Theme — International Open Access Week

"“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."