Open Access Week 2026: Addressing the Cost of Knowledge

International Open Access Week officially starts today, and conversations about “The Cost of Knowledge” are well underway. Many organizers have used the theme as a jumping off point, and this week’s discussions build directly on the themes of recent years: “Who Owns Our Knowledge?” and “Community Over Commercialization.”

Over the coming days, communities around the world will consider the financial, human, and environmental costs of creating, sharing, and sustaining knowledge—particularly when these costs are driven by private rather than public interests. Importantly, they will also focus on the concrete steps we can take, individually and collectively, to address these costs and advance systems for sharing knowledge that reflect the best interests of the communities.

Many of the events this year highlight the growing momentum behind community-supported models like Diamond Open Access and the importance of alignment with the values that drive the production and sharing of knowledge: advancing human understanding and the common good. We hope this year’s theme will contribute to useful conversations and to meaningful action, both this week and beyond.

As Open Access Week events have continued to move online or hybrid formats, there is more opportunity than ever for an active global discussion. We hope the selection of locally organized events below will provide a good sense of the diversity of conversations happening this week that anyone can join and contribute to. You can also find resources for engaging with this year’s theme through community-recommended resources, theme profiles, and the recently released Cost of Knowledge Accounting Analysis. As always, you can participate in the online discussion this week using the hashtag #OAWeek.

A Selection of Locally Organized Open Access Week Events

Monday, October 19

• Privatización, mercantilización y precarización de los bienes comunes del conocimiento: los costos en el Sur Global

• Who Owns, Pays for and Benefits from Knowledge?

• The Cost of Value(s): What Should Libraries Pay For?

• Wissen kostet Daten – Datentracking in der Wissenschaft

• The Cost against the Value of Knowledge

• What's the state of Open Access Repositories and Research Impact?

Tuesday, October 20

• Anarchizing Information: Thinking Critically About Open-Access Resources for Education

• Community Over Commercialization:  Advancing Global Health Knowledge for the Public Good

• All that glitters is not gold: The case for Diamond Open Access

• Open and Engaged conference 2026: The Costs of Inequity, Infrastructure and Trust

• From Access to Opportunity: How Open Access Expanded the Reach of My Research

• The Cost of Openness: AI, Extraction, and Scholarly Governance

• The Cost of Knowledge: Community-Governed Knowledge in the age of AI

• Charting a Third Path: Fair Use, Open Access, and University-Built Datasets for Academic AI

Wednesday, October 21

• Reclaiming the Commons: Restructuring Scholarly Communication with Digital Public Goods

• “The Cost of Knowledge: Open Access, Democracy and the Future of Europe

• Open Access in Egyptology: Digital Platforms, Open Science and Public Engagement

• Fifth International Conference “Open Science and Innovates in Ukraine 2026”

• Open Access Week Event 2026: What Does Knowledge Cost?

• Systematic Exclusion: The Visibility Divide: Barriers Facing Researchers in the Global South

• The cost of knowledge – Wer bezahlt eigentlich für Wissen?

• Publier en libre accès diamant : témoignages de la communauté universitaire

Thursday, October 22

• Open research, trusted knowledge: the future of repositories

• Cost of Lost Knowledge: When Research Cannot Wait

• Low-cost and no-cost, community-developed services: A showcase and discussion from the institutional publishing perspective

• Connecting Open Science and Research Assessment Reform: Good Practices for Advancing Research Cultures

• Visibility Matters: Exploring the Cost of Closed Knowledge

• Two Truths and a Lie: Public Access Policy, Publishing, and Pilfering

• The Cost of Knowledge: Three Perspectives on the Price of Open Access

• Diamond fever! Webinar on visible and invisible costs in diamond open access

• Open Access for Everyone?  Language, Confidence and the Hidden Barriers Facing First-Time Researchers

Friday, October 23

• The Cost of Incentives: Making Open Scholarship the Norm

• AAU OPEN: Two Years of University-Led Diamond Open Access Publishing

• A diamond knowledge is possible

• No paywalls, no publishing fees. Is it possible? Insights from diamond open access publishing at University of Oxford