8 April 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.
Building on the work of OA2020 and ESAC, OA Forward reflects the growing international collaboration among libraries, consortia, funders, and research institutions working to shape more open, transparent, and sustainable approaches to scholarly publishing.
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 and greater control over 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.
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.
“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.”
“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.
OA Forward is hosted by DEAS gGmbH, providing a neutral and legally established framework to support globally governed collaboration across international partners. 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.