Open Access Week 2025: “Who Owns Our Knowledge?”

There is a revolution happening in how medical knowledge moves through the world. At its heart is a question both rehearsed and urgent: who owns what is discovered together? 

This year’s International Open Access Week invites us to explore the global impact of the question “Who owns our knowledge?” It asks us to consider not only who controls access to information but also who gets to create it through funding, how it’s shared, and who benefits from access to it. In medicine, where the line between discovery and care is measured in human life, the question becomes deeply ethical. At Stanford Medicine, this conversation is more than theoretical. It lies at the heart of its mission: “Improving health through leadership, diversity, collaborative discoveries, and innovation in health care, education, and research.”

 New policies, such as the NIH 2025 Public Access Policy, are hastening access to information by removing the twelve-month embargo and requiring immediate deposit in PubMed Central. Thus, the infrastructure of scientific communication is being rebuilt. The goal is clear: to make federally funded research freely and immediately available to everyone. 

Open access is not only about transparency but about equity. When clinical data or treatment outcomes are shared openly, discovery accelerates. Researchers in under-resourced regions gain access equal to that of larger institutions. Patients, whose participation makes this research possible, can finally read the work that may shape their care. During the pandemic, we saw how open collaboration transformed research into practice. Preprints, shared data, and open codebases fueled vaccine development and public health response. What emerged was not disorder but a new rhythm of cooperation; a model worth building on. 

Lane Library’s ChronosHub platform helps researchers identify which journals and publishers the university has agreements with for reduced or no article processing charges. This service makes a complex process clearer, guiding authors toward cost-effective and transparent publication choices. For everything beyond those agreements, navigating compliance with the new NIH policy, interpreting publisher licensing terms, and planning for data deposit, the Lane Medical Library remains an active partner. Librarians are available to help researchers select journals, understand funder requirements, and integrate open access planning into their research workflow. In this way, the library serves as a guide, helping to connect researchers with the support they need to publish responsibly. 

The 2025 Open Access Week theme also points to new ethical tensions: how artificial intelligence collects and learns from human writing, how commercial publishers consolidate data pipelines, and how authorship boundaries are complicated when algorithms become collaborators. As AI expands into clinical practice and research, the question of ownership extends to the models themselves. Who owns the systems trained on our collective work, and who is accountable for their use? The answer may lie in cultivating an atmosphere where medical knowledge is not only a commodity but a common good. Its aim is not possession but human flourishing. 

Open access policies provide structure but not completion. The deeper work is often cultural, to foster what UNESCO calls an open science ecosystem, a community where transparency and reproducibility exist in balance with compassion through cooperative education. This depends not only on policy but on the convictions and values of medical education centers and individual researchers. Each manuscript deposited, each dataset shared, represents an act of trust in the public good. At Stanford Medicine, the Lane Medical Library supports this work through consultations and classes. Whether helping a doctoral fellow understand licensing or assisting a research team with an open data plan, our role is to keep the flow of knowledge both intellectually rigorous and ethical, while effectively moving forward. 

Perhaps the question we should be asking is not who owns our knowledge, but how we are stewarding it. When we choose openness, we affirm a deeper truth: knowledge, like empathy, grows through the act of freely giving.