The “International Open Access Week” is a major global advocacy event aiming to provide an opportunity for the community to exchange ideas, knowledge and inspirations on open science and open access.
Open Access Week 2025 will be held from October 20th through the 26th. This year’s theme is “Who Owns Our Knowledge?”. As part of the scholarly communication community, together we consider:
Open Science practices can be applied throughout the research lifecycle. Below are five tips to help you make your research more accessible, visible, and credible.
Before you start your research, you can pre-register your research design, hypotheses, data collection procedures, and analysis plans in a public repository. This boosts research quality and transparency by showing others any changes from the original plan in the final published study.
Sharing your data allows others to replicate your studies and validate your results. It also enables the reuse of your data and increases the visibility of your research. You may deposit your data in a disciplinary repository or our institutional data repository, HKU DataHub.
Traditionally, reviewers and/or authors remain "blind" to each other. Open peer review offers alternatives that increase transparency and accountability in research. Examples include publishing reviewer reports, revealing reviewer identities, and allowing community participation in the review process.
You may publish your articles in open access so readers can access your work for free. However, some journals may charge you a fee, known as Article Processing Charge (APC). The Libraries’ transformative agreements allow HKU authors to make their research openly accessible without the need to pay APCs in eligible journals.
Alternatively, you may self-archive a version of your article (preprint, postprint, or published version) into your personal web page, departmental web page, or our institutional repository, HKU Scholars Hub. You should check the publishers’ policies, for example the version of the publication and embargo period.
HKU authors have been committed to making their research outputs freely accessible. Between 2005 and 2024, there was an upward trend in the proportion of open access publications among all publications.
Percentage of All Open Access and Non-Open Access Publications by HKU Authors (2005-2024)
The CNCI values of all open access publications by HKU authors were consistently higher than non-open access ones, indicating the citation advantage of open access publications. The CNCI values of green only open access publications were the higher than gold (including gold-hybrid) ones.
Read the blog post for the full discussion.
The open access movement supports author right retention as a means to ensure that researchers can freely share and reuse their works, thereby advancing equity and knowledge advancement.
Check-out the guide on Authors' Rights to learn about:
With the rapid emergence of AI technologies, we need to understand the legal and ethical considerations surrounding licensing academic materials in AI training.
Check-out the guide to learn about:
To celebrate the International Open Access Week, a series of blog posts on various topics related to open access to publications, open research data, and other open science topics are made available.
HKU authors have been committed to making their research outputs freely accessible. Between 2005 and 2024, there was an upward trend in the proportion of open access publications among all publications...
[New on 10 November 2025]
Apart from publishing, researchers and the public can enjoy the benefits brought by open access – as readers. In this post, a few useful tools to discover open access articles will be introduced...
For researchers working with human participants, there are important ethical and legal considerations when handling personal data, such as interview transcripts or medical records...
[New on 29 October 2025]
On top of managing research data with a Data Management Plan, the next question has come to your attention: in which repository shall we share our research data...
Not only does the choice of license restrict how others can use the research outputs, but it also impacts the author’s rights and control over their own work...
In this post, we will focus on the choices made by HKU (the University of Hong Kong) researchers. In 2019-2023, among open access articles and conference proceedings published by HKU authors, 15315 were under Creative Commons licenses...