Munich, April 8, 2026 – DEAL Open Access Services (DEAS), together with contributing partners the University of California Libraries, Consortia Colombia, the Council of Australasian University Librarians, the Max Planck Society, the German National Library of Science and Technology (TIB), and the South African National Library and Information Consortium, today announced the establishment of OA Forward—an internationally governed coordination initiative that builds on the achievements of the OA2020 movement to advance the next stage of open scholarly communication through coordinated engagement with publishers and other stakeholders.

While the OA2020 and ESAC initiatives were supported and hosted by the Max Planck Society, their success has been driven by a growing international community of libraries, consortia, funders, and research institutions. OA Forward reflects a further step in this development: partners across five continents are now working within a common framework, with broader reach, stronger legitimacy, and shared responsibility across a more unified international community.

OA Forward emerges from a decade of concrete achievement. The OA2020 and ESAC initiatives reshaped the landscape of scholarly publishing agreements, enabling hundreds of thousands of research articles to be published openly each year, driving transparency around publishing costs, and removing the burden of publication charges from individual authors. This foundation now positions the community to engage more deeply and strategically with the evolving scholarly publishing system.

“OA Forward embodies the shared commitment of the contributing partners to strengthen international collaboration around open access negotiations,” said Dr. Bettina Böhm, Secretary General of the Leibniz Association and current Chair of the DEAS shareholder meetings. “Together, we are building on the progress of OA2020 and ESAC to advance open scholarly communication and negotiate better agreements with publishers worldwide.”

“The shift toward open scholarly communication represents a structural transformation of the research system,” said Dr. Heide Ahrens, Secretary General of DFG (German Research Foundation). “OA Forward strengthens the collective capacity of institutions and funders to prompt further reforms and innovations in line with the evolving needs of researchers and the expanding potentials of modern scholarship.”

“This is a community that has developed both the experience and the alignment needed to engage with publishers at scale and, as co-creators of OA Forward, our international partners have shaped not only its direction but its foundations,” said Christian Agi, Managing Director of DEAL Open Access Services (DEAS). “OA Forward cements that alignment and supports a more coordinated approach at every level.”

The maturity and impact of open access negotiations have brought the research community to a new inflection point, where institutions are better positioned than ever to shape publisher agreements and direct resources toward diverse forms of open research dissemination. OA Forward provides the coordination needed to take this work forward collectively.

“What this community has built together—visible in the uptake of open licensing by authors, improved workflows and metadata, and greater institutional control over financial flows in scholarly publishing—is remarkable, and what we are now positioned to do is clear. The scope is no longer only about open licensing and sustainable pricing. Institutions are increasingly focused on transparency, accountability, equity, quality, and control over the scholarly record and its reuse. OA Forward brings this work together, strengthening negotiation strategies while driving innovation across a diverse ecosystem of publishing platforms, research outputs, and open science initiatives,” said Colleen Campbell, Executive Director of OA Forward.

A dedicated OA Forward website will be launched in the coming months. In the meantime, community resources, materials and activities remain accessible on the OA2020 and ESAC webpages.

Source:​ [International partners launch OA Forward to strengthen Open Access negotiations and advance open scholarly communication] 

[Read the full original article here]: https://oa2020.org/2026/04/08/international-partners-launch-oa-forward-to-strengthen-open-access-negotiations-and-advance-open-scholarly-communication/

EIVX (Enlighten Innovation and Vision with X)

EIVX is an international academic open access publisher. We are dedicated to building a high-quality platform for sharing research outcomes, promoting knowledge dissemination and innovation, and supporting the integration of industry, academia, and research to empower the transformation of scientific achievements.

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Artificial intelligence (AI) is proving highly disruptive to open science as it becomes both widely used in the analysis and production of scholarly literature and deeply embedded in the public information commons. On the one hand, researchers across all domains are harnessing the power of AI and machine learning to do things previously unimaginable – such as rapidly processing massive datasets or synthesising large corpora in many different languages – greatly accelerating scientific progress and leading to new discoveries. On the other hand, AI is seriously challenging some of the fundamental assumptions on which open science rests, putting the open science ecosystem at risk in ways that demand urgent attention.

Open Science and AI aren’t merely complementary, they are structurally interdependent. Open resources are the raw materials for training AI models and for their application; while well-functioning AI tools are increasingly critical for conducting groundbreaking research. Yet AI, as a major consumer of open science outputs, also brings with it attribution problems, the potential for information contamination, and aggressive automated traffic that strains the very infrastructure on which it depends. Left unaddressed, these pressures threaten to reverse much of what the open science movement has achieved.

Three areas of particular concern

Lack of Attribution

Large language models (LLMs), which are now starting to dominate most discovery systems, introduce an intrinsic attribution problem that breaks the chain of scholarly credit and verification. When you ask an LLM a question, it generates an answer by synthesizing patterns from the millions of documents it was trained on. But an LLM does not track which specific sources contributed to which parts of its response. Because of this, authors and institutions are increasingly pushing back on their work being used without consent or attribution for AI training, and this tension seems to be growing.

Misinformation

LLMs do not retrieve facts, they generate statistically plausible text. This means they can produce convincing claims, references, and summaries that have no basis in reality, but that can easily be mistaken for legitimate scholarship. This, along with a steady rise in paper mills augmented by AI-generated fake papers, has the potential to pollute the scholarly information space. And because LLMs are retrained continuously on new content, errors and fabrications can be absorbed, laundered, and amplified with each successive training cycle, making the problem self-reinforcing over time.

Aggressive Bots

Beyond the integrity concerns, repositories and other data providers are being inundated with aggressive bot traffic, placing serious strain on open science infrastructures. COAR’s community resources for “Dealing with Bots” represents a constructive first step in helping repositories navigate this challenge. However, there are currently no ideal solutions at the moment, and the problem is already producing a troubling response: a growing number of repositories are erecting barriers to machine access in order to protect their systems – blocking all machine access so that friendly indexing and AI systems can no longer access those resources.

How can repositories respond?

Open science was designed to make the scholarly record more trustworthy, accessible, and impactful. However, the pressures described above threaten to invert that mission, turning openness into a vulnerability rather than a strength. We must work together to develop solutions that maintain the integrity of the scholarly commons, while also remaining as open as possible to ensure that research continues to drive scientific advancements. The open science ecosystem was hard-won and will not sustain itself without effort. As such, COAR is committed to working with our community and other stakeholders on the steps needed to advance the vision of open science. As a first step, we recommend the repository community take the following concrete actions:

• Remain open. Do not block access to well-behaved machines. Researchers (and others) need access to content in repositories and rely on machines to access that content. Adopt only the measures needed to maintain full operations.

• Improve trust markers. Undertake metadata curation, adopt PIDs, link records with related content elsewhere, and encourage your communities to participate in open peer review initiatives that link open peer reviews to repository resources (e.g. publish, review, curate)

• Keep humans-in-the-loop. Validate the items being deposited into the repository to ensure they are legitimate contributions

• Engage with research communities. Inform the research community about the negative impacts of not sharing their work

• Contribute content to open source AI models. Participate in the development of AI systems that are transparent, scholar-led, and that provide clear attribution to original source materials

• Develop community norms. Work with partners (scholarly-led or industry partners) to develop the appropriate governance, norms, and practices that ensure the integrity of the scholarly record

Source:​ [Navigating the Uneasy Interdependence of AI and Open Science] 

[Read the full original article here]: https://coar-repositories.org/news-updates/navigating-the-uneasy-interdependence-of-ai-and-open-science/

EIVX (Enlighten Innovation and Vision with X)

EIVX is an international academic open access publisher. We are dedicated to building a high-quality platform for sharing research outcomes, promoting knowledge dissemination and innovation, and supporting the integration of industry, academia, and research to empower the transformation of scientific achievements.

Agriculture and Biology

Public Health and Environment