Financial Governance

At Futures Reframed, we aim to move away from the often exclusionary and opaque financial structures in academia. We invest significant time and care in developing fairer and more transparent ways of publishing and academic collaborating, and we believe that being open about money is an important part of that.

 All editors and reviewers work on a voluntary basis and are not paid for the time and energy they spend on this journal; only our student assistant receives compensation for their work.

 We received €15,000 in funding from the Diamond Open Access Fund of the Library of the University of Amsterdam, which in turn receives its resources from the KNAW. This fund supports journals that aim to work in a genuinely open access way, where readers nor authors pay a fee.

 We allocate this amount as follows:

  1. Design of a reusable template and logo
    To avoid high design or copysetting costs in the future, we developed a flexible template for the journal.
    • We paid €500 to designer and futures thinker Britt Berden for the design of this template and our logo.
  2. Access to a Diamond Open Access platform
    We reserve a substantial part of the budget for three years of participation in OpenJournals.nl, allowing us to host Futures Reframed on a platform specifically geared towards diamond open access journals.
  3. Organisation and editorial work
    We spend approximately €300 on the organisation and (online) meetings of the editorial board, to sustain the collective and caring character of the journal.
  4. Support for authors and makers in precarious positions
    In exceptional cases, we pay a small fee to authors or artists who are in urgent financial need. This ranges from €100 to a maximum of €300 per contribution. In this way, we try to make space for voices that might otherwise not be able to participate.
  5. Salary of student-assistant

 We will continue to communicate our financial decisions as clearly as possible and welcome questions and suggestions on how we can work in even more transparent or caring ways. Please feel free to contact us if you have ideas. If you are an editor of an academic journal and find our full-transparency policy inspiring, please copy the idea for your own journal – together we change the norm! If you are a scholar, you might find more inspiration in this full-transparent financial statement, written by the organizers of the HYPE conference, and in this petition for financial transparency and fair play in academia, led by colleagues from the STS community.