International Open Access Week 2026 runs from October 19 to 25, with this year’s theme, “The Cost of Knowledge,” asking a pointed question: why does access to knowledge keep getting more expensive, and who actually benefits?
Much of the conversation around this theme, understandably, centers on money: subscription costs, article processing charges, and the growing consolidation of scholarly publishing under a small number of commercial players. But there is a second cost sitting underneath the financial one that rarely gets its own headline: the cost of time. The hours researchers, librarians, and administrators spend on the manual work that openness still demands of them: depositing papers, chasing compliance, re-entering the same metadata across multiple systems, and so on. And this is the cost Symplectic Elements, part of the Digital Science portfolio, has spent over 15 years working to reduce.
What a decade of research tells us
The State of Open Data 2025 report, marking 10 years of research into researcher attitudes toward openness, gives a clear picture of where this labor cost lands hardest.
Sixty-nine percent of researchers still say they receive too little credit for sharing their data. That figure has improved since 2020, when it stood at 78%, but a clear majority of researchers still feel under-recognized for their work.
Awareness of open principles has increased meaningfully. For example, awareness of the FAIR principles, which call for data to be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable, rose from 15% in 2018 to 40% in 2025, reflecting a significant shift in how researchers understand open data. Yet understanding these principles does not, on its own, ensure that publications are deposited or funder policies are followed.
Without the workflow support to put them into practice, open principles become another expectation placed on already stretched researchers and administrators. Meanwhile, institutions are navigating a growing array of mandates from funders, governments, and internal policies, each with its own requirements. The resulting complexity falls directly on the people responsible for meeting them.
A history rooted in reducing that burden
This is not a new problem for the sector, and Symplectic Elements’ own history reflects a long-running effort to address it. In 2009, Elements became one of the first commercially available research information management systems to be open-access-aware, connecting directly to institutional repositories, beginning with DSpace and later extending to EPrints, and Figshare, which would go on to become central to how deposited research is shared and discovered.
In 2011, as open access mandates expanded across Europe and Australia, the Repository Tools module in Symplectic Elements broadened that repository integration further. Then in 2012, Crossref was introduced as a data source, giving institutions access to Creative Commons CC0 metadata they could reuse freely, removing another manual step from an already labor-intensive process. By 2015, OA Monitor had launched within Elements, turning compliance tracking from a spreadsheet-based task into a clear, and easy to use interface that institutions could act on.
Where this stands today
Symplectic Elements’ OA Monitor has continued to evolve alongside the complexity it was built to manage. Researchers can deposit their work with the push of a button, while intelligent data harvesting works continuously in the background, matching outputs and populating records without requiring manual input.
The shift this represents is substantial, as reflected in 20 years of institutional experience with Elements. Before this kind of automation existed, institutional teams often spent years manually validating and maintaining the research profiles of thousands of faculty members, checking records one by one for accuracy. The ability to automatically associate and claim dozens or hundreds of activities through a single researcher ID removed that burden almost entirely. At an institutional level, the effect shows up as less manual checking, fewer inconsistencies, and research outputs appearing in institutional systems sooner, giving institutions a stronger foundation of accurate, visible research data to build on.
Because institutions rarely operate under a single policy, OA Monitor supports multiple, independently configurable policies tracked in one place. Rather than surfacing compliance gaps after the fact, it provides real-time insight that allows institutions to identify and address those gaps as they emerge.
This visibility carries weight beyond compliance reporting. Understanding who is doing the work, and how much of it, is a meaningful step toward narrowing the recognition gap that the State of Open Data findings continue to highlight.
An ecosystem built to close the loop
None of these functions operate in isolation: this is where Figshare plays a defining role. Once a deposit clears compliance within Elements, Figshare is where that work becomes discoverable and citable, closing the loop of the credit gap felt by researchers.
Loughborough University’s experience shows what that looks like in practice. Having used Figshare as a data repository since 2014, the university restructured it in 2018 into a single, all-in-one repository covering data, journal papers, theses, and media, migrating away from a separate DSpace system. The rationale was direct: meeting open access requirements, keeping research publicly accessible, and fulfilling REF conditions. Consolidating into one system also brought cost savings for IT Services and allowed staff who had previously worked separately on either publications or data to work as a single, more flexible team. The bidirectional integration between Figshare and Elements was built specifically to support REF 2021 Open Access policies and reporting, and the full migration took about a year from start to finish.
Elements also connects to other institutional repositories including DSpace and EPrints, to publisher APIs and open databases such as DOAJ and PubMed Central, and to researcher identifiers including ORCID, Crossref, and Dimensions. Deposit, discovery, and credit only function as a system when working from an integrated infrastructure.
While institutions cannot set publisher pricing or reshape the economics of scholarly publishing this Open Access Week, the labor cost sitting behind “The Cost of Knowledge” theme is one they can act on directly, through the systems and workflows that make openness something researchers can comply with rather than struggle against.
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