Keynote: Who Owns Our Knowledge? Scholar-Led Infrastructures and the Future of Publishing

Abstract

IU's Open Access Week 2025 Keynote by Dr. Juan Pablo Alperin (Simon Fraser University; Public Knowledge Project) What would happen if Google Scholar were to vanish tomorrow? For many researchers, it has become the default gateway to academic literature, yet its dominance also exposes vulnerabilities in how knowledge is discovered and accessed. This presentation will discuss how the proliferation of open access journals, led by scholars and published out of universities from around the world, is challenging publishing models, reshaping access to knowledge, and redefining the global landscape of scholarly communication. It concludes with a call to strengthen and sustain scholar-led publishing infrastructures—so that access to knowledge is secured by the academic community itself, not left at the mercy of corporate platforms