News Story | publishing rights | rights retention

2025 International Open Access Week: Join Us in Supporting SPARC Europe’s #OA100 Campaign

20 October 2025

20-26 October marks International Open Access Week 2025, organised by SPARC in partnership with the Open Access Week Advisory Committee. This year’s theme, “Who Owns Our Knowledge?”, touches on the core mission of Knowledge Rights 21 (KR21) to promote access to culture and knowledge.

Research efforts by KR21 reveal that the level of control over knowledge by copyright holders too often leads to harms to the wider public interest. Of particular concern is, for example, the potential gatekeeping behaviour by major publishers and vendors, as shown in an October 2025 study commissioned by KR21 from the CREATe centre at the University of Glasgow, addressing the dysfunctions of the e-Book markets for libraries from the perspectives of competition and copyright law.

The Way Forward: Rights Retention & Secondary Publishing Rights

A September 2025 KR21-supported report on Open Science and copyright by Wikimedia Sverige and the Swedish library association (Svensk biblioteksförening) highlighted the cost of research that remains locked away. One-fifth of Swedish taxpayer-funded research remains inaccessible to the public, forcing Swedish higher education institutions to spend over 800 million krona (about €75 million) annually to access research they have already funded.

Advancing Rights Retention and Secondary Publishing Rights, which KR21 advocates for, are key elements towards open access. Rights Retention refers to the practice of researchers themselves retaining all key rights to their work, and only offering well-defined publishing rights to publishers, without losing the ability to publish open access themselves. Secondary Publication Rights provide a guarantee of the ability to publish works in a green OA repository, ideally immediately upon publication in a paywalled journal.

A Window Opens

It is an exciting time to be working on these issues. With a commitment to introduce a European Research Area (ERA) Act ahead of next year’s OA week, there is an opportunity to take steps to ensure that the EU’s legislative framework is supportive. While legislation alone cannot solve all problems, it can offer guarantees and unlock vital progress. Introducing a harmonised legislated Secondary Publication Right, boosting the impetus for rights retention, and broader reforms to copyright law, protected from override by contract or technological protection measures, will all help.

The European Commission’s public consultation on the ERA Act, launched earlier this month, offers an important opportunity to push policy makers to embrace these crucial instruments in unlocking access to knowledge.

SPARC Europe’s #OA100 Campaign: Getting to 100% Open Access

KR21 is pleased to support the new campaign by project partner SPARC Europe on getting to 100% open access. A milestone that, unfortunately, has yet to be reached by any European country.

To encourage and support libraries and their communities in reaching this ambition, SPARC Europe is launching a five-week campaign focusing on five essential themes.