International Open Access Week (October 20–26, 2025) is here, and with it an opportunity to reaffirm our shared commitment to learning together, investing in open solutions, and expanding the reach of scholarship worldwide.
This year's theme, Who Owns Our Knowledge? invites us to reflect on our efforts at Harvard to make research more accessible and to strengthen our support for open knowledge.
This commitment is shared across the academic world. Harvard faculty, through their votes to license scholarly articles for any non-commercial purpose, have long led in making research freely available. Our open access repository, DASH, is central to this mission. Since its launch in 2009, DASH has offered nearly 70,000 Harvard works for free, with over 67 million downloads worldwide.
But the impact goes beyond numbers. Users from around the globe share how open access to Harvard scholarship has changed their lives. For example, one DASH user shared that a freely available article helped him prepare for a pivotal job interview, opening doors to new possibilities and changing his family’s future. Stories like these remind us that knowledge truly has the power to transform lives.
DASH is just one part of Harvard Library’s effort to support open, scholarly-driven research practices. We provide guidance on open licensing and rights retention, helping our authors make informed decisions about how they share their work. Our priority is to ensure researchers everywhere can find, access, and reuse Harvard scholarship, while authors retain ownership and control of their work.
Repositories are driving innovation in open access publishing. New models like repository-overlay journals enable peer-reviewed, editor-curated content to be published openly and without fees. A community-based organization, Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR), has led the way in promoting repositories as part of a globally connected, interoperable scholarly infrastructure. The Publish, Review, Curate model promoted by COAR and others exemplifies a researcher-driven, low-cost approach to publishing.
At Harvard Library, we are using these innovative approaches in the Harvard Open Journals Program (HOJP). The program aims to ensure the viability of a no-fee journal model whether published by a nonprofit press or independently through an open repository. Alongside MIT Press and community partners, the program is collectivizing funding for Open Mind, edited by Harvard’s Samuel Gershman and MIT’s Edward Gibson, now in its second year of joint funding. With plans to add an overlay model later this year, the Harvard Open Journals Program demonstrates our commitment to knowledge as a public good.
Through DASH, Harvard Open Journals Program, and Harvard’s rights retention policies, we are working to shape a future where scholarly work is owned, led, and governed by scholars themselves. We invite you to join us at our 2025 Open Access Week events to continue these important conversations and collaborations.
“Who owns our knowledge?” is a call to action. The answer is found in the systems we build, the policies we uphold, and the communities we empower. By working together, we extend knowledge and preserve it for generations to come.