Who owns our knowledge?

The 20th of October marks the start of International Open Access Week. This year’s theme, which is also the question in the title, encourages us to think about access to online back catalogues and how we can regain control over the knowledge we generate. As geopolitical dynamics shift, affecting investments in scholarly communication and publishers profiting from agreements with companies training large language models, now is a crucial moment to consider how we can protect our research.

If you are wondering why there is a photo of flying creatures circling the Hungarian Parliament Building, read on.

We will begin by introducing the late Robert Maxwell, a former British Member of Parliament and media tycoon. I’m aware that for some, the name is only recognisable because his daughter is regularly in the news. But besides his history of financial irregularities and other family crimes, our focus here is on his role in the commercialisation of academic publishing.

Maxwell recognised the potential for significant financial gain in the dissemination of scholarly knowledge. The legacy of his aggressive business approach, which included rapidly expanding the number of journals academic libraries had to subscribe to and exploiting early-career researchers eager to publish, haunts the sector to this day (although Pergamon Press was by no means the only academic publisher using aggressive techniques – for anyone interested in Open Access, there is an excellent new book by Samuel Moore available for free download).

By the winter of 2001, the Open Society Institute (OSI) invited representatives from various open initiatives across the Global North to a meeting in Budapest. This led to the creation of the Budapest Open Access Initiative, which proposed two complementary approaches to make research openly available online: self-archiving and encouraging a new generation of journals committed to open access.

Despite this challenge, commercial publishers found various ways to profit from the research of others, and their dominance has intensified. Where publishing was once mostly free for authors, a model based on article processing charges has left unfunded authors shocked to receive an invoice they cannot afford.

The OSI, now the Open Society Foundation, has since moved its headquarters from Budapest due to increased legal restrictions imposed by the Hungarian government. The former headquarters, located in the old Lipótváros neighbourhood south of the Parliament, was still behind scaffolding this September.

But all is not lost; as a community, we can connect with others and stay informed. Libraries and Learning Resources has a dedicated team to help authors navigate the increasingly complex world of publishing, so don’t wait until article acceptance, as your options will likely be limited.

This Open Access Week, Scholarly Communication Services within Libraries and Learning Resources will launch a weekly online drop-in session for anyone interested in making their research openly accessible. We call it the Open Access Wednesday Fika, with ‘Fika’ being a Swedish tradition of connecting with colleagues and friends over coffee. This will be a chance for you to speak with someone about using Rights Retention to self-archive your work without publisher restrictions, or how to find journals included in our publisher agreements using our Search Tool. Feel free to ask any questions directly to our team member—there are no silly questions here! And don’t worry, coffee and bullar are totally optional, but they might make the session even more enjoyable.