Q&A: Open Access Week asks: Who Owns Your Knowledge?

Open Access (OA) is about making scholarship available online without cost or most copyright restrictions so that anyone with web access can read and reuse it, not just those at institutions that can afford it.

Normally, when a scholar’s essay or book manuscript is accepted for publication by a journal or press, the scholar must transfer their copyright to the publisher. The publisher then sells access—often through expensive subscriptions that libraries must buy—so only those at well-funded institutions can read the work.

Open Access Week is an international event that highlights issues in the scholarly publishing system and promotes more equitable ways of sharing research. It’s a time for libraries, publishers, and scholars to discuss barriers and solutions to equitable access and celebrate efforts that make scholarship freely available to everyone. 

The theme for International Open Access Week 2025 is “Who Owns Our Knowledge?” IU’s focus is “Who Owns (Y)our Knowledge? The Importance of University Publishing.”

Together, these themes invite us to consider not only who has access to research, but also who controls that access—and how that control might shift from commercial publishers back to universities and scholars. They challenge us to ask: How can we reclaim ownership of the knowledge we create? 

"Who Owns Our Knowledge Infrastructures? Emerging Scholarly Publishing Platforms and Outputs” brought together publishing technologists and a leading IU scholar to discuss how new, community-owned publishing infrastructures are enabling innovative forms and methods of publication—such as “micropublications” and “publish-review-curate”—and how these developments could transform how research is evaluated. 

“The Case for University-Based Publishing - Models, Missions, and Momentum” gathered librarians, IU faculty, and leaders of university presses to explore why university-based publishing matters, the challenges and opportunities it presents, and the growing momentum behind library–press partnerships.

The keynote, “Who Owns Our Knowledge? Scholar-Led Infrastructures and the Future of Publishing,” was delivered by Juan Pablo Alperin, Scientific Director of the Public Knowledge Project and Associate Professor in the Publishing Program and Co-Director of the Scholarly Communications Lab at Simon Fraser University. His talk celebrated both bibliodiversity—the flourishing of OA scholarly publishing beyond major North American and European commercial publishers—and scholar-led publishing infrastructures—which ensure that this work remains not only accessible but also discoverable. 

I was especially excited about the infrastructures panel—how it explored the relationship between publishing platforms and the kinds of scholarship they make possible. It showed that when we change the infrastructure—the systems and tools through which research is published—we can also change the genres of scholarship itself. And that, in turn, can reshape how we think about tenure and evaluation.

That’s especially important because tenure and promotion processes drive so much of scholarly publishing. Faculty are often evaluated based on where they publish—meaning which journals or presses—so the system tends to prioritize a small number of high-prestige, commercial publishers that are extremely expensive and publish only in English. If we want to lower the costs of publishing and access, scholars and institutions need to invest in and build high-prestige, nonprofit, open-access, multilingual venues, and create incentives for researchers to publish in them.