Happy International Open Access Week!
We’re halfway through International Open Access Week (October 20-26), and we couldn’t be more thrilled with the enthusiasm UND has shown for Open Access publishing. This year’s theme, “Who Owns Our Knowledge?”, highlights important questions about authorship and how individuals can reassert control over their intellectual output in times of disruption.
UND has tremendous momentum when it comes to supporting Open Access publishing. So far in 2025, 39 of our researchers have received support through the Chester Fritz Library to publish their work as open access. Our institutional repository, UND Scholarly Commons, has reached an incredible milestone: since its founding, UND research has been downloaded over 6 million times—and nearly 2 million of those downloads occurred in 2025 alone!
As a recap of our Open Access Week events: we kicked things off with a celebration where we came together as a community to discuss the challenges and opportunities of open access publishing. Much of the conversation centered on the difficulties researchers face in obtaining grant funding, and how open access can play a role in increasing research impact and visibility. We highlighted the Scholarly Commons’ record-breaking downloads and celebrated our collective momentum in this area over refreshments.
We also hosted a workshop on Open Access and Artificial Intelligence, focusing on how AI is moving fast and the implications this has for rights, authorship, and open access content. To close out the week, our colleagues in the School of Medicine and Health Sciences are hosting an Open Access 101 presentation on Friday, Oct. 24.
UND researchers have numerous opportunities to publish open access. We have publishing agreements with several publishers that allow us to publish OA at no cost, and our Open Access Grant program provides additional support for making research freely available.
If you have questions about open access publishing at UND, please reach out to Brittany Fischer, Scholarly Communications Librarian.
