Open Access

“Who Owns Our Knowledge?” is the theme for this year’s International Open Access Week (October 20-26). The 2025 theme asks a pointed question about the present moment and how, in a time of disruption, communities can reassert control over the knowledge they produce. It also challenges us to reflect on not only who has access to education and research but on how knowledge is created and shared, where it has come from, and whose voices are recognized and valued.

This theme builds on the conversations, events, and actions over the past two years that have focused on putting “Community over Commercialization.” During this time, we’ve made significant progress toward this end. Community-aligned approaches, such as Diamond OA and Subscribe to Open (S2O), have expanded substantially. A growing number of editorial boards have reclaimed ownership of their own journals by resigning from commercially published outlets. More institutions are abandoning proprietary database products and metrics for faculty evaluation, and across the world, some are reforming review, promotion, and tenure policies to more directly reward sharing. Increasingly we see researchers developing an understanding that data and outputs do not always belong to them but are shared with or even controlled by participants in their research.

Despite this progress, emerging risks threaten to prioritize commercialization over community interests. The rush to scrape academic knowledge to train artificial intelligence models and to integrate AI into academic processes—often without proper consultation or author consent—threatens to undermine our knowledge systems. Surveillance that would be unthinkable in a physical library setting now happens routinely through some publisher platforms. Nevertheless, the community-owned, community-led, and non-commercial approaches to knowledge sharing called for by the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science and Toluca-Cape Town Declaration offer pathways away from these risks toward a future where individuals and communities own and benefit from their own knowledge.

Translations of this announcement in other languages can be found at openaccessweek.org. 

Interested in learning more about Open Access?  Inspired to take action to help open up access to research and scholarly information, in your own work, your discipline, or across academia and society?    Here are some great places to get started:

• Have a conversation with your department's liaison librarian about open access publishing and open educational resources in your discipline, or ask how you can retain your rights as an academic author when you publish research.  
• Read the Very Brief Introduction to Open Access by Peter Suber, or his more detailed Overview.
• Visit the SPARC website for detailed information about Open Access, Open Education, and Open Data, from one of the Open movement's leading organizations.
• Explore stories of impact shared by people who have benefited from scholarship found in Harvard's Open Access repository.
• Explore our Open Educational Resources (OER) guide to find openly-licensed learning materials.
• If you are a student, check out the Right to Research Coalition, which advocates for access to research for all students.
• If you are a researcher, explore the question Why Open Research?.
• Install the Open Access Button browser extension to encourage scholars to share open versions of their work whenever you run into a paywall. 
• Explore our Open Educational Resources (OER) guide to find openly-licensed learning materials.

Edited from: Grand Valley State University Libraries https://www.gvsu.edu/library/sc/open-access-week-at-grand-valley-state-university-14.htm