Open Access Week 2025: Who Owns Our Knowledge?

International Open Access Week (October 20-26) aims to challenge traditional models of knowledge ownership. We need to reflect on who controls access to research and scholarly outputs, whose voices are amplified or marginalised, and how knowledge can be equitably shared for the common good.

This year’s theme asks a pointed question about the present moment and how, in a time of disruption, communities can reassert control over the knowledge they produce. It also challenges us to reflect on not only who has access to education and research but on how knowledge is created and shared, where it has come from, and whose voices are recognized and valued.

Supporting Alternative Models of Knowledge Ownership at Westminster:

University of Westminster Press

Launched in 2015, the University of Westminster Press is a digital-first open access publisher of peer-reviewed academic books, policy briefs and journals. UWP exists to provide global public access to academic work in multiple formats.

Inspired by the movement toward open research, our mission is to make journals and books free at the point of access in digital form and accessible and affordable in print, giving them the widest possible dissemination, ensuring researchers around the globe can discover scholarly materials without excess cost and with maximum convenience. The Press provides access to our online journals and books completely free of charge in a variety of digital formats. Print books are also available for purchase, and we work to ensure that our prices are as low as possible.

UWP balances cost-effectiveness with a desire to avoid charging fees directly to authors. As a Diamond Open Access publisher, we do not charge fees to either authors or readers. We explore and encourage collective funding mechanisms and library membership schemes, and we look to diverse income streams to match our costs over the longer term.

You can find more information about the Press and the UWP submission guidelines on the University of Westminster Press website.

Research Data Management

Supporting and advocating for good research data management at every stage of the open research lifecycle is integral to Westminster’s open research environment. Working towards making data open where possible, and recognising the importance of reproducibility, the University is a member of the UK Reproducibility Network, a national peer-led consortium working to promote Open Research. On our dedicated Research Data webpages, you’ll find guidance for every stage from planning for openness to using research data repositories to publish and share your software or code. We have also published a step-by-step guide to licensing your research data for re-use by others.

Many of the major UK research funders support the principle that the research data or research materials underpinning published research outputs should be made available open access wherever possible, by the publication date of the research outputs, and following the FAIR Guiding Principles (2016). These four guiding principles – Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability – are designed to ensure the transparency, reproducibility, and reusability of publicly-funded research data, and to make publicly-funded research data open for the benefit of all.

Successfully managing your research data will will allow you to manage ownership of the knowledge you produce. Moving away from traditional models where copyright ownership was transferred to publishers, who then choose when, where and in what format your research will be seen and the audience to whom it will be available.

Library & Archives Services Support

Creative Commons Licences

Creative Commons Licences are a type of open licences that you can apply to your work to indicate you are happy to share the work under certain conditions. They give you far greater control over the knowledge you have created, and the Westminster LibGuide, Copyright for Researchers, contains guidance on using and choosing between the different licences available. The licences allow you to specify if you wish your work to be used for commercial purposes and if you require the person re-using your work to share it under the same licence, or if you are happy with derivative works being created from your work. 

Open Book Publishers Supporter Membership

Open Book Publishers is an award-winning, non-profit publisher of Open Access monographs, run by academics in Cambridge and London and committed to making high-quality research freely available to readers around the world. By joining the OBP Library Membership Scheme, Westminster is supporting Open Access publishing and the endeavour to make high-quality academic monographs freely available to readers everywhere.

WestminsterResearch

Set up in 2005, our institutional repository, WestminsterResearch, continues to openly share as much of the research output of the university as possible. As well as listing and making open existing open access content. It further supports open access by:

• enabling ‘green’ open access, whereby copies of accepted author manuscripts are openly shared, making the content of journal articles accessible to anyone, anywhere with internet access.
• including PhD theses since 2008
• allowing practice-based research to benefit from being more effectively shared. More information in our previous post.
• integrating with the ORCID researcher ID system. ORCID allows you to store together all your research outputs within your account and share them between platforms. 

Open Access Publisher Agreements

The Content & Digital Services team in the library are responsible for helping to negotiate, then purchase and implement subscriptions to content for the university. Read and Publish agreements mean we can access and read content from a subscribed publisher, as well as publish through gold open access, in return for a single subscription cost. You won’t be asked to pay a one off APC. Link through to ‘How to Make Your Research Articles Open at Westminster‘ for a list of subscribed publishers.