2026 International Open Access Week: The Cost of Knowledge
“The Cost of Knowledge” is the theme for this year’s International Open Access Week (October 19-25).
We create and share knowledge in order to advance human understanding and the common good. We recognize that accessing and sharing knowledge is a human right. Yet, the costs to access and share knowledge continue to increase, often dramatically. Why? Who benefits?
Leddy Library will be hosting a range of hybrid and virtual events in the first floor Research Collaboratory. Join us for whichever sessions you'd like! We'll have group viewing of virtual sessions hosted by libraries around the world, and have a hybrid session on getting started with ORCID and what benefits that unlocks for faculty and students alike.
| Date | Time | Title | Host institution | abstract |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-10-15 | 8:00-11:00 am | Who Measures Merit? Open Science and the Future of Academic Evaluation (Zoom and Leddy Collaboratory) | IE University Library (Madrid) | Research assessment is undergoing profound change as institutions worldwide seek more responsible, transparent, and inclusive approaches to evaluating research and researchers. This online event will explore how the principles of Open Science are reshaping research assessment, from international initiatives such as the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA) to national developments and institutional implementation. Speakers will discuss the evolving policy landscape, the role of qualitative and responsible assessment practices, the challenges of moving beyond traditional metrics, and the services and support that universities can provide to foster meaningful change. It will offer an opportunity to reflect on the future of academic evaluation and the collective efforts driving research assessment reform. Programme 8:00 – 8:15 am Greetings and introduction 8:15 – 8:45 am “Rethinking Academic Merit: Open Science and the Shift in Research Assessment” Alicia Gómez (IE University Library, Madrid) 8:45 – 9:15 am “CoARA Italian National Chapter: Challenges and Opportunities” Paola Galimberti (Università Statale degli Studi di Milano) 9:15 – 9:45 am “CoARA in Practice: Infrastructures Supporting the Future of Research Evaluation” Susanna Mornati (4Science) 9:45 – 10:00 am Break 10:00 – 11:00 am Round table: Francesco Grossetti (Bocconi University) The event is organized in partnership with IE University Library (Madrid) and in collaboration with the network of universities of the European Project CIVICA. |
| 2026-10-20 | 11:00 am - noon | Publishing Open Data with Dryad (Zoom and Leddy Collaboratory) | University of Tennessee-Knoxville | Join us for Open Access Week 2026 with UT Libraries! During this week of events, we’ll share resources related to learning about open access and how you can make your work open! This workshop will provide a brief overview of Dryad and show how researchers can deposit and publish datasets openly. |
| 2026-10-20 | 3:00-4:00 pm | Cost Comparison of Open Data Repositories (password: oamonth; Zoom and Leddy Collaboratory) | University of New Mexico | This online session offers a practical roadmap to navigating generalist open data repository options and will cover:
Confirmed speakers:
|
| 2026-10-21 | 9:30-10:30 am | Zurich | “The cost of knowledge” – this year’s Open Access Week motto asks why publishing publicly funded research still costs so much, and who benefits. Björn Brembs will argue that today’s journal system is structurally broken: a handful of publishers extract far more from public budgets than the service justifies, starving the infrastructure that reliable, reproducible research actually needs. Thus, the research system faces not only a replicability crisis but also an affordability crisis and a functionality crisis. Drawing on his paper “Replacing academic journals” he will sketch what a leaner, community-owned alternative could look like. Björn Brembs is Professor of Neurogenetics at the University of Regensburg, Germany, and an advocate for reforming scholarly publishing for many years. | |
| 2026-10-21 | 2:00-3:00 pm | Keynote: Reclaiming the Commons: Restructuring Scholarly Communication with Digital Public Goods (Zoom and Leddy Collaboratory) | Indiana University at Bloomington | Commercial publishing models continue to gatekeep scholarly outputs through high subscription costs and author fees. Drawing from Latin America’s long-standing tradition of community-led openness, cooperation, and non-commercial knowledge sharing, Arianna Becerril García will explore the necessary transformation of scholarly communication. By positioning open access infrastructure and non-commercial publishing models as essential digital public goods, the session will reflect on regional models of knowledge sovereignty and practical frameworks for building sustainable, interoperable, and ethically aligned open science infrastructures that return control of the academic commons to the global scholarly community. Keynote Speaker Arianna Becerril García holds a Ph.D. and M.Sc. in Computer Science from Tecnológico de Monterrey and a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering from Autonomous University of the State of Mexico (UAEMex). She received the International Science Council’s Early Career Scientist Award and is a full-time professor and the Secretary of Science at UAEMex. She co-founded the Redalyc open infrastructure, driving non-APC Diamond Open Access publishing across Latin America and now expanding worldwide. She also co-founded and leads AmeliCA Open Knowledge, a community-driven initiative advocating non-commercial scholarly communication and regional knowledge sovereignty. Becerril García has served on advisory and council boards for international organizations, including the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and the National System of Scientific Publications of Mexico. She collaborates on UNESCO-supported open science projects globally and coordinates a Latin American research group at the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO). |
| 2026-10-22 | 10:00-11:00 am | Getting Started with Your ORCID (Teams and Leddy Collaboratory) - POSTPONED TO NOVEMBER due to presenter illness. | University of Windsor, Leddy Library | Establishing an ORCID is a great way to maximize your research impact and reduce the amount of work a researcher needs to do to keep their public research profile complete and up to date. In this session, Leddy librarians from the Research & Publishing Services Unit will introduce ORCID, its benefits, and how to get started. This session will be recorded, but Q&A at the end of the session will not be recorded for attendees' privacy. |
| 2026-10-22 | 1:00-2:00 pm | Publishing for Impact: A Conversation on Open Access (Teams ONLY) | Athabaska University Press | Athabasca University Press invites you to join the directors of two Canadian open access scholarly presses for a conversation about the role of open access publishing in expanding the reach and impact of research. Drawing on their experience in scholarly publishing, Ryan Van Huijstee, Director of Concordia University Press and MacKinley Darlington, interim Director of Athabasca University Press will discuss why authors choose to publish open and how open access supports the broader circulation, use, and influence of scholarly work. Open to scholars, readers, and publishing professionals across the globe, this event will focus on what impact looks like in an open access environment, from academic engagement and citation to public readership, community uptake, and contributions to the common good. By exploring how open access publishing helps connect ideas, foster discovery, and extend the reach of research, participants will leave with a better understanding of the role open access can play in maximizing the visibility and influence of their work. |
| 2026-10-23 | 10:00-11:00 am | The Cost of Incentives: Making Open Scholarship the Norm (Zoom ONLY) | University of Indiana at Bloomington | Funders, governments, and universities are increasingly seeking to make open scholarship a routine and valued part of academic practice. But making open scholarship the norm raises difficult questions about incentives, equity, and institutional responsibility. How can open scholarship be encouraged without it becoming another unsupported expectation, particularly when researchers have unequal access to funding, infrastructure, time, and disciplinary support? Should scholars be expected to adopt open practices, and if so, what responsibilities do universities, publishers, and other institutions have to make those practices feasible? This panel will therefore examine efforts to normalize open scholarship through changes to research assessment, scholarly communication, and research infrastructure. It will ask not only how researchers might be encouraged to adopt open practices, but also what universities, publishers, and other organizations must do to create the conditions that make openness possible, sustainable, and professionally valued. Panelists
|
Event Date:
Oct 19, 2026
Event Time:
11:45PM
chat loading...
Connect with your library