Graphic from openaccessweek.org, photo by Greg Rakozy

To mark this year’s Open Access Week (20-26 October), the UCL Office for Open Science and Scholarship hosted a webinar exploring this year’s theme: Who Owns Our Knowledge?

Facilitated by Bibliometrics Support Officer Andrew Gray, a panel of four speakers from different areas of UCL offered their time and expertise to consider this complex question.

• Lauren Cantos is the Research Integrity and Assurance Officer in the Compliance and Assurance team. Previously she worked in the Research Ethics team at UCL, and her background is as a Humanities and English researcher.
• Christine Daoutis is the UCL copyright support officer, based in the library. Her background is in open access, open science and copyright, particularly the ways copyright interacts with open practices.
• Catherine Sharp is Head of Open Access Services in Library Services [or LCCOS]. She manages the Open Access Team, which delivers Gold open access, including transformative agreements, and Green open access through UCL’s repository, UCL Discovery, for UCL staff and students.
• Muki Haklay is a Professor of Geographic Information Science at UCL department of Geography. He founded and co-direct the UCL Extreme Citizen Science group. He is an expert in citizen science and contributed to the US Association for Advancing Participatory Science (formerly the Citizen Science Association), and the European Citizen Science Association (ECSA).

The webinar began with a short reflection on the theme from each of the panellists, followed by a discussion structured around these questions:

1. What does “ownership” mean for research – for outputs and for data? And when we define what “ownership” means, how do we decide who the owners are – or who they should be?
2. We often think of ownership as linked to “authorship”. A wide range of people contribute to research – including many outside academia – but not all become named as authors. How do we recognise them?
3. What happens when copyright (or other IP rights) conflict with academic expectations around ownership and authorship?
4. How is the production and the dissemination of research influenced by commercial considerations around ownership and access?

It was a thought-provoking discussion in which the panellists touched on a wide range of subjects, including considerations of attribution beginning at the outset of a project, recognising contribution from individuals outside of academic structures, understanding copyright concerns when having work published and how UCL’s updated Publications Policy can help with this. As well as answering questions, the session raised other questions and, as is often the case, the complexity of these questions didn’t allow for straightforward answers. As Andrew aptly put it towards the end of the webinar – ‘sometimes saying the question is complicated is an answer in itself’. This particularly resonated with regard to the issue of AI tools failing to attribute authors, and also the matter of widening participation within the production of knowledge.

If this has piqued your interest, or you attended the webinar and would like a recap, you can watch the full recording now:

Access the full recording on MediaCentral

Useful Links

A selection of useful resources were shared in the webinar chat:

• The Authorship Integrity Toolkit from UK Research Integrity Office
• UCL’s updated Publications Policy
• ‘Who Owns Our Knowledge? Understanding how copyright can shape the discourse around open scholarship’ – blog post by Christine Daoutis
• Managing intellectual property rights in Citizen Science by Teresa Scassa and Haewon Chung
• Typology of Citizen Science projects from an intellectual property perspective by Teresa Scassa and Haewon Chung
• ‘Who Owns Our Knowledge? Retaining author’s rights through UCL’s updated Publications Policy’ – blog post by Catherine Sharp
• EIFL Rights Retention and Secondary Publication Rights
• Introducing CC Signals: A New Social Contract for the Age of AI – Creative Commons
• Open Science at the generative AI turn: An exploratory analysis of challenges and opportunities | Quantitative Science Studies | MIT Press
• Copyright considerations in text and data mining: sharing and adopting best practice – UCL Library Skills training session
• “Wait, not like that”: Free and open access in the age of generative AI
• Join UCL Copyright Literacy Community on MS Teams

We are very grateful to the speakers who contributed a lot of insight and provided much to reflect on from this webinar. We hope the conversation around these questions will continue and answers will develop as we navigate the complexities.

The UCL Office for Open Science and Scholarship invites you to contribute to the open science and scholarship movement. Stay connected for updates, events, and opportunities.

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Guest post by Catherine Sharp, Head of Open Access Services at UCL

Graphic from openaccessweek.org, photo by Greg Rakozy

“Who Owns Our Knowledge?”, the theme of this year’s International Open Access Week, asks how “communities can reassert control over the knowledge they produce”. With commercial publishers continuing to monetise academic content through ever-increasing subscription and open access fees – the costs of so-called “transformative” agreements to UK HEIs is around £140m – and to report substantial and growing profit margins, while at the same time attempting to restrict authors’ rights in their own work, this remains a challenge for all HEIs. Against this background, the UK’s rights retention movement is a vital tool in the effort to free academic research and empower authors to use and share their knowledge.

UCL’s Intellectual Property (IP) Policy has long enshrined the principle that UCL staff own the copyright in their own scholarly materials, and that UCL has the right to use them for academic and research purposes. This year, with the introduction of an updated Publications Policy, UCL has joined a number of other universities, including Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial and Manchester, in taking action to assert this right. This is known as rights retention.

In practical terms, this means that from 2026, having notified publishers of UCL’s pre-existing licence, UCL will make the accepted manuscripts of scholarly articles by UCL staff open access without an embargo in UCL Discovery, UCL’s open access repository, under the Creative Commons Attribution licence (CC BY) (unless an alternative licence or exemption is requested). The CC BY licence allows widespread re-use and sharing, and is the licence that research funders, including Wellcome, UKRI, NIHR and EC funders, require.

Photo by Mary Hinckley, UCL Digital Media, ISD-LTMS

While UCL will continue to provide opportunities for authors to publish Gold open access through transformative agreements and in fully open access journals, articles that are not Gold open access will also benefit from immediate open access, on publication, in UCL Discovery. This will allow all UCL authors to meet their funders’ (including REF) open access requirements while continuing to publish in their journals of choice, and to benefit from open access through higher impact, increased citations and more collaborations.

Photo by Mary Hinkley, UCL Digital Media

The policy also benefits co-authors, and UCL authors are encouraged to let their co-authors know about it and to take advantage of it. Aside from that, authors do not need to take any action other than to upload their accepted manuscripts to RPS, on publication.

We are looking forward to seeing the practical effects of the policy as more UCL research is made available, more freely, than ever before.

The UCL Office for Open Science and Scholarship invites you to contribute to the open science and scholarship movement. Stay connected for updates, events, and opportunities.

Follow us on Bluesky, LinkedIn, and join our mailing list to be part of the conversation!

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