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7 Politics Low Countries 1 (2025)

handle is hein.journals/polwc7 and id is 1 raw text is: EDITORIAL A Future-Proof Journal for the Low Countries: Politics of the Low Countries Embraces Diamond Open Access Maurits J. Meijers & Audrey Vandeleene' The year 2025 marks a watershed moment for Politics of the Low Countries (PLC). From 1 January 2025, PLC transitioned from Boom/Eleven Publishers to Radboud Univer- sity Press (RUP) as a Diamond Open Access (DOA) journal, making all articles free to publish and free to read. This editorial outlines the rationale behind PLC's decision to adopta DOA publishing model, examines the implications of this transition for thejour- nal's financial structure and edlitorial workflow, and demonstrates how researchers in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg will benefit from this change. The Irrationality of Contemporary Academic Publishing The dominant publishing model in political science, and academia more broadly, represents a system everyone recognizes as highly irrational, yet academics rarely take steps to change it within their own journals. The logic is perverse: predominantly tax-funded researchers conduct research in the public interest, and then publish their work with commercial academic publishers such as Elsevier, Sage, Taylor & Francis, and Wiley, who do not remunerate researchers nor their universities for their work. To access their own academic work, universities pay these commercial publishers exorbitant fees in subscriptions and access charges. The financial burden is staggering. The 2019 European Universities Association Big Deals Survey Report (Morais et al., 2019), covering 30 countries across Europe, estimated that universities spend more than €1 billion annually on electronic Politics ofthe Low Countries is published with financial support from the Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique-FN RS. 1 Maurits J. Meijers, University of Antwerp, and Audrey Vandeleene, Universit6 libre de Bruxelles, are the Editors-in-Chief. 1