Going far together in Singapore: Open Access Australasia at FORCE2026

Earlier this month, FORCE2026 brought the global open scholarship community to Singapore under the theme “To go far, go together: advancing scholarly communication across boundaries and disruptions.” Held at Singapore Management University, the conference gathered librarians, researchers, publishers, funders and infrastructure builders to talk about where scholarly communication is heading and how we might shape it.

Open Access Australasia was there to listen, share, and connect work in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand with these international conversations about open access, research assessment and infrastructure.

Starting with responsible research assessment

Before the main conference began, a pre‑conference workshop event, Shared Principles, Regional realities: Advancing Research Reform in the Asia Pacific, jointly organised by DORA,  CoARA, and ALLEA, investigated ways to implement responsible research assessment (RRA). The workshop focused on very practical questions:

• How do institutions move away from “Where did you publish?” towards “What did your work change?”
• How can assessment recognise a broader range of outputs, including open data, software, community reports and Indigenous‑led scholarship?
• What does it take to shift local policies and committee practices, not just high‑level statements?

The conclusion was clear. Assessment and incentives are not side issues, they sit at the heart of whether open access and open science can actually succeed, because they shape which work is valued, funded and shared in the first place.

Conference Highlights

From there, the heart of FORCE2026 lay in two intertwined concerns: how to make scholarly communication more open, equitable and bibliodiverse, and how to navigate the growing influence of AI on research and publishing.

Bibliodiversity & equity 

Among many others, particularly noteworthy was Jess Howie’s exploration of how open research practices can better reflect diverse research communities rather than reinforcing a narrow set of dominant voices in her session, “Embedding Bibliodiversity in Open Research: Equity, Access, and Local Voices.” Jess described practicing bibliodiversity at the University of Waikato. Angel Ford presented her work on developing a critical lens from scholars’ lived experiences in scholarly communication, particularly in low‑ and middle‑income settings, to surface and analyse structural inequities in publishing and inform more just practices.

Diamond OA in practice

One of the most inspiring sessions from an Australasian perspective was Donna Coventry’s talk about Tuwhera, the diamond open access platform at Auckland University of Technology. Donna showed how, over roughly a decade, Tuwhera has supported a growing set of community‑driven, non‑APC journals, many of them grounded in local or regional needs.

What stood out was less the technology and more the long‑term commitment: building relationships with editors, supporting smaller and niche titles, and treating open access as a service the university offers to its communities. For Open Access Australasia, it was a reminder that sustainable, equitable open publishing often looks like this kind of patient, committed, people-centred work.

AI & infrastructure

AI ran as a strong theme across many sessions. Ian Mulvany’s keynote, “Surviving the Disruption: Scholarly Communication in the Age of AI,” drew on experiments at BMJ with AI in editorial workflows showing how AI is already changing the practical conditions under which journals operate. Danping Dong and Pin Pin Yeo (SMU) showed how tools like BERTopic and LLM‑based zero‑shot classification (via DeepSeek and Claude) can cluster publications, label themes and map institutional research to strategic priorities, while still needing human input to define categories and check edge cases. Aaron Tay’s session then zoomed into discovery, comparing agentic deep search tools such as Consensus and Undermind to show how different AI designs can produce more stable but less relevant results, or more relevant but less stable ones, raising questions about convergence and reproducibility in LLM‑driven literature discovery.

What came through strongly is that AI is not a standalone solution; any benefits depend heavily on the policies, infrastructures and values into which it is introduced.

How do we reform scholarly publishing?

In the closing keynote, titled “Publishing in 2026: How we got into such trouble and how we get out of it,” Ginny Barbour traced how current systems of scholarly communication have led to problems such as inequitable access, distortions created by narrow research metrics, and barriers to sharing research openly. Drawing on her experience as Co Chair of DORA and EIC at the MJA, she invited the audience to think about how research assessment, publishing practices and infrastructure could be reshaped so that they better support openness, equity and the broader public value of research, encouraging the community to think about how policies, infrastructures and incentives could be reshaped so that research outputs are easier to discover and reuse.

It was a thoughtful way to end a conference that had returned, again and again, to questions of purpose, fairness and collaboration.

What Open Access Australasia brings home

For Open Access Australasia, a few broad reflections stand out from FORCE2026:

• There is strong, practical interest worldwide in non‑APC, community‑led models of open publishing, including diamond open access platforms and regionally grounded journals.
• Assessment and incentives remain central. As long as we keep rewarding journal brands and citation counts over the actual value that diverse forms of scholarship bring to people and communities, an open, equitable research culture will struggle to take root.
• Equity and inclusion need to be built into infrastructures and policies from the beginning, rather than addressed only after systems are in place.
• Asia Pacific’s experiences, including our work here in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, are very much part of global conversations, not an add‑on.

FORCE2026 was an opportunity to connect with colleagues who are grappling with similar questions in different contexts, and to see again that progress on open access and open scholarship depends on collaboration across disciplines, roles and regions. The next challenge is to keep turning those insights into practical support and advocacy back home.

 

All photographs courtesy of Singapore Management University 2026