DEAL Open Access Services (DEAS), in collaboration with 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, has announced the launch of OA Forward. The initiative is designed as an internationally governed coordination framework to build on the achievements of the OA2020 movement and strengthen open scholarly communication through collective engagement with publishers and stakeholders.
While OA2020 and ESAC were hosted by the Max Planck Society, their success was driven by a broad international community of libraries, consortia, funders, and research institutions. OA Forward represents the next stage of this development, bringing together partners across five continents under a unified framework with shared responsibility and broader reach.
The initiative builds on a decade of progress. OA2020 and ESAC reshaped scholarly publishing agreements, enabling hundreds of thousands of articles to be published openly each year, increasing transparency around publishing costs, and reducing the burden of publication charges for individual authors. OA Forward aims to deepen and coordinate engagement with the evolving scholarly publishing system.
Dr. Bettina Böhm, Secretary General of the Leibniz Association and Chair of the DEAS shareholder meetings, stated that OA Forward reflects the partners’ commitment to strengthening international collaboration in open access negotiations. She noted that the initiative builds on the progress of OA2020 and ESAC to advance open scholarly communication and improve agreements with publishers worldwide.
Dr. Heide Ahrens, Secretary General of the German Research Foundation (DFG), emphasized that the shift toward open scholarly communication represents a structural transformation of the research system. She explained that OA Forward enhances the collective capacity of institutions and funders to drive reforms and innovations aligned with the needs of researchers and modern scholarship.
Colleen Campbell, Executive Director of OA Forward, highlighted that the initiative strengthens negotiation strategies while fostering innovation across publishing platforms, research outputs, and open science initiatives. She noted that institutions are increasingly focused on transparency, accountability, equity, quality, and control over the scholarly record and its reuse.
They announced that an OA Forward website is planned for launch in the coming months. In the meantime, community resources and materials are available on the OA2020 and ESAC webpages.
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