Open Access

Open Access Week

Help us to celebrate Open Access during this annual international event

What is Open Access Week?

International Open Access Week is an annual event celebrating the benefits of Open Access, where the outcomes of research are made freely available online for others to reuse. You can find more information about Open Access in our guide on the basics of Open Access.

Open Access Week international logo

Open Access Week started with the first "Open Access Day" held in 2007, organised by the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) in the USA. Since then, it has grown to be an entire week that is celebrated across the world. You can find more information on the history and purpose of Open Access Week on the SPARC website or on the Open Access Week event website.

What are we doing this year?

Open Access Week 2023 officially happened between the 23th and 27th October. However, unusual circumstances this year caused us at RGU to delay our local celebration of this year's event until the end of November, so we will observed it instead between the 27th November and the 1st December.

Each year, SPARC set an overall theme for Open Access Week, which invites people to think about a specific aspect of Open Access. The theme for 2023 was "Community over Commercialisation".

During the week, we invited people to share their thoughts on a number of questions relating to this year's theme. These questions were displayed in various places across campus and we're really pleased that people found time to contribute! You can find a summary of the responses we received in this blog post (published on Friday 8th December).

And in case you missed it...

We have a selection of minigames and puzzles that we produced for Open Access Week 2021. These are still available, if anyone wants to give them a go!

If you have any questions or would like to talk more with us about Open Access and other related topics, just get in touch.