Each year, Open Access Week highlights a theme that encourages discussion and reflection. This year’s theme, ‘Who owns our knowledge?’ invites us to consider important questions of ownership, access and equity in research. Whose voices are valued in academic research? Who has the right to access education and scientific findings? And how can the scientific community shape the future of knowledge in an era of change?

Open padlock and key

Who creates scientific knowledge and whose voices are valued?

Scientific knowledge emerges from years of research, thought and collaboration. Behind every paper, article, or dataset is an author (or a team of authors) whose contributions deserve recognition. Royal Society journal authors retain rights to their articles and attribution is carefully managed, keeping research transparent, reliable, and rooted in the academic community.

Our journal policies are designed to uphold ethical publishing practices, empower authors, and maintain trust in scholarly communication, yet more work is needed to ensure all researchers, regardless of geography, funding or language are fairly represented.

Who controls access to scientific research?

Journal subscription paywalls still block many researchers around the world from engaging with crucial research. Preprints can accelerate scientific communication, especially in fast-moving fields. However, since they haven’t been peer-reviewed, readers must be cautious about reliability. Open access seeks to level the playing field by reducing or removing financial barriers and ensuring that research is accessible not only to well-resourced institutions but to the global community.

At Royal Society Publishing, we believe science should be accessible to all. We support authors and institutions by offering:

  • Read & Publish agreements: enabling affiliated researchers to publish open access at no direct cost, while retaining subscription access
  • Open Access Membership: providing discounted publishing options and demonstrating institutional support for open science
  • Open Access Equity Scheme: waiving or discounting article processing charges for researchers in eligible countries, ensuring quality determines the ability to publish over financial resources
  • Science in the Making: free access to primary resources without a paywall

Looking ahead, we are planning to make Royal Society journals fully open access in 2026 through the Subscribe to Open model. This change supports global access to research without shifting costs to authors and relies on continued library participation.

How knowledge is created and shared is changing

The ways scientific knowledge is generated and disseminated are evolving rapidly. Deploying AI in domains such as protein folding have highlighted AI’s potential to unlock new frontiers of scientific knowledge. Traditional publishing remains central to dissemination, but AI tools, particularly large language models (LLMs), are transforming discovery and summarisation enabling research to be shared more widely. These technologies create exciting opportunities, but also raise questions for the scientific community: how do we ensure quality and research integrity? How do we attribute sources properly? And how do we value knowledge creators when AI may obscure the human voices behind the work?

Explore topical research from our journals that may spark these conversations:

Curious about our Open Access Week activities? Join the conversation on our Bluesky account.

Authors

  • Rachel Gladman

    Rachel Gladman

    Marketing Executive, Publishing