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| | October 2025: 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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| | OA Week 2025: Recordings now available for Open Access Australasia eventsThanks to everyone who attended and participated in our three OA Week events. A big thank you to our amazing presenters whose insights and expertise made the sessions truly engaging, and to our skilled facilitators who added such value. A special appreciation goes out to our dedicated Planning Committee 2025, Please share your thoughts and feedback via this very short survey to help us improve events next year. if you weren’t able to catch everything live or want to revisit any session, the event recordings are now available for you to watch at your convenience. |
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| | | | | Te Kāhui Raraunga releases Māori AI Governance Framework. Te Kāhui Raraunga has just released a new report unveiling a Māori AI Governance Framework aimed at protecting Māori data in the age of artificial intelligence. The report calls for: A whole-of-government AI policy and data standards to ensure ethical, trustworthy, and responsible AI use. Safeguards to prevent bias and discrimination by regularly monitoring algorithms. Greater transparency and accountability in AI deployment in public agencies. An independent monitoring body and an open public register of algorithms used in government. A move away from perpetuating colonial biases towards AI systems that uplift Māori and Indigenous peoples.
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| Wikimedia Australia partners with Terri Janke & Co.Wikimedia Australia (WMAU) is pleased to announce the formal commencement of a partnership with Terri Janke and Company (TJC), a leading Indigenous-owned law firm and consultancy specialising in Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property (ICIP) and Indigenous Data Sovereignty (IDSov). TJC will lead phase 1 of Wikimedia Australia’s ICIP and IDSov Protocol Project – a foundational stage focused on consulting on the development of organisation-wide guidance for WMAU on the use of First Nations knowledges on Wikimedia platforms and on ethical engagement with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. |
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| | | ALIA National Conference May 11-14 2026: Register now! |
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| | The ALIA National Conference is the flagship event for the Australian Library and Information Association, bringing together library and information professionals from all sectors and career stages. Held every two years, this conference is a vibrant in-person forum for knowledge-sharing, networking, and professional growth. |
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| | | | Charles Darwin creates card game for OA Week: download and play!Charles Darwin University has designed an engaging OA card game called “Knowledge Keepers” to coincide with OA Week 2025. The game helps players navigate challenges around Open Access, teaching key concepts in a fun, interactive way while encouraging the sharing and protection of knowledge. It’s a great tool to raise awareness about Open Access principles and is available to download under a Creative Commons license. Enjoy! |
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| | | | AuSCCoP The Australian Scholarly Communications Community of Practice (AuSCCoP) is looking for co-conveners for 2026. If you are interested please contact the group via this EOI form. At the last meeting the CoP heard from Dr Danny Kingsley who reported back from OASPA 2025. For a summary, including a link to Danny’s slides, see the notes. The group will be hosting a special Watch Party series November 17 – 19 featuring 3 sessions from OAI14. The next meeting will be held on Thursday November 13th. More information and how to join AuSCCoP Diamond Open Access Publishing group. The Diamond group is looking for co-conveners for 2026. If you are interested please contact the group via this EOI form. At the last meeting the group set up a document and are asking members to add resources, links, and pearls of information useful in the establishment of a Diamond Journal – including platforms, policies, copyright and open licensing details, dissemination, indexing, legal deposit, preservation etc. More details can be found in the groups notes. The next meeting will be held on December 4th and the group is hoping to host a watch-along session followed by discussion. Please contact the convenors with any suggestions! More information about the Diamond Publishing group and how to join. AuSCCoP Repositories group The Repositories group is looking for co-conveners for 2026. If you are interested please contact the group via this EOI form. The group held a special meeting on Thursday 16 October 2025 featuring Kathleen Shearer, Executive Director of the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR). Kathleen is a leading international voice on open access, open science, and the evolving role of repositories in research assessment and scholarly communications. For a summary see the meeting notes. The group next meets on November 20th. More information about the Repository group and how to join. Aotearoa Scholarly Communications CoP Information about all six 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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| | New offers from big five ‘still too costly’ for UK universities“Improved offers from the “big five” academic publishers may still prove too costly for many UK universities to accept, raising the prospect of thousands of scholars losing journal access, experts have warned. New proposals by Elsevier, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, Wiley and Sage were sent to universities recently after their initial offers were decisively rejected by institutions in a sector-wide consultation run by Jisc, which is negotiating jointly with Universities UK on behalf of universities.” |
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| | | | eLife partners with leading UK universities on open access publishing agreementseLife is a non-profit, peer-reviewed, open access scientific journal focused on life sciences and biomedicine, committed to faster, fairer publishing with greater transparency through its publish-review-curate model. It aims to improve research culture and support open science by giving authors more control and providing detailed peer review assessments alongside published preprints. “eLife is pleased to announce partnerships with Imperial College London and the University of Sheffield, UK, on its new uncapped scheme that promotes greater equity, inclusivity and sustainability in scientific publishing. These partnerships come after the nonprofit introduced uncapped and centralised schemes to help institutions support their researchers in publishing through the eLife Model, and to help transition away from traditional author fees that pose a barrier to research communication.” |
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| | | | Crossref releases new tool to report on completeness of Open Research Information globallyCrossref, the open scholarly infrastructure nonprofit, today releases an enhanced dashboard showing metadata coverage and individual organisations’ contributions to documenting the process and outputs of scientific research in the open. The tool helps research-performing, funding, and publishing organisations identify gaps in open research information, and provides supporting evidence for movements like the Barcelona Declaration for Open Research Information, which encourages more substantial commitment to stewarding and enriching the scholarly record through open metadata. Check your institution using the participation reports tool. |
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| | | | Shape the future of OpenCitations: take the Community Survey.OpenCitations publish freely accessible, structured, and interoperable bibliographic and citation data to enable transparent, unrestricted reuse and machine-readable linking of scholarly references. They promote open scholarship and support reproducible research evaluation by providing an alternative to proprietary citation indexes. “Whether you are a supporter, a partner institution, a user, or have simply come across OpenCitations by chance (even if you’ve never used our data or looked closely at what we do), this survey is your opportunity to share your experience, tell us what works, what could be improved, and what you’d like to see in the future. Your insights will directly inform how we evolve our services and activities to better support your work, research, tools and, more generally, the circulation of open knowledge.” |
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| | | | EIFL updates Diamond OA GuideEIFL (Electronic Information for Libraries) works with libraries to enable access to knowledge for education, learning, research and sustainable community development. The guide was written by Iryna Kuchma and Milica Ševkušić, of the EIFL Open Access Programme, and first published in April 2025. The revised and updated version, published in October 2025, includes additional links to useful information for journal publishers and editors, clarifications and improvements to the original text. |
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| | | | $1.5 million program targets changes to academic incentivesSeveral organizations are now putting more than $1 million toward reimagining hiring, promotion and tenure at U.S. universities. The program, called the Modernizing Academic Appointment and Advancement (MA3) Challenge, is seeking proposals for “bold, creative strategies to develop academic reward systems that foster a collaborative, responsive, and transparent research environment.” Organized by the Open Research Community Accelerator (ORCA), the program will offer grants at two funding levels — $50,000 or $250,000 — over two years. |
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| | | | | | Cambridge University Press calls for radical reform of academic publishing system.Cambridge University Press undertook a comprehensive, community-driven examination of the open research publishing landscape to uncover innovative, practical strategies that promote sustainability and address the changing demands of researchers and other key stakeholders. “This is a collective action problem of major proportions. Academic institutions, professional societies, research funders, and academic publishers all have important roles to play in the development of a more equitable and sustainable model going forward. There is every reason for optimism: The report is filled with examples of sector initiatives to change academic incentive structures, innovative open-access arrangements, potential alternative publishing platforms, and concrete suggestions for better-supporting peer review.” Professor Deborah Prentice, Vice-Chancellor, University of Cambridge |
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| | | | | | | “In a Scholastica blog interview on the progression of the open access (OA) movement nearly a decade ago, longstanding OA advocate Roxanne Missingham predicted that there would be a multiplicity of OA publishing approaches in the future: “There are advantages in having a range of models that are flexible and allow for experimentation by publishers, libraries, authors, and funders. Together we should be creating new solutions that offer a diversity of approaches, rather than picking a winner model.” Looking back on that conversation, I’m struck by how spot on her projection was….” |
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| | | | | Reflections on Radical Open Access III: From Openness to Social Justice ActivismThe Radical Open Access III conference, held in April 2025 at Cambridge University Library, explored the future of radical open access publishing with a focus on social justice activism. Bringing together publishers, librarians, editors, and technologists, the event emphasized open access as a process intertwined with broader movements for equity, care, and collective resistance to dominant academic and publishing structures. This reflection captures the critical discussions and collaborative spirit aimed at rethinking publishing as a tool for social change. |
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| | | | | | With more article submissions and fraudulent activity than ever before, journal peer review processes are creaking under the pressure. Nina Notman discovers how AI and automated tools are taking some of the strain. |
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| | | | Wikimedia Makes Its 19M Data Entries AI-Ready for Smaller DevelopersThe Wikimedia Foundation just launched a new AI-friendly database that transforms its 19 million Wikidata entries into vectors, making it dramatically easier for smaller AI developers to access structured information. The project aims to level the playing field against Big Tech companies who already have the resources to vectorize this data themselves. |
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| | | | | | This event, hosted by James Cook University Library for Open Access Week 2025, presents a timely panel discussion exploring the intersection of AI, copyright, and open access in knowledge creation, preservation and sharing, with participants examining how AI is transforming authorship, copyright laws, and the democratisation of information. |
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| | | | This event was a partnership between the Knowledge Equity Network (KEN), a global community dedicated to overcoming barriers to equitable access to education and research, and the Global OER Graduate Network (GO-GN), which supports doctoral researchers working on open education topics worldwide.The session brings together a variety of voices in open education and equity from multiple countries in an in-depth exploration of practical approaches to embedding Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) within open education. |
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| | | | | Fraud, AI slop and huge profits: is science publishing broken?Scientists are warning that academic publishing needs urgent reform in order to retain trust in the research system. Ian Sample tells Madeleine Finlay what has gone so wrong, and Dr Mark Hanson of the University of Exeter proposes some potential solutions |
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| | | | Upcoming events in OA & scholarly publishing |
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| | | | | Kohacon2025 17 – 23 November 2025, Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand. |
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