Editors’ Note: Today’s post is by Andrea Chiarelli and Eleonora Colangelo. Andrea is Associate Director at Research Consulting. Eleonora is a Policy Lead at Frontiers. Reviewer credit to guest blogger Sarah Hands.
On October 19 and 20, 2026, the Forum for Open Research in MENA (Middle East and North Africa; FORM) will hold its 5th Annual Forum entirely online. That is a change worth reflecting on. A year ago, the event was a physical gathering: 150+ delegates in the atrium of the American University of Sharjah; almost 800 more watching from 73 countries; and coffee queues where librarians, funders, publishers, and early-career researchers compared notes in person. This year, FORM has replaced the in-person meeting with a bilingual online symposium under a title that says more than any communiqué could: Resilience in Research: The Role of Open Science in the Arab World.
FORM has been candid about the reasons for this change. Several countries and communities that the Forum serves are, in its own words, “in crisis,” living through war, famine, disease, or profound economic instability. The region’s open research community is not considering resilience as an abstract theme, but simply naming the operating condition that many of its members are already working in. That is the condition the 5th Forum is responding to.
Independent reporting by University World News documented direct damage to Sharif University of Technology’s High-Performance Computing Centre, the Pasteur Institute, and laser, plasma, and satellite-research facilities, and highlighted that graduate students have been locked out of laboratories by internet blackouts. These are only select examples, but they illustrate how much weight the word ‘resilience’ is being asked to carry. That is the condition the 5th Forum is responding to.
Looking Back Before Looking Forward
It is worth pausing on that change before looking ahead, because the 4th Annual Forum, held in Sharjah under ALECSO‘s patronage in October 2025, already diagnosed the fault lines that resilience is now being asked to hold together. Revisiting that meeting provides a useful baseline for reading the 5th Forum’s agenda.
Sharjah itself was a symbolic host. The Emirate has invested heavily in knowledge institutions as part of a long-term development strategy championed by the Al Qasimi family, and American University of Sharjah’s Chancellor Tod Laursen opened last year’s Forum by tying that investment explicitly to openness: knowledge that circulates, that can be reused, that can be adapted locally rather than simply consumed. Twelve months on, with the meeting moved online for reasons of necessity, that ambition has to be pursued through screens. The substance of the conversation, though, has not gone away.
The baseline question at Sharjah — whether to support open research — was already settled. Across the World Bank-defined MENA countries, publication output has grown steadily since 2016, tilted towards STEM fields in areas of clear public interest such as health and engineering, and channelled largely through traditional, non-Arabic publishers. Open access shares have risen too, driven by the rapid expansion of gold OA agreements. The region was always intending to open up its research, and the key question was how to steer a growing, uneven ecosystem so that openness could serve regional priorities rather than reproducing existing differences and hierarchies. Under current conditions in the region, those differences have only sharpened.
What Sharjah exposed was a landscape rich in initiatives but short on coordination. Institutional repositories, national platforms and discipline-specific networks have proliferated, often in isolation from one another. For researchers trying to share or reuse work across borders, that means asymmetrical quality, duplicated effort and a fragmented experience. Emily Choynowski, FORM’s Co-Founder and Director of Operations, set this against wider structural pressures: national systems vary widely in resources and regulatory maturity; English still dominates the most visible dissemination channels; and international rankings exert a gravitational pull even when their assumptions sit uneasily with local needs.
“There is a clear need for more localised and bilingual journals collecting and distributing Arab language – and a need to re-prioritise the region’s academic heritage and counter the endemic tendency to discard Arab and Arabic-language outlets for research as lesser,” Choynowski told us in side-room conversations at Sharjah.
Increasing Pressures
Those structural pressures certainly do not pause for a crisis; if anything, they compound. A leadership panel on the UAE in the 4th Annual Forum brought the tension down to institutional level. Universities are expected to increase open publications and data sharing while safeguarding research integrity, managing intellectual property and responding to a newer risk: low-quality, AI-generated manuscripts arriving at volume. National libraries and archives, meanwhile, are consolidating disparate collections, including large-scale digitization efforts such as the Arabian Gulf Digital Archive, and are under pressure not just to preserve the scholarly record but to make it findable across a patchwork of repositories and legacy systems. That is a governance and resourcing problem as much as a technical one, and it is exactly the sort of thing that gets harder when institutions are also managing disruption.
Dr Fareed Al Amiri of the Sharjah Research, Technology and Innovation Park (SPARK) framed open research as a practical instrument in the UAE’s transition from an oil-dependent economy to a knowledge-based one. The test, in his view, is whether open outputs feed strategic partnerships and innovation ecosystems or continue to circulate mainly within academic circles. Robust “plumbing” for open knowledge (interoperable systems, clear licensing, trusted channels) is what lets businesses and public agencies rely on university outputs at all.
“The region has made strong progress on access, but the next step is to have governance-ready digital systems that support cross-institution collaboration — particularly on knowledge systems that connect universities, industry, and government seamlessly, adopting conducive policies and incentives for collaboration, and evaluation systems that measure applied impact,”
“At SPARK, we see that when open outputs are connected to industry testbeds, incentives, and innovation funding, they stop being static documents and become instruments for problem-solving and addressing industry/community needs. In that sense, the next phase is less about widening access and more about how knowledge can be better exploited, reused, and translated into solutions.” — Dr Fareed Al Amiri
Agency After Access
A second fault line, exposed by the Arab Social Science Monitor, is about who current systems make visible. The initiative documents how the social sciences are funded, published, and used across the region, exposing structural gaps that disappear in broad, STEM-dominated datasets; its partnership with the Economic Research Forum has already strengthened research data management in several Arab countries. The concern is not a marginal disciplinary grievance. Social scientists are central to the questions a resilience agenda now puts at the center of the table: the ethics of AI in policing and welfare, the politics of water allocation, and the social consequences of displacement and rapid urban change.
That is the diagnosis the 5th Forum inherits, and it is why “agency after access” is still an appropriate framing. Once political will and funding cross a threshold, widening access is relatively tractable: agreements get signed, repositories get built and publishing budgets get allocated. Agency, meant as the capacity of universities, libraries and communities to shape the terms on which knowledge circulates, is harder, and it is being significantly tested by the current instability.
Readers outside the region should bear in mind that MENA universities are not “catching up” with a global open science agenda; in important respects they are running their own experiment in institution-led openness, with rectors, libraries and research offices occupying the role that national funders play elsewhere. And, now, doing so under conditions that most funder-driven systems have not had to face.
As a result, here is a useful test for delegates to carry into the online sessions this October: do not measure open science in MENA only by what is free to read. Measure it by who is using it and for what: whether ministries cite local open research in policy responses to crisis and reconstruction, whether small and medium-sized enterprises draw on university datasets to design services under constrained budgets, and whether journalists and civil-society organizations can find and interpret local evidence without paywalled platforms standing in the way. Those are significantly harder numbers to collect than publication counts or repository deposit rates, but they are the ones that will demonstrate to delegates whether resilience is a theme or a practice.
Registration for the 5th Annual Forum, free and online October 19 and 20 with live English-Arabic interpretation, is open now. Sharjah showed a region that has embraced open research in principle and made real progress in practice. The question this year’s fully remote, resilience-themed meeting puts directly to delegates, inside the region and out, is whether that progress still holds in the current geopolitical climate, and whether MENA institutions will manage to keep setting the terms of their own openness, rather than having those terms set for them by current conditions in the region.
