Founded in 2008, International Open Access Week is an annual event organized by SPARC in partnership with the Open Access Week Advisory Committee to promote Open Access to the academic and research community. According to the International Open Access Week website:
"Open Access Week is an opportunity for the academic and research community to continue to learn about the potential benefits of Open Access, to share what they’ve learned with colleagues, and to help inspire wider participation in helping to make Open Access a new norm in scholarship and research.
Open Access to information – the free, immediate, online access to the results of scholarly research, and the right to use and re-use those results as you need – has the power to transform the way research and scientific inquiry are conducted. It has direct and widespread implications for academia, medicine, science, industry, and for society as a whole.
Open Access Week is an invaluable chance to connect the global momentum toward the open sharing of knowledge with the advancement of policy changes and the importance of social issues affecting people around the world. The event is celebrated by individuals, institutions and organizations around the world."
Text from https://www.openaccessweek.org/about
The theme for International Open Access Week 2025, October 20-26, is "Who Owns Our Knowledge" in recognition of our "living in a time of disruption," challenging us "o 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 previous theme of "Community over Commercialization." SPARC explains further:
"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."
Text adapted from "Theme for Open Access Week 2025 Asks 'Who Owns Our Knowledge?'” https://www.openaccessweek.org/theme/en
