Open Access: Open Access Week 2025

Monday, October 20, 2025 12-2 pm EST

Join us as we Kick-Off Open Access Week with a virtual exploration of the semantic encyclopedia helps you quickly understand concepts, summarize research, and find related information. It can be used for academic analysis, literature review, content search, and even smart PDF annotations, making research and learning faster and more efficient.

Tuesday, October 21, 2025 2:00-3:00 pm

Given the increased utilization of open educational resources (some rights reserved), open pedagogy and so-called inclusive access and traditional textbooks (both all rights reserved), these conflicting approaches to accessing knowledge raises questions about who owns our knowledge. Who should own our knowledge? Should knowledge be owned? How do we democratize knowledge given access to knowledge is the pathway to critical thinking, personal autonomy and independent choices? We will explore these ideas and more during this session. Sponsored by the Massachusetts Open & Low-Cost Educational Resources Advisory Council (OLERAC).

Panelists: Millie Gonzalez, Dean of Libraries, New York Institute of Technology; Dr. Kisha Tracy, Chair & Professor of English Studies & Chair of the General Education Program Area, Fitchburg State University Event Organizer: Dr. Robert Awkward, Assistant Commissioner for Academic Effectiveness, Mass. Department of Higher Education

Wednesday, October 22, 2025 3 - 4 pm

🌎 Register to get the Zoom link. 
Join us as we explore OpenAlex, which indexes over 250M scholarly works from 250k sources, with extra coverage of humanities, non-English languages, and the Global South. We link these works to 90M disambiguated authors and 100k institutions, as well as enriching them with topic information, SDGs, citation counts, and much more. Export all your search results for free. For more flexibility use our API or even download the whole dataset. It's all CC0-licensed so you can share and reuse it as you like! Want to see how it works? 100% of our source code is open, too." https://openalex.org/works

Friday, October 24, 2025  Session 1: 8:30am-9:45am EST

• Corpus creation from open access repositories and their analysis with semantic tools presented by Ms. Udita Agarwal, Ph.D. student, National Institute of Plant Genome Research (NIPGR) and Dr. Renu Kumari, Program Manager #semanticClimate and Ms. Shaik Zainab, Anurag University, Hyderabad. The session will provide an introduction to corpus creation and pygetpapers for literature review. Links to the recording will be available after the session.
• They will be showing their complete READER-oriented toolkit. This takes OA material (both academic articles and more generally Open material such as the UN IPCC reports) and automatically turns it into semantic form (no AI contamination at this stage). There are several components, all Open, and managed by Dr. Renu Kumari, and largely automatic (i.e. their default use can scope a query in the time it takes to download material):

> New York Tech Open Access Week Colab Notebook (Create a copy to use)

This is highly flexible (written in Python) but designed for use by those without technical knowledge (other than having Python on the machine).

Friday, October 24, 2025 Session 2: 12:30pm-1:50pm:

• Dr. Yadav is a professor and researcher at the National Institute of Plant Genome Research (NIPGR), New Delhi, India. Instructor: Ms. Udita Agarwal, Ph.D Student NIPGR; Co-instructor: Dr. Renu Kumari, Program Manager #semanticClimate and Ms. Shaik Zainab, Anurag University, Hyderabad. Co-coordinators: Gitanjali Yadav, National Institute of Plant Genome Research (NIPGR), New Delhi, India, Simon Worthington, TIB – Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology and University Library, Peter Murray-Rust, Cambridge University, UK

• In today’s world of increasing publications and their availability in the format which are not machine readable has led to the development of the tools by semanticClimate. pygetpapers (see video example) is one of them which is being used to create corpus of the open access literatures in a structured and machine readable format for further analysis on the corpus. 

The applications of the semantic and structured corpus are the following:

• To train Natural Language Processing (NLP) models for: Named Entity Recognition (NER), Automated summarization
• Facilitate literature reviews for identifying research gaps
• Help in formulating hypotheses

This has also led to resolve the following challenges associated with exponential growth of publications.

• Bulk download of the data in less time
• Machine readable format 
• Single platform to access the data
• Automated article retrieval from open access repositories
• Updated record of literatures

Curious about what other open access events are happening all over the world? Check out the calendar of Open Access Week events hosted by other institutions at other locations.

Thursday, October 23, 2025 11am

🌎 Register to get the Zoom link.  

A panel discussion with three thought leaders in the field: Dr. Samuel Moore, Scholarly Communication Specialist at Cambridge University Library, one of the organizers of the Radical Open Access Collective, and author of the forthcoming book Publishing Beyond the Market: Open Access, Care and the Commons, Sarah Lamdan, Deputy Directory of ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom and author of the widely acclaimed book Data Cartels'  Peter Suber, author of the seminal monograph Open Access and a leading theorist of the Open Access movement. Details of the virtual session on their website.