Open Access Week 2025: Who Owns Our Knowledge? – Update from the LIBER Open Access Working Group
Every year, LIBER actively supports the International Open Access Week, taking place from 20-26 October. Standing with this global movement, LIBER libraries are organising events for their local communities to strengthen the idea of Open Access on their campuses and communities.
What does this year’s theme ‘Who Owns Our Knowledge’ mean to the LIBER community?
Public ownership in research communication and the active role of the library community are crucial for ensuring equitable access, community engagement, and the integrity of scholarly information. There are several reasons for this:
- Non-commercial services ensure that access to research and information is inclusive and not limited by profit motives. Libraries facilitate free access to a wide range of resources, democratising information for all citizens regardless of socioeconomic status.
- Research communication under public ownership is more likely to reflect community needs and serve the common good, rather than narrow commercial or political interests. Libraries act as anchors in their communities, safeguarding the neutrality and reliability of information dissemination.
- Publicly owned infrastructures—such as libraries—encourage collaborations among researchers, practitioners, governments, and citizens to address local and global challenges. These collaborations support the development of new resources, technologies, and services tailored to community interests.
- By advocating for open access, transparent communication, and responsible stewardship of digital resources, the library community helps maintain high ethical standards and safeguards the integrity of academic research. This good governance approach minimises distortion or manipulation of research findings for private gain and supports informed decision-making in society.
All these reasons (inclusiveness, reflection of community needs, encouragement of collaborations, good governance) are also reflected in the LIBER strategy and are exemplified by its member libraries.
LIBER OA Working Group focus areas in 2025
The Open Access Working Group supports LIBER and its strategy, namely in the field of Open Science and Open Access. The main topics for the Working Group are:
a) Transformative Agreements with commercial publishers
Transformative Agreements combine the reading access to the journals of a specific publisher with the right to publish in these journals in Open Access. The costs for reading and publishing are organised in one single contract, without additional costs, e.g. for single authors. Against the background of growing support for Open Access by research policy makers and research funders transformative agreements become more popular every year. The ESAC Registry of Transformative Agreements now counts more than 1000 such agreements, negotiated in over 70 countries with more than 60 publishers large and small, leading to the publication of well over one million articles immediately open access by 2024. In Europe today the majority of agreements with large commercial publishers like Elsevier, Wiley, or Springer are based on the transformative agreement concept. But there are still a lot of differences between the individual contracts, e.g. on how much they contribute to a largescale transformation of the publication market towards Open Access. On this background the Swedish library consortium Bibsam has decided, from 2026 onwards only to negotiate for publication in open access journals and not to sign agreements for reading and publishing in hybrid journals anymore.
LIBER supports its member libraries to negotiate agreements with publishers, which enable more and inclusive Open Access. It is connected to initiatives like OA2020 and is organising regular events to inform the research library and open science community about new trends. For example, in 2024, the Open Access Working Group organised a Webinar on new studies regarding the impact of transformative agreements.
b) Scholar-Led Diamond Open Access
Scholar-led Diamond Open Access (DOA) refers to academic publishing models where the entire process—from journal ownership and editorial management to actual publishing—is controlled by scholars or academic communities rather than commercial publishers, and no fees are charged to either authors or readers. This approach is supported by many research policy makers and also by research funders (e.g. by Coalition S or the Council of the European Union). On the back of this scholar-led DOA has developed very fast in the last years. Starting with the Action Plan for Open Access in 2022 several national DOA Capacity centres have been established across Europe, e.g. in
- Germany
- The Netherlands
- The Nordic Countries (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden)
They all aim to establish or maintain scholar-led journals under the DOA model. They advise journal editors, provide journal platforms and sometimes even help to organise financial support.
The EU funded several important projects, which focus on DOA, e.g. DIAMAS and CRAFT-OA. These projects played a pivotal role in mapping the landscape, identifying key challenges, and also laying the groundwork for a federated Diamond OA infrastructure. On the back of these projects came also the idea for an overall umbrella organisation on scholar-led DOA in Europe: The European Diamond Capacity Hub (EDCH), which was established in January 2025. The EDCH aims to strengthen the Diamond OA community in Europe by supporting European institutional, national and disciplinary capacity centres and Diamond Publishers and Service Providers in their mission of performing Diamond OA scholarly publishing. The EDCH will provide these Diamond stakeholders with coordination, sustainability, training modules, technical tools, and services at scale.
Within LIBER, the Open Access Working Group actively supports scholar-led DOA. Several working group members are involved in their national DOA capacity centres and have build up expertise in this field. Moreover, the Working Group has organised events on the topic, e.g. a workshop at the LIBER Winter Event 2024 in Maribor, Slovenia.
c) Open Access Infrastructures (incl. Repositories)
Open Access infrastructures are tools and services in the context of Open Access publications. These can be databases like the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) or the Open Policy Finder, software to publish or store Open Access publications like Dspace or Open Journal Systems (OJS) or add-on services like DeepGreen, which acts as an interface between publishers journal articles and institutional or subject-based repositories. A lot of them have been created in academic institutions and are also hosted and maintained in a non-commercial way.
LIBER supports the idea of scholar-led infrastructures and is actively connected to initiatives like SCOSS (Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services) who seek to organise financial sustainability for open infrastructures. The Open Access Working Group has hosted two webinars on the topic of open infrastructures, one together with SCOSS and one in cooperation with COAR called “Leading the Way: How libraries are shaping the future of repository services”
Looking ahead: What’s next for the OA Working Group?
In the upcoming months, the LIBER Open Access Working Group plans to organise workshops and webinars on several Open Access related topics. They will be planned mainly in cooperation with other important stakeholders in the scholarly publishing landscape, e.g. with OA2020 on libraries as participants of transformative agreements or with the EDCH on Diamond Open Access. Moreover, the Working Group also wants to add its topics to the next LIBER events like the LIBER Conference or the LIBER Winter Event. To stay on top of the latest developments, stay informed via LIBER’s social media and monthly newsletter, the LIBER Insider.
In addition to that, several Working Group members are also active in other Open Access related international networks, initiatives or services, e.g.:
LIBER’s mission is to support European research libraries and enable world-class research. Openness is embedded to the core of our work, guided by our 2023-2027 Strategy and the strategic node ‘Advancing Open Science’. Within this framework, Open Access stands as a key focus area, facilitating the way towards inclusive and sustainable access to scholarly publishing.
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