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 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 2025 ran from Monday 20th through Friday 24th October. 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 2025 was "Who owns our knowledge?".
This theme asked a pointed question about the present moment and how, in a time of disruption, communities can reassert control over the knowledge they produce.
We ran several activites this year:
- Poll: Who should own our knowledge? We ran a poll over the course of the week, inviting the RGU community to let us know their thoughts on who should own the world's knowledge. You can find the results of the poll here!
- Special blog posts. Each day during Open Access Week, we released a special blog post:
- Pop-up stand. We ran two pop-up stands: one at Gray's on Monday, and one at the Sir Ian Wood Building on Thursday. As well as being an opportunity to learn more about Open Access and the Library's research support services, there was also a chance to play our "Open Research Challenge". Well done to everyone who took part; especially to the person who got our fastest time of 23 seconds!
- Games-Based Training Showcase. The RGU Games-Based Training group (which includes colleagues from both the Library, and Research, Innovation and Enterprise) ran a showcase of some of our games for Associate Deans for Research and Research Degree Co-ordinators. If you're interested in learning more about what we demonstrated at this session, please speak with the relevant people in your School.
If you have any questions or would like to talk more with us about Open Access and other related topics, just get in touch.