Open Access Week Builds Connections with Community over Commercialization Theme

The 2023 International Open Access Week theme, “Community over Commercialization,” resonated with researchers, advocates, students, funders, and people around the world interested in advancing open scholarship in the public interest. There were meaningful conversations about what individuals and communities need to do to ensure community values are at the center of disseminating critical knowledge.

To illustrate how leaders of organizations in the open space are committed to the concept of “Community over Commercialization,” the Open Access Week website featured profiles exploring how different projects build that commitment into their work. Additional profiles will be added to the site in the coming weeks to help continue the conversation around this year’s theme.

Below we’ve collected a series of highlights from the week that might be of interest and serve as resources for continued work to promote open access with community at the core. If you have an event recording or resource you would like to include in this year’s highlights, please reach out.

Action, Collaborations, and Resources Advancing Open Access

Participants in the Global Summit on Diamond Open Access in Mexico published a Conclusions and a Way Forward statement about the convening. 

The Open Library of Humanities launched a zombie journal poster campaign, commemorating the term ‘zombie journal’ first used by linguists in 2015 following the mass resignation of editors at the Elsevier journal Lingua. 

The Scottish Confederation Of University & Research Libraries (SCURL) announced it was collaborating to establish Scottish Universities Press, a fully open access, nonprofit publishing press: 

SPARC Europe released a new report on rights retention and “non-legislative policy practices affecting researchers and authors in the authors' rights and licensing domain:” Opening Knowledge: Retaining Rights and Open Licensing in Europe 2023.

EIFL launched the Collaboration for Sustainable Open Access Publishing in Africa project at the Global Summit on Diamond on Open Access in Mexico. 

Johns Hopkins Sheridan Libraries shared Five Action Items Researchers Can Take Today.

Concordia University Library opened submissions for an open textbook grant program and developed an interactive quiz around both general and Canada-specific OA knowledge.

Articles and Blogs

Just before Open Access Week, We So Loved Open Access was published to recognize the 25th anniversary of SciELO with reflections from individuals who participated in the origins and evolution of the open access movement.

The DIAMAS project spoke with Iva Melinščak Zlodi, from the University of Zagreb about the OA Week theme. Read the Q&A interview posted here. 

CLACSO published a blog by Karina Batthyány about the Diamond Open Access Summit and the need to work for knowledge as a public good and a human right.

The University of Texas at Austin posted a series of blogs about the importance of open access, open science, OER, and repositories and created a “Sticker Shock” poster to convey the high cost of journals.

Harvard’s Martha Whitehead posted a statement in celebration of OA Week focused on the importance of repository-based, non-APC models for Open Access. 

The University College London produced a series of blogs during OA Week: How Creative Commons licences support open scholarship | UCL Open@UCL Blog

The COPIM Team interviewed Kevin Sanders about the Open Book Collective.

MIT Libraries published a series of articles including a kickoff blog highlighting MIT’s open infrastructure investments, an article on community-run data repositories, an update on the success of their open monographs fund, and an exploration of the benefits of open for  DSpace@MIT communities.

Melissa Hagemann, director of the BOAI, published an article on how Latin America exemplifies what can be accomplished when community is prioritized over commercialization.

A Selection of Recorded Presentations, Events, and Interviews Addressing This Year’s Theme

Penn State University Libraries hosted a discussion on open initiatives at the university to support research and teaching. Watch a recording of the panel on the PSU website.   

View highlights from an Open Access Week activities in Chile here. 

ASAPbio held a panel discussion on community and commercialization in biomedical preprint servers. The recorded event can be viewed here.

DataCite highlighted their Global Access Program in alignment with this year’s theme and linked to recordings of presentations given at the FORM 2023 event.

Open Access Australasia held several events covering topics from diamond open access journals to publishing avenues for Indigenous-led research. The recordings from each event are now available on the OAA website.

MIT Libraries hosted discussions on legal issues in computational research using text and data mining and on the launch of the non-profit, open access journal Imaging Neuroscience. There was also an announcement of the winners of the 2023 MIT Prize for Open Data.

Representatives from EIFL spoke at events in Botswana, North Macedonia, Serbia, Ukraine, Zimbabwe and a British Library conference in London,