“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” [see below]. 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. Read more here.
Open Access Week events at Adelphi University Libraries
The latest digital humanities projects are using linked open data and sometimes even artificial intelligence to make new discoveries about the history of slavery in the United States, including in New York City and on Long Island.
Thanks to the open-access databases created by Enslaved.org, FreedomOnTheMove.org, and other projects, searching for information about people enslaved in the United States is getting much easier. With the help of students, faculty, and researchers from around the world, these databases continue to grow as more records are discovered, digitized, and added. These digital resources help us tell fuller stories about slavery in the region and also help people find their enslaved ancestors.
Earlier this year, Professor Chris Barnes created a dataset for Enslaved.org containing information about 149 individuals enslaved in Brooklyn who obtained their freedom between 1797 and 1825. He also published a peer-reviewed article describing the data and its historical context in the Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation, a publication that serves as the clearinghouse for new datasets deposited within Enslaved.org. The managing editor of the journal, Dr. Kristina Poznan, will join Chris Barnes for this hybrid event held in celebration of Open Access Week 2025.
Register for this SPARK Seminar and join us in the Innovation Center or via Zoom to learn more about this digital humanities work and ways of getting involved through ongoing projects and crowdsourcing.
This SPARK Seminar is free and open to all Adelphi undergraduates and faculty members, but registration is required.
What funding and support is available to Adelphi faculty who want to publish an open access (OA) article, chapter, or book? Which journals and publishers have negotiated agreements with Adelphi to cover the costs of subscriptions and OA publishing? What are the options for faculty when no funding is available?
These and related questions will be addressed during this virtual event held in celebration of International Open Access Week. Register and join Andie Ward, Vice Provost for Research and Libraries, Sandy Urban, Chairperson of University Libraries, and Chris Barnes, Digital Publishing Librarian for an informal discussion about the ways the university is supporting faculty in their efforts to publish their work OA, ensuring maximum dissemination and impact.
The theme of this year's International Open Access Week is Community Over Commercialization. It invokes the various ways that the academic community - researchers, librarians, funders, administrators - are collaborating to create a scholarly publishing ecosystem which is an equitable, sustainable, and open alternative to the legacy system dominated by a handful of commercial publishers who have monopolized the market and reaped huge profits at the expense of nonprofit academic institutions and the people they serve.
By pooling resources, sharing infrastructure, and agreeing to operate by a set of shared principles, the community is finding ways to pay for open access (OA) publishing which do not rely on giving publishers even more money in the form of article processing charges or APCs. The commercial publishers who run hybrid journals charge high subscription fees and then require authors to pay an APC on top of that if they want to publish the article OA. These fees, which commonly range between $3000 and $5000 but can go as high as $11,000, are simply inverting the inequity from reader to author.
By working together, the academic community is preparing to walk away from such inequitable arrangements by the end of 2024. Thanks to the many signatories to Plan S and the billions of dollars of research funding they control, the scholarly publishing system is being forced to flip to open access on a firm timeline. Furthermore, new guidance from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, or the so-called Nelson Memo, means that the results of all federally funded research must be immediately and openly available to the public starting no later than December 31, 2025. If journals want to publish the results of research funded by any of these institutions, they must abandon their subscriptions and find new ways to fund their operations. Thankfully, the academic community has been hard at work finding new business models and collaborative arrangements which can and are allowing many journals to flip from subscription to OA without charging author-facing fees.
Digital Scholarship Show-and-Tell for Open Access Week 2024
Wednesday, October 23rd, 2024, on Zoom and in the Innovation Center (Swirbul Library first floor).
Bring your lunch and learn about some exciting digital scholarship projects on a wide range of topics from universities around the globe. From newly digitized archives and databases to crowd-sourced transcription and mapping projects, students and faculty are creating works of digital scholarship that are interdisciplinary, multimedia, and free to access online.
Since the theme of Open Access Week 2024 is Community over Commercialization, we will focus on projects that are community-based or focused on particular communities including African Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans, as well as the LGBTQ+, disabled, and migrant communities. Each of these projects seeks to use digital tools and the internet to increase understanding and awareness of these communities by the public and not just other students or scholars.
Below is a recording of the event and here is a link to the presentation slides.
