International Open Access Week 2026

International Open Access Week “ The cost of knowledge ” is celebrated from October 19 to 25.

The specific theme of the CLACSO conference is: “ Privatization, commodification and precarization of the common goods of knowledge: the costs in the Global South ”.

CLACSO's participation takes place from Monday, October 19th to Friday, October 23rd in five 90-minute panels, one per day, from 9 to 10:30 Mexico time | 10 to 11:30 Colombia and Peru time | 12 to 13:30 Argentina and Brazil time.

Organized by: Latin American Council of Social Sciences, Latin American Forum for Scientific Evaluation (FOLEC) and CLACSO Working Group “Open Science as a Common Good”.

The Scholarly Publishing and Scholarly Resources Coalition (SPARC) poses the slogan as a question about who pays for knowledge and who benefits: corporate concentration and commercial control of scientific communication, invisible human costs (peer review, unpaid editing), global inequality in knowledge production, use of research to train artificial intelligence systems without consent or compensation, and environmental costs of digital infrastructure.

Addressing the price of knowledge from the perspective of the commons involves analyzing the social, epistemic, and exclusionary costs that the Global South assumes when adopting commercial publishing models.

For decades, Latin America and the Caribbean have maintained the world's most consistently non-commercial scientific communication system: journals and repositories that do not charge for reading or publishing, managed by universities and public institutions. This trajectory is now under pressure. International Open Access Week 2026 proposes asking how much it truly costs to produce and sustain knowledge, and who bears those costs. From the region's perspective, this question demands a contextualized response: the costs are not only financial, and they are not distributed neutrally.

First cost: privatization

Infrastructures that were once public or community-owned—repositories, publishing systems, indexed databases, evaluation platforms—are now in private hands; data produced with public funding is being restricted; scientific output is being used to train artificial intelligence systems without the consent or compensation of its authors and institutions, while platforms track the reading habits of researchers. The cost here is not measured by the price paid, but by the lost ability to make decisions about one's own infrastructure.

Second cost: commodification

The commodification of flow and value operates even when formal ownership doesn't change hands. Application publishing charges (APCs) and transformative agreements shift the barrier from the reader to the author; commercial metrics and rankings define what gets published, in what language, and what is considered valid; and open access diamond programs that outsource processes to external providers reintroduce market logics under the guise of being non-profit. Added to this is the less visible human cost: writing, peer review, editing, and editorial management constitute a massive, unpaid subsidy from public academia to private profitability. No position of neutrality toward these dynamics is truly neutral: the absence of a stance reinforces the patterns that sustain them.

Third cost: precarity

The precariousness of scientific and university systems, teaching, and research is exacerbated by the rise of far-right governments in the region. This is not just another cost on the list: it is the condition that makes the other two possible. An underfunded scientific system cannot sustain its own infrastructure and ends up depending on commercial platforms; a precarious research community is unable to challenge the evaluation criteria used to measure it. Privatization, commodification, and precarity are intertwined, and that is why defending science as a common good is not a technical agenda but a political and collective task that simultaneously demands sovereign infrastructure, cooperative funding models, and decent material conditions for those who produce knowledge.

CLACSO Programming

Five 90-minute panels, one per day – Free activity with mandatory registration

– Monday 10/19 · [Opening] Privatization, commodification and precarization of the common goods of knowledge