There’s a moment most medical students recognise: you find the perfect article for your research, a clinical decision, or simply your curiosity, and you click, only to be stopped by a paywall. Access denied. The knowledge is there, but you’re asked to pay more than many people spend on a week’s groceries just to read it. In that second, science stops being a shared human effort and becomes something exclusive, gated, and conditional.
This barrier is what the Open Access movement works to dismantle. And this year, during International Open Access Week, IFMSA joined universities, libraries, researchers, and students around the world in asking: Who gets to access knowledge, who gets to use it, and ultimately, who owns it?
Opening Up the Meaning of “Open”
Open Access is often reduced to a simple idea: free articles online. But when we look closer, it represents something much bigger. It is a vision of a scientific system in which access does not depend on wealth, institutional affiliation, or geographic privilege.
It is a commitment to the idea that knowledge grows when shared rather than controlled.
During our campaign, we explored how Open Access works in practice. There are different models, like Gold, Green, Hybrid, and Diamond Open Access, each representing different ways research can be shared. None of them is perfect, all of them are evolving, but together they push the world toward a more inclusive research culture.
Open Access is not just a publishing choice. It is a stance about what, and who, science is for.
When Knowledge Becomes a Barrier
Science advances quickly; medicine even more so. A treatment guideline today can become outdated next year. If access to research depends on purchasing power, then the gap between healthcare systems does not just widen; it solidifies.
For students and early-career researchers, this reality shapes our education. Some of us have access to major journals. Many of us do not. Two students can study the same disease but learn vastly different things, simply because of the cost of accessing information.
The result is not just a difference in academic experience, it’s a difference in future patient care.
Knowledge inequity directly becomes health inequity.
Our Voice in Global Conversations
This year, the campaign coincided with key spaces where IFMSA brought forward the student perspective: the United Nations Open Science and Open Scholarship Conference, International Open Access Week itself, and the Open Education Conference.
Across these discussions, we carried forward what our IFMSA Policy on Open Science affirms:
That access to knowledge is part of global health equity, and young people are not simply observers in this movement; we are active contributors, shaping the future of science.
We are not just learning in this system.
We are helping to transform it.
Choosing What Comes Next
This campaign does not end at the end of the week. It continues with the choices we make every day, in our research, in our learning, in the conversations we start.
We can:
- Recommend open resources to our peers.
- Publish in journals that make our work accessible.
- Ask our institutions to support open repositories.
- Share what we learn openly, without barriers or gatekeeping.
These are quiet actions, but they are powerful ones.
Openness grows through culture, and culture grows through practice.
Closing Reflection
When we talk about Open Access, we are talking about the kind of medical community we want to build. A community where knowledge is shared generously. Where solutions are discovered sooner. Where geography or wealth no longer determines who gets to learn, innovate, or heal.
So the question remains: Who owns our knowledge?
If we choose openness, the answer becomes simple. We all do.
Written by: Anna Liakopoulou, IFMSA LSR
