Who Owns Our Knowledge? A Practical Guide to Open Access at Queen’s

Join us for an in-person workshop that explores the critical question: Who Owns Our Knowledge? In a time of rapid change and disruption, this session invites scholars, students, and staff to critically examine how knowledge is created, controlled, and shared—and to think about how we can reassert collective agency over scholarly outputs.

This session will:

• Highlight the key principles of Open Access (OA)—the movement to make scholarly research and outputs freely available, enabling anyone to read, download, distribute, and reuse scholarly outputs without barriers, aligned with the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) definition.
• Explore themes related to “Who Owns Our Knowledge?” including advancing community over commercialization in academic publishing and moving away from proprietary platforms and commercial oligopoly publishers toward community-based, library-supported publishing infrastructures.
• Describe the services available at Queen’s University to support OA publishing, including our read-and-publish agreements, library-supported diamond OA journal and monograph platforms, and our institutional repository QSpace.

Whether you are new to OA or looking to deepen your understanding, this workshop blends big-picture themes with practical advice tailored for Queen’s researchers. Join us to help build a just and open scholarly future.
Register for this event
For questions, please contact Marissa Stein.