Of the phenomena shedding light on the place and role of scientific communities in the shift towards open access publishing, ‘flipping’ is certainly one of the most interesting to observe. The success of a journal’s transition to Diamond Open Access (OA) depends not only on the economic and infrastructural conditions secured by the editor-in-chief and his editorial board, but also on the community’s support for the decision and the transition (Sinsou, and al., 2026). Journals that have successfully flipped are those whose communities have embraced, supported and followed through on the editor-in-chief’s decision, by the shift of the community’s voluntary activities (reading, citing, submitting and peer reviewing) (Adema, Moore, 2024; Luca and al., 2026) from the “deserted” journal to the new Diamond title.
This transition is intended to secure the community’s freedom to publish high-quality work in line with its own aims and objectives. It typically involves the entire board resigning en masse to establish a new Diamond OA journal, relying on the community — including authors, peer reviewers, board members and, more broadly, the wider community in their field — to unanimously support their move. However, flipping sometimes fails because the community that initially rallied becomes divided. While some board members remain with the “deserted” journal — or even become its new editors-in-chief — readers and authors of the new journal do not follow. Their loyalty is kept to the historic journal, which still retains the symbolic capital (Moore, Wigdorowitz, 2025).

Although flipping is well documented in the scientific literature in terms of its scale and impact (Solomon and al., 2016), its effects on its own communities have received very little attention. There is also limited knowledge about the communities behind the trajectories of flipping journals, the leading scholars driving these transitions and the loyalty of the journals’ contributors. While public statements and press releases provide insights into the arguments that informed the decision to flip, they do not shed light on the robustness and sustainability of the community’s motivation to see this decision through. This is why we aim to emphasize in this proposal the relevance of flipping experience and process for understanding scientific communities’ role and impact. Therefore, our proposal addresses the following research questions: how do scientific communities navigate the experience of their journals flipping? What factors determine community cohesion, or indeed division?
Our methodology relies on a qualitative approach involving 21 semi-directed interviews with editors-in-chief of international scholarly journals from various fields (STEM and SSH), organized between February and April 2026. Our grid interview enabled us to explore the mechanisms and impact of the flipping experience, as well as the consensus and dissension within the journal community, the choice of infrastructure by the journals, and the reputation and legitimation of the new journals. The following table outlines the data corpus.

Our results highlight that the conditions for the success of journal flipping mainly rely on the intricate relationship between the editor-in-chief (his authority and legitimacy) and his journal community. Building on this relationship, the editor-in-chief, as a leader and as a gatekeeper, can make the journal identity ‘portable’ (Anderson, 2023). This portability encompasses the entire process: technical (hosting infrastructures), economic (funds support) and social (community practices shift). They endorse the whole transition by playing a leading role in making the flipping feasible and sustainable (Laakso and al, 2016). Many factors influence community cohesion or division, including genuine commitment to open access, attachment to reputational metrics (mainly Impact Factor), generational differences (between early-career and senior researchers) and community attitudes towards perceived unfair behavior or injustice from publishers (Beigel, 2025). In this case, flipping can be considered as a trial of loyalties and the key to its success or failure.

The study also reveals that the flipping can be divided into two stages: 1/ a process of loss and dispossession, and 2/ a process of reconstruction. The latter can be seen as evidence of the governance of knowledge production by the journal’s scientific communities. This restores the role and status of the editor-in-chief and reaffirms the value of editorial labour. It also reclaims community control over the process. This allows us to conclude that the success of a journal’s transition to the Diamond model is primarily a matter of how scientific communities govern their own research production and dissemination.