Open Access Week is on the horizon! This year, we’re celebrating #OAWeek from October 20 to 26. As many of you know, this internationally celebrated week was established to raise aware about open access publishing and encourage discussion. The theme for 2025 focuses on the timely question of who owns knowledge and encourages us to consider how knowledge is created and shared, and whose voices are upheld. As part of our celebrations for open access week, AU Press is turning to our own community (you!) to find out how you engage with open access. We created a brief survey and are looking forward to hearing your thoughts. Everyone is welcome to take the survey as there are questions that apply to authors, readers, students, and instructors!
We’ll be sharing an analysis of the results right here on our website, so stay tuned!
For Open Access Week, we will also be participating in an event put on by our colleagues at Concordia University Press about open scholarship and education practices. See more below.
Behind the Scenes: Open Scholarship
Open scholarship and open education can often feel mystifying—especially from the outside. But even for those working within these practices, common challenges and shared experiences are bound to emerge across institutions.
Approaches to countering the gatekeeping of knowledge manifest in various forms, including library-led initiatives and programming, teaching and learning centres’ guidebooks, and collaborations, as well as student union endorsements of open education, open-access university press publishing, and open science working groups. These efforts—led by libraries and librarians, university presses and their dedicated staff, teaching and learning centres and their instructional designers, faculty groups, student unions, and more—might often be united by a common goal: to prioritize community over commercial interests in the pursuit of democratizing knowledge.
This Behind the Scenes hybrid event brings together practitioners from different institutions to share what excites them about a current project, the behind-the-scenes work that makes it possible, and a key challenge they face in their practice!
Friday, October 24, 2025 at 11:00 AM MST
