Sigrid Hegna Ingvaldsen, PhD, is a Researcher and Research Advisor at Stiftelsen Dam. She has a background in clinical research fields and neuroscience, and her current research focus includes initiatives for open research and social sustainability in health.

The question of rights in Indigenous research contains a set of conflicting principles: If the result of the research is decided by people outside of the relevant research project, we no longer have a free research, and might as well hand over the job to spindoctors. We will thus argue for free research when it comes to research results; any alternative to that will undermine the validity of the research conducted.

Institutional repositories are a cornerstone of the open science ecosystem, enabling global access to scholarly work and supporting long-term preservation. Yet in an era of automated data extraction and rapidly advancing AI technologies, these repositories face a new and largely unaddressed threat: large-scale, covert scraping of academic content by commercial entities, often for training proprietary AI models. This practice bypasses scholarly norms, offers no transparency or attribution, and exploits institutional infrastructure without consent. Despite the ethos of openness, such unchecked reuse risks distorting scholarly communication, undermining author rights, and compromising the trust that underpins open research infrastructure.

Bernt Glaser is a PhD student at the PsychGen Centre for genetic epidemiology and mental health, at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health. His research focusses on the roles of genetics and the family environment in the context of neurodevelopmental conditions.

The UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science (2021) has served as a global guiding framework, encouraging regional organizations, countries, and institutions to make scientific knowledge openly available, reusable, inclusive, and transparent by promoting collaborative scientific practices for the benefit of science and society. Regional blocs, such as the European Union (EU), whose member states are connected by shared regional economic integration and interests, have proactively engaged in influencing knowledge ecosystems, advancing policies on open science, and sustaining collaborative dialogues within Europe’s research and scientific communities as exemplified in the EU open science policy (European Commission, 2016) and Plan S initiative (European Science Foundation, 2018). The African Union (AU) is also increasing momentum in supporting policies on collaborative open knowledge sharing through the endorsement of free trade agreements within the African continent and its policy commitment to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (Okafor et al., 2022). Several single-country and institutional efforts from Southeast Asia have demonstrated strong support for open-access publishing (Abidin et al., 2024; Awasthi et al., 2025; Irawan et al., 2022) and the development of open repositories (Lee-Hwa et al., 2013; Mostafa et al., 2024). However, such policy coherence, as seen in the EU and AU efforts to advance collaborative and regional-driven policy initiatives, remains underexplored in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). There is also a limited understanding of how ASEAN, as a regional bloc, supports open science in policy and practice. Thus, this presentation explores the current landscape of open science initiatives in the ASEAN region by addressing two questions: (1) How are ASEAN member states reflecting on the framework outlined in the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science? and (2) What are the current regional developments, including benefits, opportunities, and challenges, in shaping ASEAN open science policy? Using an exploratory review method, this study draws on peer-reviewed literature from Web of Science and Scopus, as well as grey literature from publicly available government portals and websites to identify emerging themes and patterns. This presentation aims to map the current landscape of ASEAN open science initiatives, highlighting the benefits, opportunities, and challenges, and revealing patterns of engagement and collaboration across ASEAN member states and their connection with other global actors in open science. The overall findings contribute to informing policy development and strengthening the ASEAN open science movement.

Our presentation will showcase a variety of innovative open metadata management, hosting, and distribution solutions tailored to tackle the problems of getting OA works into the wider book supply chain. We will show how Thoth enables publishers to create rich, fully open data in industry-standard formats, incl. ONIX (2.1, 3.0, 3.1) MARC21 & KBART for free, encouraging uptake of good metadata practice e.g. by integrating PIDs and controlled vocabularies as well as adhering to recent legislative reporting regulations. The resulting metadata is automatically released into the public domain (CC0), to facilitate easy re-use by e.g. libraries. Publishers can also either use the self-service option to export fully Crossref-compliant XML to directly register DOIs for books and chapters with Crossref themselves, or benefit from a dedicated Sponsorship route (via Thoth) and automated registration workflows that are available through the Thoth Plus service model.