6 minute read.To go far, go together: reflections from FORCE2026
This year’s edition of the FORCE11 conference was hosted in June by Singapore Management University. Its title, “To Go Far, Go Together: Advancing Scholarly Communication Across Boundaries and Disruptions” truly resonates with Crossref’s truths; it takes a village! Crossref only works as long as the scholarly research community wants to work together globally, across all disciplines, for integrity and openness of the scientific record. The conversations were influenced by a genuinely diverse mix of librarians, researchers, open infrastructures, and service providers, and that mix shaped almost every interaction we had at the conference.
Two themes ran through nearly every session we attended: research assessment reform and research integrity. A third, quieter thread, a move towards more modular scholarship, kept surfacing as a possible answer to the complexities arising from the two previous themes. Here’s what stood out.
The pre-conference CoARA-DORA event set the tone before FORCE2026 had even officially started. Around 30 people including librarians, researchers, and funders, gathered for a day that made one thing clear: reforming research assessment is no longer a theoretical conversation happening in the policy space – it’s a global practice, rooted in local particularities.
We heard from leaders from CoARA and DORA about how these initiatives are supporting the community in translating policy ambitions into practice through guidelines and dedicated working groups. We heard from CLACSO, Queensland University of Technology, Kyoto University, and the Ministry for Business, Innovation and Employment of New Zealand how change needs to account for local contexts. It was also interesting to hear perspectives from policymakers, funders, and practitioners at universities on how the levers are different for each one.
This theme carried straight into the main conference. Lily Kong’s keynote, “From Publish or Perish to People and Purpose,” was blunt about the cost of the status quo: a damaged research culture, disincentivised collaboration, and researchers leaving academia altogether. Her argument wasn’t that we need better metrics, but that we need a different set of values: recognising impact as human capital development, community engagement, and a “full ecology of academic work,” where people and disciplines are allowed to shine under different lights rather than being measured against one standard.
Research integrity and AI
If assessment reform was a structural theme of the conference, AI was setting its anxious mood. The Day 2 keynote, “Surviving the Disruption: Scholarly Communication in the Age of AI,” captured a lot of what we’d been worrying about. AI is here to stay and it can improve much of what is important, but it also amplifies what is dangerous: poor quality information and integrity issues. The most important takeaway was that although we should be embracing the new status quo, humans need to stay central to the process.
This connected directly back to Lily Kong’s keynote, where she flagged AI as a force that could intensify, not solve, the pressures and distortions already present in research culture. Between the two keynotes, research integrity became a very concrete problem: how do we build systems, incentives, and review processes that hold up once AI is fully in the loop?
Modular scholarship: breaking out of the PDF
A persistent undertone was the push to move scholarship beyond the static, narrative-driven PDF. The session on Open Exchange Architecture made the case most directly: research is currently trapped in a “paper-shaped box,” with data, software, and code relegated to supplementary status, when they should be first-class, citable components in their own right.
At the funder forum, one discussion was entirely dedicated to integrating research software in open scholarship. An important aspect of this integration is how to ensure that these ‘components’ are discoverable from the moment they are created, interoperable, and findable. Not many people in the room were surprised when open metadata and persistent identifiers were described as a solution, and we agree.
Together with Bianca Kramer (Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information) and Cameron Neylon (Curtin University), we organised a workshop “Global Perspectives on Open Research Information”. The workshop set out to explore why research information — the bibliographic metadata, metadata on research software and data, funding, and contributors — matters, and why it should be open. We made the case that closed data undermines fair assessment, equitable decision-making, and open science itself. We ran through the landscape of sources, and described Crossref infrastructure in more detail.
The session was participatory and interactive, we had attendees map their own use cases and data sources, followed by discussions and Q&A. Participants shared their own experiences with different sources, from CRIS systems and commercial databases to repositories, aggregators, and open databases. We discussed the value of the Crossref database as a large, open, rich, and community-governed database that 25,000 members contributed to and invested in.
To finalise, we had the opportunity to facilitate a panel on the accessibility of open scholarly infrastructure in Asia. We were joined by Mochammad Tanzil Multazam, from Relawan Journal Indonesia, Maria Lamury, from PKP, Xiaofeng Guo, Sin-Chn SCIENTIFIC PRESS and Crossref Ambassador, and Joanna Ball, from DOAJ, for an insightful conversation. As we explored what is needed for infrastructure to be accessible, one question kept coming up throughout the conversation: if communities can’t engage with it effectively, is it really open?
The role of community in skill building, supporting scholars in local languages, and sharing community feedback to the infrastructures was echoed by all panelists. This highlighted that open infrastructures need to support not only the technological layer, but the community layer too, which is fundamental for the accessibility of any infrastructure locally. This raised a question for infrastructure providers: what does it actually take to empower communities toward meaningful participation? At Crossref, we try to close that gap through our work with sponsors, ambassadors, and the GEM program (but there is always more to do!).
Closing thoughts
FORCE2026 didn’t resolve the tension between metrics and meaning, or between AI’s capabilities and our ability to harness them responsibly. But it did make clear that these conversations are maturing from principles and manifestos toward implementation. Reform looks different in Kyoto than in Queensland, and different again in Buenos Aires, and that’s not a bug, but a feature. The role of collaboration and community to realise a more open scholarly landscape can’t be overstated and we for one can’t wait to do our part.
