Journal of Mass Spectrometry and Advances in the Clinical Lab (JMSACL); all under the Diamond Open Access publishing model: free to authors and readers. https://www.sup.org/journals/press-release-three-new-journals

These journals include two new academic-owned journals established by editorial boards that resigned en masse from journals owned by for-profit publishers (BIOG & REL, see Biogeography.News, Retraction Watch: JBI, Retraction Watch: JES), a new journal set up by an existing society (PBMT), and an existing journal that is transitioning from a commercial publisher to SUP’s nonprofit program (JMSACL). Their funding models also vary, including funding from the Gates Foundation to SUP+PKP, a grant from the Dutch Research Council (NWO) to REL, and partnership of Biogeography with the OACIP fund of Lyrasis. SUP+PKP is also employing the services of Knowledge Unlatched (KU) for subscription management of journals under an S2O model, under which libraries subscribe to journals and allow those journals to become open to all.

The diversity of journals, models, and partners illustrates the breadth of interest and the vigor of the movement to provide publishing options that are more affordable, accessible, and supportive of our research communities with the ultimate goal of bringing journal publishing back to the nonprofit academic sector.

Biogeography (BIOG) is an initiative of PEEER, intended to demonstrate and explore the feasibility of alternative sustainable models for high quality, academically owned, diamond open access scientific publishing.