| | | | August 2026: What’s in this issueWhat’s new in OA & scholarly publishing in Australia & Aotearoa New ZealandWhat’s new in OA & scholarly publishing globallyRecent writing & resources on OAUpcoming events in OA & scholarly publishing
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| | | | What’s new in OA & scholarly publishing in Australia & Aotearoa New Zealand |
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| | Making open knowledge CultureStrongWikimedia Australia has released two new resources – the ICIP and Indigenous Data Sovereignty Guide and the CultureStrong Platforms White Paper – developed by Terri Janke and Company to support more responsible engagement with First Nations knowledge across Wikimedia projects. In this blog post, Dr Terri Janke explains that material may be legally or technically available to share without necessarily being culturally appropriate to publish or reuse. In this context, CultureStrong calls on open-knowledge platforms and GLAM institutions to centre cultural authority, community involvement, appropriate protocols and Indigenous governance of knowledge and data. The Guide provides practical direction for working with Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property and Indigenous data, while the White Paper invites discussion about how platforms such as Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata might better support Indigenous governance, cultural protocols and community agency |
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| | | | | CORE: COnnecting REpositories – An Open Scholarly Infrastructure Supporting RepositoriesSeptember 14th, 2pm AEST 4pm NZST.We are pleased to welcome CORE COnnecting REpositories to present to our community on their impressive body of work. CORE is an open scholarly infrastructure that indexes millions of open access research papers and metadata from repositories and journals worldwide. Its goal is to improve the discoverability and reuse of research outputs and support machine access to scholarly content in line with open access and open science principles. This talk will provide an overview of CORE and its services for repositories, including compliance monitoring, metadata validation, and tools to improve interoperability and discoverability. |
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| | | | | | | Understanding publishing agreements for academic authorsOAA member staff are warmly invited to attend our second workshop Understanding publish agreements for academic authors to be given by Richard White, Manager, Copyright and Open Access at University of Otago/Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka, and member of the OAA Executive Committee. This is a companion workshop to the first held in June: you do not need to have attended the first workshop to attend this one. Although this is a member only workshop any resources generated will be shared with the community via our Resources for Rights Retention site. The guideline and checklist from the first workshop are available for use here The rights retention site is very much a work in progress, and we strongly encourage our community to get in touch with feedback, suggestions, and additional materials we can showcase. If you would like to offer your institution as a case study let us know! |
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| | | | Are you making plans for OA Week 2026?This year’s theme is “the cost of knowledge” – “We create and share knowledge in order to advance human understanding and the common good. We recognize that accessing and sharing knowledge is a human right. Yet, the costs to access and share knowledge continue to increase, often dramatically. Why? Who benefits?” International Open Access Week The OA Week Planning Committee are finalising the last details on a number of events that will take place throughout October. The full program will be released very soon! This year OAA is also teaming up with SPARC and OASPA to foster some thoughtful, engaging conversations around this theme. Be ready to mark your calendars and watch this space! If your institution has any events you would like us to promote on our website, please send them through to contact@oaaustralasia.org |
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| | | Asking the harder question: what happens when article growth outruns the agreement?CAUL has published an analysis of the pressure that rising publication volumes place on capped and volume-based open-access agreements. It argues that publishers’ expanding titles, transfer pathways and growing submissions can increase the volume risk ultimately carried by libraries. While uncapped agreements can protect authors’ ability to publish openly during the agreement term, CAUL’s article raises the related question of how sharp growth in article output affects future pricing. It calls for volume-linked cost commitments so that growth does not simply translate into higher costs at the next negotiation. |
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| | AuSCCoP AuSSCoP continues to operate as usual, with regular community meetings, resource sharing, and discussions supporting scholarly communication practice across the sector. We look forward to building on this steady momentum through the remainder of the year. The group next meets on September 15 at 1pm AEST 3pm NZST. In October, our members focus on OA Month activities within their institutions and then we plan to round out 2026 with one last official meeting and watch party. Members continue to contribute to the shared Glossary of scholarly communications terminology and are also invited to add their ideas for the group to the feedback form. New members are always welcome to join our lively discussions. If you’re interested in knowledge sharing, exchanging ideas, and connecting with colleagues in a friendly and supportive space, you’re very welcome to join the CoP. Meeting times for 2026 are listed here. AuSCCoP Diamond Open Access Publishing group. The Diamond CoP are currently developing a webpage for the OAA website to profile Diamond Open Access in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. All going well, the webpage will be live by the end of 2026. Speaker details for ‘Insights from Canada’s Library Publishing Landscape’ (CAUL, CARL and PKP Webinar) will be announced soon. The webinar is scheduled for October 15. The group next meets October 15th 11am AEST/12pm AEDT/2pm NZDT Please add your diamond journal to our Australasian Diamond Discovery Hub and feel free to share resources, guidelines and websites for diamond here We welcome all new members. Details for joining the CoP and the meeting schedule for 2026 can be found here: how to join. AuSCCoP Repositories group Results of the recent Repositories survey were discussed at last meeting. The group next meets on Tuesday 8th September at 12pm AEST 2pm NZST and will discuss implications for repositories of the updated ARC OA policy. More information about the Repository group, dates for 2026 and how to join. Aotearoa Scholarly Communications CoP This CoP consists of subgroups for open educational resources, open access, Open Journal Systems, research data management and research impact metrics. Information about all of the Aotearoa groups can now be found on OAA’s website find out more and sign up for meetings |
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| | What’s new in OA & scholarly publishing globally |
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| | SCOSS Releases Five Principles for Supporting Open InfrastructureSCOSS has released five guiding principles to help institutions make practical, sustainable investments in the open infrastructure that underpins research discovery, access, reuse and preservation. The principles encourage institutions to map the open services they already rely on, share responsibility for their sustainability, prioritise community-governed infrastructure, treat it as core – not project – funding, and begin with modest but consistent contributions. |
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| | | | APC costs under renewed scrutinyA new preprint estimates that institutions and funders worldwide paid US$15.08 billion in article processing charges (APCs) to 14 major publishers between 2019 and 2025. The study also finds that APCs in hybrid journals tend to be higher than those in fully open-access journals. The findings come as a U.S. lawsuit filed under the False Claims Act alleges that Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Informa caused federally funded institutions to submit false reimbursement claims by charging excessive APCs. |
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| | Clarivate announces enhanced SkyRiver platform for open bibliographic metadataClarivate has announced an enhanced version of its SkyRiver library-metadata platform, which it says will support the sharing, reuse and creation of bibliographic metadata across library systems. The company states that SkyRiver will use open metadata by default, with CC0 for metadata created directly by the platform and support for CC0 and CC BY reuse, export, API access and bulk download where rights permit. The announcement is of interest to libraries concerned with metadata interoperability, provenance and reducing duplicated cataloguing effort. However, the practical value of the model will depend on its implementation – particularly pricing, technical access conditions, API and bulk-download arrangements, data portability, governance, and the limits placed on reuse. The platform also introduces AI-assisted record creation, raising further questions about transparency, quality assurance and professional oversight. |
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| | | | Open Science Framework to phase out active project workspacesThe Center for Open Science is making major changes to the Open Science Framework (OSF) in response to a difficult funding environment. From 16 November 2026, users will no longer be able to create new OSF Projects or child components; from 19 February 2027, existing public and private projects will become read-only. Public projects, including their links and DOIs, will remain persistent, discoverable and downloadable. OSF will focus more narrowly on preregistration, study planning, registries, preprints and linking research outputs held in specialist repositories such as Zenodo. Users with active or private projects should review their content and plan a move to another suitable storage, repository or workflow service |
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| | | | | Who owns and governs Diamond Open Access?A newly posted preprint, Who Owns, Publishes, and Governs Diamond Open Access? Institutional Arrangements Among Journals Using Open Journal Systems by Nikoleta Chhtena, Juan Pablo Alperin and Mikael Laakso examines who owns, publishes and governs Diamond Open Access journals using Open Journal Systems. It looks behind the no-fee model to the institutional arrangements that shape editorial independence, accountability and long-term sustainability. The paper is timely because Diamond OA is often described as community-owned, yet “community ownership” can take many forms – from journals owned by universities, libraries and scholarly societies to those supported by other public or non-profit bodies. It invites closer attention to whether legal ownership and governance structures actually give scholarly communities meaningful control over their publishing venues |
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| | | | | OpenAIRE’s 2025 Annual Report: open infrastructure at scaleOpenAIRE has released its 2025 Annual Report, documenting a year in which open science infrastructure, services and community capacity-building continued to expand across Europe. The report offers a useful international perspective on the practical work required to make research information open, trustworthy and reusable in an increasingly AI-enabled environment, while also foregrounding questions of sovereignty, security, skills and responsible research assessment. OpenAIRE have also published this month Operationalising bibliodiversity via the OpenAIRE Graph: a multidimensional demonstration by Simone Angioni, Miriam Baglioni & Andrea Mannocci, showing how the OpenAIRE Graph can be used to measure bibliodiversity across multiple dimensions, offering a practical way to assess whether scholarly communication systems support a diverse range of languages, publication venues, disciplines, countries and research communities. |
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| | | | Wikimedia, the Commons and the New AI Knowledge LoopA new white paper from Open Future and Wikimedia Swiss chapter (CH) asks how Wikimedia can remain an active, self-governing force in the emerging AI knowledge ecosystem. It warns that generative AI systems increasingly draw on the knowledge commons while weakening the reciprocal flows of readers, contributors, attention and funding that have helped sustain it. Rather than framing the answer as simply closing off access or accepting extraction as inevitable, the paper calls for a “Wikimedia and AI mission” centred on pro-commons governance, reciprocity and investment in commons-aligned public AI infrastructure. It is a useful contribution for anyone interested in what it will take to keep open knowledge visible, sustainable and governed in the public interest as AI becomes a primary interface to information |
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| | | | | By Cassandra Sedran-Price, Riley Taitingfong, Rose Barrowcliffe, Jacob Prehn, Maggie Walter, Gawaian Bodkin-Andrews, Raymond Lovett Indigenous Governance of Data Held by Organisations: How to Operationalise Indigenous Data Sovereignty Principles in Australia examines how universities, governments, health services and other organisations can put Indigenous Data Sovereignty into practice when they hold Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander data. Rather than treating governance as a high-level commitment, the article outlines practical mechanisms for embedding Indigenous authority in decisions about data collection, access, use, reuse and accountability. The article shifts the conversation from whether institutions recognise Indigenous Data Sovereignty to how they can enact it, through sustained, properly resourced governance arrangements that enable Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to exercise authority over data about them, wherever that data is held. |
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| | | | Special Issue: Openness and Inequity in Scientific ResearchSocial Epistemology, Volume 40, Issue 5 (2026) Guest editors: Sabina Leonelli, Paola Castaño and Rena Alcalay. A new special issue of Social Epistemology examines how Open Science can both widen access to research and reproduce—or deepen—inequity, exclusion and epistemic injustice. “Openness and Inequity in Scientific Research” brings together seven papers and two commentaries on the infrastructures, tools, labour conditions and power relations that shape who can participate in open research and on what terms. The collection considers issues including data standards that exclude lower-resourced researchers, extractivism in data sharing, global citizen-science platforms, AI tools for research evaluation, researcher agency over scientific software, and locally responsive open-science capacity building. Its central message is that openness is not automatically equitable: its value depends on how practices and infrastructure are governed, resourced and adapted to the needs of diverse research communities. Of particular note: Not All Research Environments are Created Equal by Sabina Leonelli. |
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| | | | | Preprint estimates widespread LLM-assisted writing in biomedical articlesA new preprint estimates that 89% of English-language, open-access biomedical articles published in December 2025 and deposited in PubMed Central showed a statistical vocabulary signal consistent with some level of LLM-assisted writing or editing. The study analysed approximately 1.19 million articles and estimates a rapid increase in such signals, from 19% in 2023 to 52% in 2024 and 77% across 2025. The authors stress that their method cannot show how, or how extensively, AI was used in any individual paper. The signal could reflect anything from language editing and translation support to more substantial drafting, and the article remains a preprint rather than peer-reviewed research at this stage. See also Nature’s coverage. |
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| | | | Will AI keep science human?A new perspective published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) asks whether the widespread use of large language models will do more than accelerate research workflows: could it reorganise science itself? The authors argue that as AI enters the processes through which research is written, assessed, funded and published, scientific systems may increasingly reward what optimises for machine-mediated evaluation rather than what advances human understanding. They warn of a possible self-reinforcing loop in which AI-shaped publications inform subsequent AI systems, while human judgment, curiosity and accountability are progressively displaced. The article does not argue for rejecting AI in research; instead, it calls for stronger human oversight, provenance measures, protected domains of human evaluation, and incentives that keep scientific inquiry anchored in careful verification and public trust. |
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| | | | | IFLA WLIC 2026: From Scraping to Strategy How Libraries Can Respond to Collection Crawling“Description: Automated bots increasingly crawl library collections at scale—indexing catalogs, harvesting metadata, scraping full texts, and probing digital repositories. While some of this activity supports discovery and research, much of it creates operational, legal, and ethical challenges for libraries of all types. In this session, we examine how bot traffic is reshaping collection management, access provision, and digital stewardship, and we outline practical and strategic responses for the library community.” For another interesting take on this issue see Will the Open Internet Survive the War on Bots? Mapping the Debate Over “AI Preferences by Kevin Bankston. |
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| | | | | Live panel: Wikimedia Australia and Dr Terri Janke’s guide to working with First Nations content.Episode 6 • 18th August 2026 • All That We Touch • Impact Studios This live pane explores Wikimedia Australia’s new guide to respectful, accurate engagement with Indigenous knowledge on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia platforms. Recorded at WikiCon Australia 2026, the discussion features Dr Terri Janke, Shevawn Wright and Matilda Langford, and considers cultural authority, Indigenous agency, metadata, reliable sources, and free, prior and informed consent. The episode also discusses the accompanying CultureStrong White Paper, including the unresolved tensions between open licensing and customary law, and the proposal for a dedicated, Indigenous-led First Nations Protocol for Wikimedia Australia. |
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| | | Upcoming events in OA & scholarly publishing |
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