The Open Knowledge Fellowship: An Opportunity for Transformative Learning at the Doctoral Level

How can we integrate the principles, practicalities, and complexities of open educational resources (OER) and open access scholarly literature into graduate-level education? At the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY), the popular and successful Open Knowledge Fellowship offers a much-needed intervention in doctoral education by addressing these topics and associated debates. Between 2020 and 2025, the intensive six-week Fellowship program was offered 12 times and trained over 200 doctoral students from across the disciplines in the selection and use of openly licensed resources in the courses they teach. These 200+ students then taught their revamped courses across the 25 campuses of the CUNY system, reducing course costs for thousands of students and often engaging those students in knock-on conversations about the meaning and possibilities of “open.” As the program enters its 6th year, we would like to take this opportunity to showcase the Fellowship for a broad audience of graduate librarians. Eminently replicable and potentially scalable, the Fellowship is a time-tested model for engaging graduate students with the economics of educational publishing and scholarly communication, as well as the possibilities created by moving from mere cost-free course materials to a fuller open pedagogy. We will provide an overview of the program’s structure and content for those who may be interested in pursuing a similar program or otherwise adapting our syllabus for graduate-level instruction at their own institutions. Additionally, we will highlight the critical edge of the Fellowship content. Given our location in New York City and the politicized nature of graduate education at a publicly funded institution, participating students are highly attuned to the intersections of labor, pedagogy, access restrictions, and other forms of exclusion. Their awareness of these issues results, time after time, in a robust, probing program that questions the nature and incentives of scholarly knowledge production. Further, we will share how the program has varied from iteration to iteration thanks to the unique contributions of our colleagues at the Graduate Center Library and across CUNY—they have brought to the Fellowship their expertise in student data privacy, accessibility, artificial intelligence, digitized archives, the role of OER in tenure and promotion, and more.