Open Access Week takes place October 20-26, 2025, which gives us an opportunity to reflect on this year’s theme, Who Owns Our Knowledge? While the theme covers a lot of important ground that we encourage you to read, this HSLS Update article will focus on how “communities can reassert control over the knowledge they produce” by highlighting ways to openly share your work through non-commercial venues.
Posting a preprint of your work on a preprint server can be an effective way of quickly disseminating research results openly and retaining the rights of your work. While for-profit publishers have their own preprint servers, many other servers are established and maintained by non-profit organizations. ASAPbio’s List of Preprint Servers provides information on who owns preprint servers and other information that can help you select the right server to meet your needs.
Other types of work, such as article manuscripts, data, and code, can be shared in non-commercial repositories. D-Scholarship@Pitt is the institutional repository at the University of Pittsburgh and accepts a wide variety of research outputs created by Pitt authors. Not only does D-Scholarship@Pitt provide long-term access to research materials, but it can help increase the research visibility of those works as well. Other open subject-based repositories can be found on OpenDOAR, which includes information on repository ownership.
To learn more about ways to openly share your work, consider taking one or more modules from the Open Scholarship and Research Impact Challenge, an online, asynchronous Canvas course developed by HSLS and the University Library System.
Have any questions about open access or need some extra guidance? Contact HSLS Publishing Services to get in touch with a librarian and we’d be happy to help!
~Stephen Gabrielson