What Is International Open Access Week, and Why Does It Matter?

“Open” Is Not Always “Fair”: Turning Knowledge from a Commodity into a Commons

October 21, 2026 at 01:41 PM16 min readAuthor: Oğuz Demirkapı

The Cost of Knowledge: What Is International Open Access Week, and Why Does It Matter?

Dear Young Comrades,

In the week you are reading these lines, the same question is being discussed in libraries, universities, journal editorial boards and civil society organisations all over the world: What is the cost of knowledge, and who pays it? 19–25 October 2026 is International Open Access Week. In Turkey, too, the week is going on under the umbrella of Açık Erişim Türkiye (Open Access Turkey), with the hashtag #AE2026, panels and workshops.

Perhaps you are hearing this name for the first time; perhaps you dismiss it as "academics' own internal business". Yet the issue is the very name of this site: knowledge commons. A student who needs an article for an assignment and hits a 40-dollar paywall, a village doctor who cannot get hold of the latest treatment guidelines, a trade unionist who cannot read a piece of occupational health research: all of these are consequences of the same property relation. In this piece I will try to explain what the week is, where it comes from, what this year's theme opens up for discussion, and what class position we draw from it.

First, the Concept: What Is Open Access?

In its simplest definition, open access means that scientific knowledge (an article, a book, a dataset) can be read, downloaded, shared and reused by anyone on the internet, without any fee or technical barrier. This definition became an international principle with the Budapest Open Access Initiative in 2002.

There are two classic routes to open access:

The green route: Whichever journal researchers publish their article in, they place a copy in an institutional or subject repository (in Turkey, universities' open repositories, or at national level YÖK's open science repository); everyone reads it from there.
The gold route: The journal publishes openly itself. But this is where the knot begins: most of the gold route has turned into a model that charges a fee not when an article is read but when it is published (the APC, or article processing charge).

There is also a third route that is becoming increasingly important:

The diamond route: No fee is charged either to readers or to authors. The journal is run by a university, a scholarly society, a public institution or a volunteer publishing collective. Knowledge is a commons in the true sense.

Keep the difference between these three routes in mind; at the end of the piece we will talk about why the word "open" is not enough on its own.

A Short History of the Week: From Students to the World

Knowing that Open Access Week was born from a student action changes how we look at it.

Year	Development
2002	The Budapest Open Access Initiative: the international definition and principles of open access
2007	In the US, the student organisation Students for Free Culture and the Alliance for Taxpayer Access hold a "National Day of Action for Open Access" on 15 February
2008	14 October is declared international Open Access Day; led by SPARC and student groups, the event spreads around the world
2009	The day becomes a week: International Open Access Week
2012	The practice of an official annual theme begins; Turkey's first open access events (AE2012) are held
2015	The Ankara Declaration is published at the end of the events in Turkey
2021	The UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science is adopted; it has now been endorsed by 193 countries
2023–2024	The same theme two years running: "Community over Commercialization"
2025	Theme: "Who Owns Our Knowledge?"
2026	Theme: "The Cost of Knowledge"

Sources: Open Access Week (Wikipedia), openaccessweek.org, acikerisim.org (in Turkish).

Look carefully at the list of themes: a movement that began in 2012 with a technical, optimistic call such as "set the default to open" arrived at "Open for whom?" in 2019, "Community over Commercialization" in 2023, "Who owns our knowledge?" in 2025, and this year at the question of "the cost of knowledge". In other words, by going through its own experience, the movement reached the question of property and capital. From our point of view this is not something to belittle: a movement that began as a liberal demand for "access" is rediscovering the class question in practice.

This Year's Theme: "The Cost of Knowledge"

The theme statement of the international advisory committee opens with this observation: access to knowledge is a human right, and knowledge serves the common good; but the costs of access and sharing are rising constantly, and often sharply. And the real question: Who profits from these costs?

The statement stresses that the cost is not made up only of subscriptions and article processing charges, and it widens the list:

The unpaid labour of authors, reviewers and editors,
The exclusion of most of the world's population from the production and consumption of knowledge,
The failure to recognise Indigenous peoples' data sovereignty,
The licensing of research for AI training without the consent of, or compensation for, its authors,
The surveillance of users on knowledge platforms,
Data centres competing with people's needs for energy and water.

This list covers almost all of the axes we have discussed on this blog over the last two years: the invisibilisation of labour, digital enclosure, the expropriation of the general intellect, the digital panopticon. It should be read not as an "endorsement" but as common ground. The statement has a limit, however: it lists the costs and asks "who profits", but it does not name the structure of that profit. Let us name it.

Knowledge Paid for Three Times: The Political Economy of Academic Publishing

Let us follow the journey of a scientific article step by step:

The research is carried out largely with public resources (university budgets, TÜBİTAK projects, public scholarships). Society pays here for the first time.
The researcher writes the article and gives it to the publisher for free; often they also sign over the copyright.
Reviewers assess the article for free. Editorial board members mostly work for free or for a token fee. The salaries for this labour, too, are paid by the public university.
The publisher packages the product of this labour and sells it back to libraries as subscriptions. Society pays here for the second time.
In gold open access, an article processing charge is levied on the author or their institution. Society pays, sometimes on top of the subscription, for the third time.

Let us look at what comes out at the end of this process. According to its 2025 results, the RELX group, to which Elsevier, the world's largest scientific publisher, belongs, reported revenue of £9.59 billion and adjusted operating profit of £3.34 billion: a profit margin of 34.8%. The group's scientific publishing arm (STM, that is, Elsevier), according to Journalology's round-up, generated £1.04 billion of profit on £2.71 billion of revenue, a profit margin of roughly 38%.

For comparison: this margin is in the same league as the world's most profitable technology and pharmaceutical companies. But there is a difference: those companies at least buy their raw materials and their labour power. The academic publisher gets the raw material (the research) for free, uses most of the labour (reviewing, editing) for free, and sells the product back to the public.

In Marxist literature the name for this is clear: this is income arising not from production but from a monopoly of property; a kind of rent. The publisher does not produce knowledge; it sits at the gate of the channel through which knowledge circulates and charges a toll. The social accumulation of knowledge that Marx in the Grundrisse called the "general intellect" is here enclosed in the balance sheets of a handful of companies. The concept of digital enclosure that we have used for AI companies has long been at work in academic publishing, in a far older and far more mature form.

Open for Whom? The Trap of the Gold Route

Here I want to draw attention to a mistake young comrades might fall into: the idea that "since open access is spreading, the problem is being solved".

Capital is skilled at absorbing the demands directed at it and turning them into a new field of accumulation. The same thing happened with the demand for open access. When the legitimacy of the "charge the reader" model was shaken, the big publishers switched to the "charge the author" model. So:

The paywall was lifted from in front of the reader and placed in front of the author.
Rich universities and funded projects can publish; the young researcher in the Global South, at a provincial university in Turkey, without a project, has become someone who "can read but cannot write".
With "transformative agreements" between countries and publishers (subscription plus publishing packages), the flow of money did not shrink; it changed direction.

In other words, when openness is achieved without changing the property relation, it does not remove inequality; it moves it. That is why the word "open" on its own is not a class position. The real question is: In whose hands are the means of production and distribution of open knowledge?

The commercial publishing model	The knowledge commons model
Knowledge is a commodity; its value comes from scarcity	Knowledge is a commons; its value grows as it is shared
The public funds the research, the company takes the profit	The public funds it; the public and society benefit
Reviewer and editor labour is free and invisible	Reviewer and editor labour is recognised and institutionally supported
Copyright is transferred to the publisher	Rights stay with the author; free licences (CC BY / CC BY-SA) are used
A paywall for access or for publication	No fee from either reader or author (the diamond route)
Closed infrastructure; the platform owner collects the data	Open-source infrastructure (such as OJS), respectful of privacy
Articles are licensed to AI companies without consent	The scholarly community sets the terms of reuse
Measure of success: impact factor, profit margin	Measure of success: social benefit, access, use

A New Front: Artificial Intelligence and the Second Expropriation of Knowledge

The most current dimension of this year's theme is the one most familiar to us. Over the last two years, the big academic publishers have begun licensing their article archives to AI companies as training data. In these deals, authors are neither asked nor given a share.

Think about the situation: a researcher gave their article to the publisher for free; the publisher sold it to libraries for years; now it is selling the same article once more, this time to an AI company. The AI company, in turn, sells the model it trained on that knowledge back to universities and students as a subscription product.

This is the academic counterpart of the contradiction we underlined in the distillation debate: learning from everyone's labour counts as "fair use", learning from the monopoly's product counts as "theft". Knowledge is enclosed once by the publishers and once more by the AI monopolies. The general intellect is expropriated a second time.

It is no coincidence that the theme statement mentions the water and energy consumption of data centres. The cost of knowledge is no longer paid only in money; it is also paid with the water of a drought-stricken district and with a city's electricity bill.

Individual Heroism or Organised Change?

In this debate you will certainly come across two names:

Aaron Swartz was a young programmer and activist who argued that academic articles should be shared freely. He was prosecuted for bulk downloading from the JSTOR archive, faced the threat of decades in prison, and died in 2013, at the age of 26.
Alexandra Elbakyan, with Sci-Hub, which she founded in 2011, took millions of articles out from behind the paywall; she is still fighting lawsuits from the big publishers today.

These two names need to be understood: they are symbols of how, in an order where the law is built on the side of monopoly, what is morally legitimate is treated as legally criminal. But the real lesson for young comrades is this: individual heroism exposes the injustice of the system; what changes it is organised, collective, institutional struggle.

The best example of this is the action that gave this year's theme its name. In the "The Cost of Knowledge" boycott, which began in 2012 with a blog post by the mathematician Timothy Gowers, researchers declared that they would not publish in Elsevier's journals, nor review or edit for them. The boycott had three grounds: exorbitant subscription prices, the forced bundling of valuable and worthless journals, and the company's support for bills that restricted access to knowledge. Today the number of signatories exceeds 20,000.

Look at it through a trade unionist's eyes: this is academic workers withdrawing their labour, that is, a kind of strike. If reviewers do not review and editors do not edit, the publisher has nothing left to sell. Unpaid labour is in fact academic workers' most powerful weapon, provided it is used in an organised way.

Looking from Turkey

The open access movement in Turkey has its own story. Librarians, information scientists and volunteers have organised Open Access Week every year since 2012; the Ankara Declaration (in Turkish) was published in 2015. In 2019, both YÖK's open access policy and the TÜBİTAK Open Science Policy (in Turkish) were announced; the principle that publicly funded research should be open access was accepted.

DergiPark, a public journal infrastructure, is also a notable example: the platform run by TÜBİTAK ULAKBİM hosted, as of the end of 2019 (in Turkish), around 1,900 journals and more than 410,000 articles, and was largely open access. It is an experience that shows what can happen when the public builds its own knowledge infrastructure.

But there is another side to the picture:

The subscription fees that universities and national consortia pay to the big publishers are not transparent; how much public money goes to which company is not shared with the public.
The academic promotion and incentive system pushes researchers towards high-fee "prestigious" journals; it is often the young researcher who pays out of their own pocket.
Precarious academics, research assistants and dismissed scholars are the first to lose the access that an institutional subscription provides.
The labour of the workers in the publishing sector, the typesetters, journal secretaries and librarians, is almost never part of the debate.

This week, there are sessions in the AE2026 programme (in Turkish) in Turkey that address some of these problems directly. In particular, the session organised by AKYAD and EASE Turkey on Thursday evening, 22 October, at 19:30, on the cost of knowledge and the invisible labour of journal reviewers and editors, is a discussion not to be missed from the point of view of academic labour. The sessions by Koç University's Suna Kıraç Library on the costs of research data and open access publishing, and the day on 22 October at TÜBİTAK ULAKBİM where new processes in DergiPark will be discussed, are also worth following.

Why Does It Matter? Five Reasons

Let us sum up. Why does Open Access Week matter to us?

Because knowledge is a means of production. In the age of artificial intelligence, who can access knowledge, who can produce it and who profits from it directly determine the future of labour.
Because academic labour is labour too. Reviewing, editing, data cleaning, archiving and librarianship are forms of labour that are made invisible. Making them visible is a precondition for organising.
Because public resources must return to the public. Knowledge produced with the people's taxes cannot be closed off from the people.
Because inequality is geographical and it is class-based. Paywalls exclude the Global South and the children of the working classes from science, both as readers and as authors.
Because the alternative already exists. Diamond open access journals, open-source publishing software, public repositories and collective knowledge projects such as Wikipedia prove every day that knowledge can be organised as a commons. The task is to turn this from the exception into the rule.

Concrete Tasks: What Can Young Comrades Do?

Whether you are a student, a research assistant, a librarian or an IT worker, there are concrete things you can do this week and beyond:

Put your articles in a repository. Upload the author's copy of everything you publish to your university's open repository. This is the simplest and most effective step on the green route.
Read before you sign. In publishing contracts, try not to sign away your copyright, and prefer free licences such as CC BY or CC BY-SA.
Grow the diamond route. Publish in free, non-commercial journals, review for them, and recommend them to the people around you.
Make your unpaid labour visible. The recognition of reviewing and editing labour in academic assessment and in workloads should be raised as a trade union demand.
Demand transparency. Ask how much your university and the national consortia pay the publishers; file freedom of information requests.
Object to AI licences. Ask your publisher which companies your articles have been sold to as training data; join joint statements against use without consent.
Contribute to the commons. Wikipedia, Wikidata, open-source publishing software and open data projects are the everyday building of the knowledge commons.
Take part in this week's events. Follow the online sessions in the AE2026 programme (in Turkish), ask questions, and bring the class question into the discussion.

Knowledge Belongs to Everyone

Dear Young Comrades,

The name written under an article is the name of one person; but inside that article is the labour of countless people who made it possible: the worker who cleaned the laboratory, the generations who built the library, the hundreds of researchers who searched for the answer to that question before, the survey worker who collected the data, the teacher who read the thesis. Knowledge is social by its very nature. What turns it into private property is not knowledge itself but the property relation it is squeezed into.

This year's theme asks about "the cost of knowledge". Our answer is clear: the cost of knowledge has already been paid; with labour, with sweat, with public budgets, with the accumulation of generations. We refuse to pay it again.

Open access is not a favour; it is a matter of rights. And rights, as throughout history, are won through organised struggle.

Knowledge belongs to everyone.