This Year, International Open Access Week Asks, "Who Owns Our Knowledge?"

Every year at the end of October, people across the world celebrate International Open Access Week. “Open access” — or OA for short — refers to both a set of principles and a movement to remove the barriers to accessing scholarly research so anyone in the world can benefit from that research. International Open Access Week gives us a special opportunity to highlight the many great advantages that open scholarly research can offer to you and to the world. 

This year’s theme for International Open Access week, “Who owns our knowledge?,” strikes at the core of why open access is so important. It asks us to think about whether we want the knowledge and discoveries that we learn and produce open to everyone or available to only a limited few. Sometimes when people talk about OA, they focus primarily on economics. Publishing, journal subscriptions, and access to research databases all cost a lot of money, and OA can help to reduce the costs users have to bear to use and benefit from scholarly research. This year’s theme raises the economics of OA by addressing the question of ownership.  

But this question is not just about money. There are many other reasons to support providing broad, open, unrestricted access to scholarly research. For example, by helping more scholarly research reach a wider audience than may be possible through traditional publishing, open access publishing can lead to new insights and revelations that may not have been possible without it. Indeed, one of the fundamental goals of the open access movement is to democratize access to information and knowledge. OA wants to knock down the barriers to access that prevent so many people from using scholarly material because access to knowledge is essential to making this world a better place. At a minimum, even without any new discoveries, open access can get important information and knowledge to people and places who may not be able to access it otherwise. 

The Budapest Open Access Initiative itself, the origin of the modern OA movement, describes access to information as a public good, and anticipates this year’s theme for International Open Access week: 

An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good. The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their research in scholarly journals without payment, for the sake of inquiry and knowledge. The new technology is the internet. The public good they make possible is the world-wide electronic distribution of the peer-reviewed journal literature and completely free and unrestricted access to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds. Removing access barriers to this literature will accelerate research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be, and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge. 

To celebrate International Open Access Week, the Penn Libraries have a bunch of great events planned for you. We start the week with a panel discussion on transitioning scholarly journals to open, then move to a workshop on open access publishing basics and the OA publishing agreements that Penn Libraries’ has made with several different publishers, and many more events. We hope you’ll join us.

Featured Image: "Data Lab Dialogue" by Hanna Barakat & Cambridge Diversity Fund / https://betterimagesofai.org / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/