>  I feel that essentially because those diamond OA journals are "hosted" in/by the institutions

> and not "sponsored".  Something like a student enrolled in a university vs a student sponsored

> by the university.

 

Right – and either of those terms may apply perfectly well to the student’s relationship to the university, depending on how the student is being supported at the institution. If the student is paying the costs of attendance out of her own pocket, then clearly she’s enrolled but not sponsored. But if the university is covering all her costs, then couldn’t we reasonably say that the university is sponsoring her? Or if she has a full scholarship from some third party, then couldn’t that third party reasonably be called her sponsor? That’s the kind of relationship we’re talking about here: one in which the journal is Diamond because it’s fully supported by its host institution.

 

The problem with simply using the word “hosted” to describe that relationship is that we often use it to describe something less than a full-support relationship. For example, it’s pretty common for an institutional repository to serve as the host platform for a journal that is primarily supported (staffed, managed, edited) by another organization. A term that we apply to fully supported journals loses usefulness if we also use it to mean partially supported ones.