Open Access Week 2026: The cost of knowledge

The international Open Access Week will take place on 20–26 October 2026. This year’s theme invites us to reflect on the financial, human and environmental costs of creating, sharing and sustaining knowledge.

Published

20.10.2026

The growing concentration of knowledge and increasing commercial control influence who controls knowledge and under what conditions it can be used. This year, International Open Access Week invites us to consider how openness and the public interest can be promoted in a context where private commercial interests are gaining increasing influence.

Open science is not just about making publications accessible. It is also about who has the opportunity to create, share and use knowledge – and who bears the costs involved.

The University of Jyväskylä spent more than €1.3 million last year on making research articles and books openly accessible. A sum of this magnitude could likely be used for other purposes—especially since more financially sustainable publishing options exist, along with available support and tools at JYU. Despite this, fee-based open publishing has become an established practice that is unfortunately only rarely questioned.

A blog post by the Open Science Centre highlights the challenges associated with paid open access, explores why it continues to persist, and reminds readers of the following two funder-approved ways to publish openly without article processing charges.

Diamond open access publishing

Choose a publication channel that does not charge authors fees. Such diamond open access journals can be found, for example, via the Open Journal Finder service. Open access books that are free for authors are published by providers such as Open Book Publishers (OBP)—not to mention the university’s own JYU Studies publication series.

Find scientific journals to publish in: Open Journal Finder

Self-archiving

At the University of Jyväskylä, the easiest way to achieve open access is through self-archiving. This year, the prior licensing model (Rights Retention Strategy, RRS), now adopted also in Finnish universities, enables the immediate open availability of articles published behind paywalls under a CC licence. Thanks to this model, authors can publish in subscription-based journals or edited volumes without paying publication fees and ensure openness by depositing the accepted manuscript in the JYX institutional repository as soon as the article is published.

For more information, please contact the Open Science Centre:
openpublishing@jyu.fi

Open Access Week 2026

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