October 20-26, 2025 is International Open Access Week and a time to discuss Open Access (OA) to information. Scholarly publishing is largely still behind paywalls, but the open access movement has greatly expanded the amount of research that is freely available online for everyone to read, use, and re-use.

Levels of Open Access

There are a few paths to OA publishing:

• Green means that the work was published in an institutional or disciplinary open access repository available to the public at either the time of publication or at a later date
• Gold means that the work was published into an open access journal or conference proceedings
• Diamond means that not only has the work been published into an open access journal, but there also weren’t any article processing charges for the authors

There are also variations upon these paths, including the author publishing the work to the author’s own website or posting preprints that have not yet undergone peer review, or post-prints where the work has gone through peer review and been accepted for publication, but not yet published.

Who Owns Our Knowledge?

The theme of this year’s Open Access Week is “Who Owns Our Knowledge?,” which gives us an opportunity to think about not only where and how information is published, but who has a right to access and use that information. How can communities reassert control over the knowledge they produce?

In 2022, the White House released a memo decreeing that any federally funded research should be made immediately freely available to the public to accelerate data sharing and scientific innovation. This has necessitated that federal agencies update their open access policies to ensure this equal access to data and research.

With the explosion of artificial intelligence tools in recent years, in particular generative AI tools such as ChatGPT and Midjourney, there has been a large discussion of ownership and access to information. AI tools that are built on datasets and language models need very large amounts of information to create the training sets from which they analyze and predict outcomes. There have been several lawsuits against AI companies over the alleged scrapping of copyrighted information. Recently Anthropic AI has settled with a group of authors for $1.5 billion for the estimated 500,000 books covered by the settlement. In academia, we are also seeing the development of AI tools for research that will also bring into question the ownership of research being done on our campuses. With other lawsuits ongoing, where AI tools overlap with ownership of information and fair use is still being determined.

Open Access with Mullen Library

In addition to our catalog and databases we subscribe to, we also include several open access databases such as the Directory of Open Access Journals into our main search, SearchBox. This facilitates getting a larger pool of the research available when first searching on a topic to get a sense of all the scholarship available.

We also have a research guide on Open Educational Resources with links to databases with open access research and other open media.

Be sure to also check out our events page for information on our upcoming Digital Scholarship Workshops. You can also see all the events worldwide for Open Access Week here.

Resources
Association of Research Libraries. (2025). Public access to federally funded research and government information. https://www.arl.org/public-access-policies/

Open Access Network. (2025, June 10). Green, gold, and diamond Open Access. https://open-access.network/en/information/open-access-primers/green-and-gold

SPARC. (2025). International Open Access Week 2025. https://www.openaccessweek.org/

Veltman, C. (2025, September 5). Anthropic settles with authors in first-of-its-kind AI copyright infringement lawsuit. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2025/09/05/nx-s1-5529404/anthropic-settlement-authors-copyright-ai