“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, significant progress has been made 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.

About SPARC

SPARC is a non-profit advocacy organization that supports open systems for research and education that enable everyone, everywhere to access, contribute to, and benefit from the knowledge that shapes our world. International Open Access Week was established by SPARC and partners in the student community in 2008. Learn more at sparcopen.org.

About International Open Access Week

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, and its organization is led by a global advisory committee, which selects each year’s theme. The official hashtag of Open Access Week is #OAweek.

Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License to SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition).

Watch this PowerPoint presentation to learn more about open access and developments in academic publishing: