Welcome to the first newsletter of 2026!

We trust 2026 has started out well for our members and our readership.

We would like to extend a heartfelt thank you to our members without whose support we would not be able to do the work that we do. A warm welcome to Monash, our newest member! So good to have you join us!

We also extend our thanks to the broader open access community and our partners for continuing to collaborate, share and advocate for open, equitable scholarship in Australasia.

Open Access Australasia has started out the year running, presenting a workshop at the Force11 Scholarly Communication Institute, and we are now busy preparing for our Annual General Meeting in March. This year will see the launch of part 2 of OA201, follow up from the Brisbane meeting on repository infrastructure, initial work from the OAA Rights Retention Working Group and we have a number of exciting webinars in preparation.

All the best for the comng year!

The OAA Executive Committee and staff.

All member staff are warmly invited to OAA’s AGM 2026

This year’s Annual General Meeting will take place via zoom on March 19th at March 19 at 11am AEST/12pm AEDT/2pm NZDT. This is an opportunity for members to:

• Welcome new members

• Review 2025 achievements across all programs/projects.

• Review and approve the 2026 budget.

• Welcome new Executive Committee members.

• Shape 2026 priorities through member discussion.

Hope to see many of you there.

OAA farewells long serving Executive Committee members

It is with sadness, but also with extreme gratitude, that we give heartfelt thanks to Kim Tairi, Dimity Flanagan and Fiona Bradley for their outstanding service and commitment as members of the OAA Executive for many years. Our work has been so deeply enriched by the contributions of these three members whose influence will be felt and appreciated long after their departure. All three have served two consecutive terms on the Executive, the longest time possible under the constitution.

Thank you, ngā mihi nui, Kim, Dimity and Fiona.

CAUL releases Strategic Plan 2026-2028

OAA welcomes the release of CAUL’s Strategic plan for the next 3 years and supports its commitment to “a transformed, equitable scholarly system

that enables open knowledge and serves the public good.” The plan focuses on 3 key areas: Transforming knowledge ecosystems for equity and access; Enhancing the university library sector’s voice and value ; Commitment to Indigenous partnership. For a summary of the plan see CAUL Strategy on a page 2026-28

OAA workshop: FORCE11 Scholarly Communications Institute.

In January 2026, Open Access Australasia delivered a series of three workshops as part of the FORCE11 Scholarly Communication Institute (FSCI) titled The Future is Open Scholarship*: Explore and discuss four key topics in the evolving open landscape. The first two sessions were hosted virtually via Zoom, fostering global participation, while the third culminated in an engaging in-person event in Bangkok, Thailand, held during the pre-conference of the Charleston Asia Conference.

* the title intentionally refers back to Tom Saunders’ foundational report, The Future is Open: Establishing Wider Open Access for Research Publications in Aotearoa New Zealand (2022.)

3rd Global Summit Diamond Open Access: Recap.

By Tracy Creagh

The 3rd Global Summit Diamond Open Access was held in Bengaluru, India (2-6 February). Four days of workshops, plenaries, thematic tracks, digital poster sessions – all focused on Diamond open access initiatives, capacity building, strengthening scholarly societies, supporting and sustaining community engagement

AuSCCoP

The CoP is off to a great start in 2026, with new co-conveners settling into their roles and building strong foundations for the year ahead. We’ve been busy setting up meetings, doing some early planning, and shaping the focus of upcoming activities. Our first session and our first watch party are both coming up soon, and we’re looking forward to getting the community together. 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.

We’ve also launched a new feedback and ideas form. If you have suggestions for future topics or speakers, or any general feedback you’d like to share, we’d love to hear from you.

AuSCCoP Diamond Open Access Publishing group.

The Diamond OA CoP’s mission is to advocate for inclusive, equitable, sustainable, community-controlled OA publishing with no fees to either reader or author. We seek to provide members with a participatory and engaging community for helping each other with everyday practice, as well as opportunities for discussion, development, and dissemination of best practices and strategies towards realising our mission.

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

Please join members in congratulating our new co-convenors, Allison Brown, University of Melbourne and Lucie Goudie, CQU. More information about the Repository group, dates for 2026 and how to join.

Aotearoa Scholarly Communications CoP

Stuart Yeates from Victoria University has been working on a comprehensive list of diamond OA journals in Aotearoa using Wikidata. Shared diamond journal infrastructure continues to be actively discussed following the publication of research from AUT last year.

Information about all six of the Aotearoa groups can now be found on OAA’s website find out more and sign up for meetings

What’s new in OA & scholarly publishing globally

European Research Area (ERA) Act

The proposed ERA Act aims to unify Europe’s fragmented research landscape by driving R&D investment, improving researcher careers and mobility, and promoting free circulation of knowledge and technology.

For open scholarship, it promises reforms in research assessment to value integrity over metrics, aligning with DORA/CoARA principles, supports diverse outputs, and  mandates immediate open access.

LIBER (Association of European Research Libraries), representing over 400 institutions, offers a key library-sector perspective on advancing these goals. Their consultation response, crafted with SPARC Europe and IFLA input, urges an EU-wide secondary publication right with zero embargo periods, rights retention by default for authors, and standardized open licensing (like CC BY), amongst other points.

The Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) conducted a survey in early 2025 to assess the extent to which repositories were being adversely affected by a sudden massive increase in activity by “bots” – automated Web clients such as crawling or harvesting systems. The ensuing report – The impact of AI bots and crawlers on open repositories: Results of a COAR survey, April 2025 – was published in June 2025. COAR then convened a taskforce to compile a web resource, detailing strategies to manage bots, and inviting collaboration with the broader repository community.

Open Journals Collective Launches!

The Open Journals Collective (OJC) is a collaborative funding model where libraries invest collectively to sustain diamond open access journals (no fees for readers or authors) from independent scholarly presses, promoting bibliodiversity. OJC officially launched in January 2026 with founding publishers like Open Library of Humanities, UCL Press, and Érudit, plus DOAJ-indexed titles.

Libraries can now sign up via tiered memberships. Independent diamond journals can now apply for inclusion in the catalogue for free if they pass elligibility (similar to that of DOAJ.)

Publishers Win Dismissal in Peer Review Lawsuit: Uddin v. Elsevier et al.

A U.S. federal judge in New York dismissed a 2024 class-action lawsuit against major academic publishers (Elsevier, Wiley, Sage, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, Wolters Kluwer) accusing them of antitrust violations via unpaid peer review, single-submission rules, and manuscript restrictions during review.

Plaintiffs claimed these industry norms fixed reviewer pay at zero and stifled competition. The Judge ruled they lacked evidence of collusion. The decision upholds status quo norms but spotlights ongoing researcher frustrations.

France’s CNRS Abandons Web of Science for Open Databases.

France’s National Centre for Scientific Research terminated access to Clarivate’s Web of Science on January 1, 2026, having already left Scopus in 2024. The organisation predicts savings of €1.4 million annually which can be invested in open databases like OpenAlex, potentially gaining better coverage of more diverse sources of research beyond English language journals. Deputy CEO Alain Schuhl called on partner institutions to similarly embrace open, transparent databases. Meanwhile in the UK three major research universities opt out of new Elsevier deal

Reports

New report challenges funders and institutions to expand their understanding of openness to better reflect arts, humanities and social sciences.

Report authors: Jenni Adams, Miranda Barnes, Samuel Moore, Stephen Pinfield, Siddharth Soni.

This report details the findings of work by the Materialising Open Research Practices in the Humanities and Social Sciences (MORPHSS) project to identify and catalogue open research practices in the arts, humanities and (primarily qualitative) social sciences in order to reveal the nuanced and discipline-specific approaches to openness that take place in AHSS.

What we are reading:

Open Access and the Solidification of Epistemic Injustices: The Democratisation Myth

By Marcel Knöchelmann.

Marcel Knöchelmann, a Yale-based cultural sociologist, challenges the myth that open access inherently democratizes knowledge. In this sharp analysis, he argues it often solidifies epistemic injustices—marginalizing Global South voices through APCs and Northern “big deals”—while calling for community-led models to foster true bibliodiversity.

Why is change in scholarly communication so hard to imagine?Findings from a stakeholder consultation for the cOAlition S proposal ‘Towards Responsible Publishing.’

By Wolfgang Kaltenbrunner, Andrea Chiarelli, Andrea Reyes Elizondo, Stephen Pinfield, Ludo Waltman, André Brasil.

This SocArXiv preprint uses cOAlition S as a key example to dissect why scholarly communication reform faces slow progress amid publisher resistance, fragmented funder coordination, and researcher disengagement. It maps systemic inertia across stakeholders and charts practical fixes via aligned incentives and collective action.

Keeping up with AI

New and powerful AI agents gain traction in research.

A February 2026 analysis by Intuition Labs highlights agentic AI’s rapid adoption in research, looking at FutureHouse, whose ready-made agentic tools like Crow (literature search) and Falcon (deep paper synthesis on open-access corpora), are outperforming PhDs on benchmarks.

Tools like CrewAI (an open-source framework, lets researchers build multi-agent “teams” where one agent retrieves papers, another summarizes, a third analyzes gaps, and they collaborate to generate cited literature reviews,) and SuperAGI (free, open-source software that lets developers create “smart robots” which work on their own to complete goal driven tasks) are also gaining traction this year.

Tools like these go way beyond chatbots by autonomously chaining tasks across APIs/tools, but continue to raise serious flags around integrity, reproducibility, the use of opaque, proprietary datasets, and ethics.

Watch this space, its going to get weirder!

What we are watching

Beyond the Ivory Tower: The Real-World Importance of Open Access Today

“Open access advocates routinely proclaim the importance of information as a public good. Access to information and knowledge has been codified in the UN Declaration of Human Rights (Article 19). But what is actually happening on the ground? Does it matter that we make scholarly research open to those beyond academia? Who else is finding, reading and benefitting from open content? Where are they and what are they doing with the information? In short – why do we care about opening up access to scholarship? And what is the risk of not having this content openly available?”

What we are listening to

Dr Terri Janke: “We Need To Protect Our Knowledge And Culture”

Larissa Behrendt in conversation on Speaking Out with Terri Janke, pioneering Indigenous lawyer whose career spans founding her own Cairns-based firm in the late 1990s, to becoming a founding champion of ICIP, to being a leading advocate for creators in the AI era.

Also see “True Tracks” and “Our Culture: Our Future,” pioneering and foundational texts authored by Terri Janke.

Upcoming events in OA & scholarly publishing

ALIA National 2026 Conference

11 – 14 May 2026, Sydney. Australia.

FORCE2026

3 – 5 June 2026, SMU, Singapore.

Research Support Community Day

16 – 18 June 2026, online.

Hosted by Monash University

Details and website TBA

ResBaz Queensland 2026

23 – 25 June 2026, Brisbane, Australia.