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What is Open Access Week?
Open Access Week is an important annual event that highlights the value of making research, data, and educational resources freely accessible to everyone.
This year's theme, "Who Owns Our Knowledge?" explores how communities can reclaim control over knowledge in times of disruption while questioning who creates it, accesses it, and values it education and research.
JCU Library OA initiatives
JCU Library helps promote and enable Open Access to research and education for our university community all year around! Open Access Week is a chance to acknowledge the great work being done, both nationally and internationally.
Open Access Week Awards 2025
Since their inception in 2020, the Open Access Week awards have grown into a wonderful event which acknowledges the hard work of Open Access advocates in the JCU community. In 2025, we are presenting four awards across a variety of categories:
- ECR Open Access Champion Award 2025 – will be awarded to the JCU ECR who has made the greatest contribution to Open Access through their research publications within the previous three to four years.
- HDR Open Access Advocate Award 2025 – will be awarded to the HDR candidate who produces a poster which is a pleasing and persuasive combination of text and visual imagery that offers strong advocacy for the benefits of Open Access publication.
- Open Education Champion Award 2025 – will be presented to the staff member who has made the greatest contribution to open education at JCU during 2024-2025.
- JCU Open eBook Excellence and Impact Award 2025 – honors an outstanding open educational resource published in 2023 or 2024 that significantly enhances the JCU student experience.
To learn more about the judging panel, awards, and prizes see our web page for more information.
Open Access Week Panel Session: Open Access and Copyright in the age of AI
Join us online for a panel session exploring how generative technologies are reshaping our understanding of creativity, ownership, and access to knowledge. From the ethics of AI training on copyrighted works to the future of open scholarship, our speakers will probe whether existing frameworks can survive the rapid evolution of machine authorship. This discussion invites scholars, artists, and technologists alike to imagine what intellectual property, and intellectual freedom, might mean in the AI era.
- Thursday, 23 October, 2:00pm (AEST, Brisbane) - Open Access Week Panel Session: Open Access and Copyright in the age of AI. Register here.
Bring Out Your Dead! Retroactive Green Open Access Project 2025
The ResearchOnline@JCU repository is an online archive for the collection, preservation, and dissemination of JCU research. In an effort to increase the visibility and accessibility of the University’s research outputs, we invited researchers to participate in our Retroactive Green Open Access Initiative. The initiative encourages authors to deposit the author accepted manuscript, that is the final version of their accepted paper without publisher formatting, into our repository when the published version is not freely available. This is called “green” Open Access publishing and is in accordance with the University’s Open Scholarship Policy. If you would like to participate, please contact our team.
JCU Open eBooks
In the spirit of Open Access, learning and teaching resources created under the same overarching principles of free access are facilitated by our Open Education team. JCU Library is using Open Educational Resources (OERs) to widen participation and break down financial barriers which may impede access to high-quality learning materials.
Since 2021, JCU Library has assisted in the creation and publication of 32 open ebooks, with many more in production. These resources can be found on the JCU Open eBook platform. For a selection of open ebooks curated by librarians see our discovery collection.
Key Open Access Australasia webinars to attend during Open Access Week:
Do you want to learn more about Open Access from practitioners in the field? Open Access Australasia is running three webinars during Open Access Week, which are free for anyone to register and view online.
- Tuesday 21 October, 9am AEST (Brisbane) – The politics of knowledge: Who controls the story and who has access to it? Register here.
- Wednesday 22 October, 12pm AEST (Brisbane) – Community ownership: Relation, reciprocity and responsibility. Register here.
- Thursday 23 October, 12pm AEST (Brisbane) – Vive la révolution! Taking our knowledge back.* Register here. *Featuring JCU staff – Jayshree Mamtora, Tove Lemberget, and Wayne Bradshaw.
Any questions?
If you have questions about Open Access? Please contact the library or read more about it on our Open Access Publishing guide.
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