Charlie Farley 
What is Edinburgh Diamond and what do you do? 

Rebecca Wojturska  
I’m Rebecca Wojturska and I am the Open Access publishing officer, responsible for managing Edinburgh Diamond. Edinburgh Diamond offers free publishing services to support books, journals and conference proceedings created or led by University of Edinburgh academics, staff and students. 

The reason we’re called Edinburgh Diamond is everything we publish is Diamond Open Access, meaning there are no costs for people to use the service, no costs for people to access the content and no costs to publish within any of the journals or books It also means everything is openly licenced using Creative Commons licences to allow fair reuse. 

Edinburgh Diamond helps with all aspects of publishing, apart from copy-editing and typesetting (but we are looking into getting those things put in place). We provide you with your own hosting site to publish your work, a workflow management system (for journals), digital object identifiers, ISSN’s and ISBNs, ongoing technical support, publishing advice and guidance, and we will also submit your content for indexing and archive and preserve everything. And we don’t set you up and leave you to it. We’re on hand for support whenever you need it. 

Charlie Farley   
How long has the service been around? 

Rebecca Wojturska 
The service launched in 2009. At the time it was set up to host one staff-led journal that needed a home. The service then became known as the journal hosting service and the library staff at the time found there was actually quite an appetite from staff and student members to use it. I was brought in in 2020, literally during the first lockdown, to grow the service. That’s when the rebrand to Edinburgh Diamond came and we expanded to include books and conference proceedings. So that’s, oh, it’s over a decade. 

Charlie Farley 
And the shift to open textbooks, you said that happened quite recently? 

Rebecca Wojturska  
Yes, the book service launched in 2021.
The very first book we launched with, we’re very proud of it, is Fundamentals of Music Theory. It was a collaborative project between staff, students, and professional staff within the library. It really had that collaborative spirit of multiple people working on it. It used content from a MOOC which had then been used in a taught course and had input from various stakeholders. We’ve publicised it at conferences internally, externally, and it’s been well received. We’re looking into getting the book indexed to further the reach. Fundamentals of Music Theory has been downloaded over 21,000 times. It really shows that Diamond Open Access works and that the content is relevant and important. We’re very, very proud to have helped with that project. 

Charlie Farley   
There are now 11 open textbooks on the catalogue, and from quite a wide range of subject areas as well. 

Rebecca Wojturska  
When we launched, we were focused on textbooks, but we have expanded so we now have textbooks, monographs, edited collections, and reports.
We want to publish academic research and course textbooks, but we also want to celebrate the more social projects. One of our books is a cookbook for homeless people created by third year medical students, and we also host some beautiful colouring books. 

Charlie Farley    
What do you think has led to the increased interest in open textbooks that’s happening? 

Rebecca Wojturska  
From an academic perspective, you can tailor an open textbook to your own course, and you can revise it without waiting for publication lead times. You might have to wait nine months or so for a traditional revised edition of a textbook to come out. Whereas if you publish an online Open Textbook, you can just do that immediately and have a new version there the very same day. From a student perspective, it’s free to access straight away. And other institutions are starting to see that benefit. We’re seeing more libraries launch their own versions of Edinburgh Diamond. It’s very much a growing area and I think academic students and librarians alike are all very, very excited about it. 

Charlie Farley   
How have people felt about the open licensing aspect of publishing with you? 

Rebecca Wojturska   
It’s gone down quite well, and I think the reason for that is there are various licences to choose from. You can use a completely open licence so people can reuse your content and repurpose it, or you can apply restrictions, such as not allowing commercial entities to reuse your content. You can be as restrictive as you like with it whilst keeping it open and ensuring credit is given back. 

Charlie Farley   
What advice would you give to somebody who is interested in publishing an open textbook with you? 

Rebecca Wojturska   
Reach out to us, we’re always happy to have a chat. It doesn’t matter what kind of content you work on as we are open to all of it, whether it’s science, or arts and humanities. We want the service to be shaped by you!