| | | | March 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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| | Welcome to the OAA Executive Committee 2026A very warm welcome our new Executive Committee members appointed at the recent AGM: Sarah Howard, University Librarian, Griffith University. Gary Pearce, Director Academic Services, Monash University. Nicole Clark, University Librarian, QUT. Richard White, Manager, Copyright & Open Access, University of Otago Emma McLean, Associate Director, Scholarly Communications & Repositories, UNSW
These new members will join Anne Lennox, Associate Director, Library Services Learning, Teaching and Research, RMIT, who has stepped into the role of Chair. Sarah Howard will be Deputy Chair. An important amendment to OAA’s Constitution passed at the AGM was to appoint an Indigenous Community Affiliate to the Executive Committee. Please invite any colleagues you think might be interested in this position to get in touch. A big thank you again to our outgoing committee members Kim Tairi, Dimity Flanagan, Fiona Bradley, Yanti Ropeyarn and Jess Howie. You will all be missed! |
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| | | ARC releases updated OA PolicyThe Australian Research Council (ARC) released its updated Open Access Policy 2026 on 23 March 2026, with the new requirements taking effect on 1 July 2026 for all grant schemes opening on or after that date. The update requires journal articles and conference papers to be openly accessible immediately (no embargo), mandates a DOI for all outputs (including creative works), and introduces new requirements for research with, by, or for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples aligned with the Maiam Nayri Wingara principles |
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| | | | Wikimedia Australia ICIP & IDSov Project UpdateTerri Janke & Co have been contracted by Wikimedia Australia to lead the development of an ICIP & Indigenous Data Sovereignty (IDSov) Guide that embeds First Nations protocols into Wikimedia projects like Wikipedia. The purpose of this work is to enable Indigenous communities to be the primary guardians of their knowledge on open wiki platforms, moving beyond “open by default” to open with sovereignty and consent. This recent update describes the progress to date and the establishment of an Indigenous Expert Working Group (Working Group). Yanti Ropeyarn, former OAA Executive Committee member, joins this group. |
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| | | | Jess Howie appointed Lead, Governance & Operations.Former OAA Executive Committee member and long time friend of OAA, Jess will support the governance functions of CAUL administering key business operations for the CAUL Office, delivering events and working with the convenors of CAUL’s Communities of Practice. |
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| | | | Tracy Creagh: Misconceptions about open access models persist even after two decadesIn an email interview with Santosh C. H. for Open Interview, Tracy, Journal Manager, Office for Scholarly Communication, Queensland University of Technology and long time friend to OAA, shares her insights on open access, noting that despite significant progress, misconceptions about open access still persist. |
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| | AuSCCoP The Australian Scholarly Communications CoP held a watch party on the 25th February showing the UKSG webinar Usage metrics for OA, AI, and more: building on solid foundations. The recording can still be accessed at the UKSG website Members continue to contribute to the shared Glossary of scholarly communications terminology Members are also invited to add their ideas for the group to the feedback form. The group next meets on April 21 at 1pm AEST. 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 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 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 meetings for 2026 can be found here: how to join. The next meeting will be held on April 16 at 12pm AEST. AuSCCoP Repositories group Many thanks to Keely Chapman who is stepping down as co-convener of the group. The group’s first meeting on February 10 included a robust discussion on DOIs, Open Educational Resources and collecting policies. Fiona Glasgow and Emma McLean from UNSW gave a highly informative presentation on their institution’s approach to rights retention. More information about the Repository group, dates for 2026 and how to join. The group next meets on May 12th at 12pm AEST. To 11th of June 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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| | Launch of global consultation: Equitable scholarly communication for implementation of open science UNESCO is launching a consultation to explore fair, inclusive ways to create, share, and access academic knowledge, and to address challenges in building more equitable systems. Those wishing to contribute can download the PDF, add comments directly in the document, and email it to openscience@unesco.org with the subject line “Feedback on equitable scholarly communication”. Deadline for responses is April 13. |
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| | | | eLife receives Wellcome boost to build open publishing ecosystemeLife is pleased to announce funding from Wellcome which will support a new initiative, called eLife Pathways, in building an open and collaborative ecosystem for alternative approaches to scholarly communication. The new eLife Pathways initiative will pursue three goals: enhancing eLife’s current technology to better serve the community; co-developing with the Public Knowledge Project a free open-source tool to produce high-quality JATS XML (the industry standard for structuring and sharing research articles); and delivering technology to support vital community projects, promoting their adoption and ecosystem contributions. |
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| | | | CERN to host Europe’s flagship open access publishing platform CERN has been selected to host a new phase of Open Research Europe (ORE), an initiative supported by the European Commission and a new funding consortium of European national funding agencies and research organisations. Aligned with the Action Plan for Diamond Open Access, the initiative is a community-led alternative to traditional academic publishing. |
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| | | | Navigating the Uneasy Interdependence of AI and Open ScienceFollowing their recent resources for repositories tackling AI bot overloads, COAR has released a statement highlighting the tense relationship between AI and open science. It outlines three key challenges: first, protecting repository integrity from unchecked scraping by AI bots; second, ensuring AI-generated citations accurately link back to original sources; and third, sustaining open access amid surging computational demands that spike bandwidth costs and threaten viability without new funding. |
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| | | | | Scoping Report on Non-for-profit Publishing EcosystemsThe ALMASI project’s D1.1 Scoping Report establishes shared definitions for Diamond Open Access publishing across Africa, Europe, and Latin America, mapping nonprofit ecosystems through five pillars: funding, governance, platforms, services, and outputs. It aggregates bibliometric data from sources like OpenAlex to identify 20,355 Diamond OA journals (13,202 Europe; 5,821 Latin America; 1,351 Africa), noting universities as primary publishers. |
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| | | | | IFLA Journal. March 2026 Special Issue: Indigenous Knowledge“Co-sponsored by IFLA’s Indigenous Matters Section and partners, the issue centers Indigenous expertise in reshaping professional practice. The contributions examine legal developments affecting traditional cultural expressions, collaborations between Indigenous communities and heritage institutions, Indigenous data governance, language revitalization, climate adaptation, and community-based library models.” |
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| | | | Posted by OLH on 26 March 2026. In OLH’s latest Long Read, the anonymous author examines how AI/data platform dominance creates ‘infrastructure landlords’ extracting rent from research. Growing researcher dependency on AI, data platforms, and corporate infrastructure as these technologies expand raises concerns for independent scholarship. |
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| | | | How Graduate Students Engage with Open Access: Challenges and InterventionsBy Martha Stuit, Christy Caldwell and Lucia Orlando. This study offers valuable insights into graduate student perspectives on OA, highlighting discipline-specific adoption patterns. It reveals that while students hold positive attitudes toward OA, their actual publishing practices often fall short, highlighting a gap that calls for targeted guidance to align OA strategies with their focus on research impact. The authors propose interventions to better support graduate students in integrating open practices into their scholarly workflows. |
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| | | | | An Open Training Set For AI Goes Globalby Glen Moody The Common Corpus, developed by French startup Pleias, has expanded to over 2.267 trillion tokens of permissively licensed, multilingual training data for AI models, now including substantial content from China, Japan, Korea, Brazil, India, Africa, and Southeast Asia. This curated dataset draws from diverse sources like government documents, scientific articles, cultural heritage texts, code, and web content, with toxic material removed and provenance fully documented to comply with regulations such as the EU AI Act. It offers an ethical alternative to scraping copyrighted web data, enabling auditable, open-source AI models resilient to legal challenges in training data usage. |
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| | | | Carlo Iacono, UL at Charles Sturt, takes an existential look at the data from Anthropic’s recent study, based on interviews with 80,508 Claude users across 159 countries. The data uncovers users’ desires for AI to alleviate modern life’s cognitive overload, prioritizing time freedom, professional excellence, and personal relief over raw intelligence. Respondents envision AI handling mundane tasks—like documentation or executive functions—to reclaim family time and mental space, revealing pre-existing systemic strains in work, education, and social fabrics that AI diagnoses rather than creates. “The…study reads less as a report about what people want from AI than as a diagnostic scan of a civilisation that outsourced its care infrastructure, overloaded its workers, defunded its public spaces, and then watched a machine move into every gap it left empty. The respondents are not confused about what they are asking for. They are asking for what was taken from them. That AI is the tool they are asking with, and the tool that threatens to take more, is the entanglement the study maps with clinical precision.” |
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| | | | Why genAI means the end of copyright for software and the re-invention of open sourceGenerative AI (GenAI) threatens software copyright by training on vast open source codebases, then outputting near-identical snippets stripped of source license, author, repository, or context—leaving downstream developers unaware of obligations. ‘Copyleft reciprocity’ requires that if you modify/distribute covered code, you must share your changes under the same terms, enabling community access and iteration. GenAI breaks this by transforming licensed code into ‘originless’ statistical outputs, making compliance impossible as users cannot identify or contribute back to the source. |
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| | | | | This RLUK 2026 conference session, chaired by Katie Eagleton (University of St Andrews), explores how universities can shape the future of open scholarship in the age of AI through three interconnected talks. It opens with a strategic proposal that universities explicitly retain text and data mining (TDM) and AI training rights in their research outputs. By combining these with existing database rights, institutions can build a rights-clear, ethically governed research corpus that blocks publishers and tech firms from monopolising academic value, protects academic freedom, supports responsible AI, and funds community-owned publishing. The session then shares practical copyright literacy strategies from Imperial College London and UCL, including a reusable toolkit to build a community-led understanding of copyright, and closes with a look at the shift to open, shareable metadata and AI-enriched infrastructure to improve discovery, interoperability, and knowledge equity while reducing fragmentation and commercial dependency. |
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| | | | | “Join…co-hosts, WariNkwi and Sierra, for a critical analysis of the first international standard that applies the CARE Principles through technical provenance. As the US Indigenous Data Sovereignty Network notes, this is a milestone step for governance, but what does it look like in practice?” In two parts. |
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| | | | | The Taonga Files podcast investigates provenance for taonga Māori (treasured Māori objects) in museum collections, focusing on their hidden histories, colonial acquisition, and repatriation efforts. |
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| | | Upcoming events in OA & scholarly publishing |
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