Who owns our knowledge? Open Access Week
October 20–26, 2025, is the Open Access Week, an annual global initiative promoting open access to scientific results. This year’s theme is “Who owns our knowledge?” It invites the scientific community to rethink who has access to scientific and academic results, how knowledge is created and shared, and who owns the knowledge itself. It also encourages people to identify which open science ecosystem solutions best serve the interests of society and the academic community.
In recent years, community-driven knowledge-sharing models, such as diamond open access, have grown worldwide; more editorial boards are reclaiming ownership of journals, and institutions are striving to reduce their dependence on commercial databases and metrics.
At the same time, new risks emerge: the use of academic knowledge to train artificial intelligence models without proper consultation or author consent. The counterbalance to this is non-commercial models supported by the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science and the Toluca-Cape Town Declaration.
During the week, the VMU library invites you to:
- Online seminars on open access, research data management, and copyright issues
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- A Practical Guide to Open Research
2025-10-22 12:30–15:30 Registration
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- Who “owns” research data?
2025-10-23 13:00–13:30 No registration required. Event link (Zoom)
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- Open Data in the Humanities: Balancing Legal Constraints, FAIR Principles and AI
2025-10-23 15:00–15:30 More information
- Publish your work in open access journals for free or at a discount.
- Choose a non-commercial open access model – publish in “diamond” open access journals: journals published by VMU, journals indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).
- Learn more about the open access movement at the University.
More information about Open Access Week.