Every October, researchers, librarians, publishers, universities, and Open Science advocates around the world come together for International Open Access Week —a global annual initiative established by SPARC to promote openness in research that encourages stakeholders to explore ways to make knowledge more accessible.
The theme of Open Access Week 2026 (October 19-25), “The Cost of Knowledge”, continued discussions from recent years, including “Who Owns Our Knowledge?” in 2025 and “Community over Commercialization” in 2023 and 2024.
This year, it invited the global academic and research community to consider the cost of creating, sharing, and sustaining knowledge, going beyond financial expenditure and expanding the discussion to human and environmental costs, particularly when these costs are driven by private rather than public interests.
Preprints.org Webinar
For OA Week 2026, Preprints.org brought together speakers from libraries, scholarly infrastructure organizations, preprint platforms, and the Preprints.org research community for a webinar on 29 October 2026 .
It aimed to answer an often-overlooked question: what does it cost when knowledge takes too long to reach those who need it? Panelists explored these costs and the role that open and timely research sharing can play in addressing the issues.
The webinar featured four speakers, chaired by Dr. Ioana Craciun, scientific advisor at Preprints.org:
A recording of the event is available here . The conversation also continues on SciProfiles , where the unaddressed questions from the webinar are archived for further discussion, with the speakers joining the conversation to share their responses.
Preprints matter in the discussion
In 2023 and 2024, the theme “Community over Commercialization” highlighted preprint servers as examples of community-oriented infrastructure that can better serve the interests of the research community and the public. Even earlier, the 2016 topic “Open in Action” encouraged researchers to take actions toward openness, including posting preprints to make their work more accessible.
These discussions highlight the role preprints can play in making research more accessible to the wider community. Preprints.org is founded on the principle that openness, transparency, and timely research communication can benefit not only the research community but also the wider society.
“Research creates values when it can be seen, discussed, challenged, and built on,” said Lloyd Shu, product manager of Preprints.org. “Preprinting is not only about sharing the paper earlier, it is about starting the scholarly conversation sooner, and helping knowledge go further.”
This year’s OA Week provided an important opportunity to reflect on the role of preprints in open scholarly communication. Since 2025, Preprints.org has hosted OA Week webinars to create a space for discussion of preprints alongside the challenges and opportunities in open science, joined by key stakeholders from Open Science organizations and community initiatives working to advance transparent, inclusive, and reproducible research.
Lower the cost of knowledge with preprints
Open Access is not only about making research more accessible, but also about lowering the barriers to sharing, sustaining, and disseminating knowledge. Preprints offer a way to address these challenges.
Read more on the Preprints.org blog: