As preparations for the 3rd Annual Forum for Open Research (2024) start to gather pace – with just over 150 days to go until the Forum starts – we want to welcome and thank our first sponsors for their generous support for the event and their endorsement of our mission. Our first Platinum sponsor is IEEE “the world’s largest technical professional organization dedicated to advancing technology

We are proud to announce our support of the Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information, reaffirming its commitment to fostering openness, transparency, and collaboration in research across the MENA region. The Barcelona Declaration, a landmark initiative in the global open research movement, outlines key principles aimed at advancing the accessibility and impact of research outputs. We are particularly proud of the Declaration’s commitment to fostering

Last week, we hosted our first coffee hour and drop in. We wanted a chance to talk to our community informally, to give an opportunity for people to come to us with their problems and their priorities (outside of formal, structured Q&A sessions in our regular community development activities). We decided to host the coffee morning hour on our community slack channel, a free service

With just 201 days to go before the 2024 Annual Forum, the 3rd in our series, we are very excited to announce the Call for Papers! The theme of this year’s conference is Transforming Knowledge into Action. We chose this theme to reflect the proactive growth which we have already seen across the Arab region, as more open science communities are established and more higher

The Annual Forum for Open Research in MENA has grown rapidly since its inception and gone from strength to strength. Our first event was held in Egypt in 2022, in partnership with the Egyptian Knowledge Bank. Our second was held in the UAE, in partnership with Khalifa University, the UAE Ministries of Education and Culture, and UNESCO. And we are excited to announce that the

Some of our team (our Director Emily, our Community Engagement Manager Nahil, and our Event Manager Lissette) visited beautiful Doha, in Qatar last week. It was fantastic to meet so many potential partners and discuss possible collaborations and future joint projects. Qatar is a regional leader in the promotion of Open Science, particularly with regards to Open Access (launching the first Open Access journals in

The Forum for Open Research in MENA is a community-led organisation with a clear mission: to support the advancement of Open Science in the Arab region by working with research communities across all 22 Arab states. An integral part of our strategy to achieve this goal is by building long-term partnerships with grassroots initiatives across the Arab world and providing them with the resources, infrastructure,

As a cross-regional initiative established to provide localised resources and support for open science advocates and research communities, it is important we are accessible to all our stakeholders. We are therefore hugely excited to announce the long-awaited Arabic language version of the FORM website. Produced by our team of Arabic Open Science experts, we hope our new Arabic language website will make our work and

2024 is a very important year for FORM as we aim to grow our Community Development Activity series and develop specific types of events to benefit all our different stakeholders groups. We launched the Community Development Activity series in 2023, with 8 collaborative events organised in partnership with some of the most important and influential non-profit companies and NGO groups involved in Open Science around

One of our core goals is to support the development of “accessible and localized resources relating to the implementation of Open Science policies and practises” in higher education and research communities. The historic absence of a pan-regional open science vocabulary is one of the key challenges to the growth of Open Science practises faced by our research communities. It is crucial to the advancement of