December was a hugely busy, and fantastically interesting, month for FORM, with a number of impactful events relating to open science policies and practises taking place across the world. We were thrilled to be able to attend and present at a number of events, represented by our Founder and Director, Dr Emily Choynowski. These events included the Open Science Forum which took place in Morocco, jointly organised by ALECSO and UNESCO; e-AGE24 organised by the Arab States Research and Education Network; and the 2nd Global Summit on Diamond Open Access held in Cape Town.

It was an especial honour to be able to attend the Open Science Forum and discuss our mission and vision, share updates on our activities and achievements, and develop new collaborations with a number of leading regional policymakers and educational organisations. It was also a wonderful opportunity to learn about what our peers are hoping to achieve in the coming decade, celebrate their many successes over the past year, and catch up with old friends!

Meanwhile, at other events – including e-AGE24 – we shared some initial findings from an ongoing project to map the open access journal landscape across the Arab region, using data kindly provided by D.O.A.J. and PKP. The purpose of the project is to map the journals by subject, language, location, indexing and financial model, to better understand the region’s scholarly communications ecosystems, and to make this analysis freely available for the region’s stakeholders. It is our hope that we will be able to publish a comprehensive data-map of the region’s journal landscape, together with our in-depth analysis and evaluations of key challenges and priorities, which can be used to help stimulate future growth in local and localised research output vehicles.

The production and promotion of Arab and Arab language research is a key priority for our organisation. It was therefore an especial pleasure to attend the 2nd Global Summit on Diamond Open Access, and help participate in the shaping of the Toluca-Cape Town Declaration on Diamond Open Access, which contains an explicit commitment to regional and language diversity and advocates the dissemination of local and localized research. And we therefore strongly endorse the declaration.