The 2025 International Open Access Week asks a fundamental question: Who owns our knowledge? It invites the global research community to reflect on who creates, shares, and benefits from scholarly work – and how we can ensure that knowledge remains a shared public good rather than a commercial privilege. This question is more urgent than ever, as new technologies and commercial pressures are reshaping the way research is disseminated and accessed.
At the European Alliance for Innovation (EAI), we believe that research should serve humanity as a whole. Our open access publishing model ensures that scientific findings from our journals, books and our in-house conference proceedings, are freely available to readers worldwide. By making research openly accessible, we aim to maximize its societal impact and support innovation, education, and collaboration across disciplines and borders.
Supporting researchers in developing and emerging regions is a key part of this mission. Access to international publishing opportunities can be limited by resources, infrastructure, or geographic location. Through our global network of conferences and open access platforms such as the CORE and CCER proceedings series, EAI provides researchers from these regions with visibility, recognition, and opportunities to engage with the broader scientific community. By offering these platforms, we help level the playing field and ensure that valuable insights and discoveries are not overlooked simply because of where they originate.
Did you know? The European Union Digital Library (EUDL) provides open access to EAI’s journals, conference proceedings, and book series across multiple disciplines, making research freely available to the global community.
Open access also brings new responsibilities. The rise of paper mills and AI-generated submissions threatens the integrity of scholarly publishing, and unchecked, these practices can undermine trust in open platforms. EAI actively addresses these challenges through rigorous peer review and ethical standards, protecting the credibility of the knowledge we disseminate.
True openness is therefore not just about removing paywalls – it is about fostering a system where research is shared responsibly, inclusively, and transparently. We invite all researchers, institutions, and communities to join this collective effort to ensure that ownership of knowledge stays where it belongs: in the hands of those who create it and those who benefit from it.
