Access Lab 2025 Program Announced
NISO Member News
Bristol, UK (United Kingdom) | January 6, 2025.
OpenAthens is thrilled to announce their online Access Lab 2025 program, taking place 24 – 27 February 2025. As OpenAthens turns 30 this year, the Access Lab program celebrates its partnerships and customers’ success around the world.
Access Lab brings together industry leaders, innovators, and thought leaders for an insightful and engaging program. The online event will run over several days and in multiple time zones and languages so that as many of its global audience can join.
Whether you are a publisher, provider, library or IT professional, Access Lab provides the opportunity to join the OpenAthens global community to share knowledge, challenges and updates from across the industry.
Access Lab 2025 program
Chief Information Officer for STM Solutions, Hylke Koers, will give the opening keynote ‘The future of trust, access and identity in scholarly communications’. Hylke’s presentation will draw on some of the key findings from a recent STM draft report ‘Trusted Identity in Academic Publishing’.
Hylke Koers, CIO of STM Solutions, emphasizes the importance of balance:
“In a world where scientific integrity is paramount and content becomes increasingly easy to fabricate, we need to develop new ways to establish the veracity of scholarly contributions. Identity verification can provide important safeguards provided that it is implemented in such a way that it does not exclude legitimate contributions and respects researchers’ right for privacy and does not impose undue barriers.”
Other sessions include:
- Misinformation, disinformation, and trust in scholarly communication: Challenges and Strategies
- Piracy websites and research integrity concerns
- Customer case study: Extending the reach of OpenAthens - leveraging library technology for non-traditional applications
- Community case study: How OpenAthens supports lifelong learning and empowers communities
- Generative AI in Research Discovery: a Web of Science case
- Workshop: AI literacy for librarians. The future skill of research support
Access Lab provides a safe space to explore, discuss and learn from your peers. This year’s program includes a number of topic-based discussion groups ranging from security and user privacy, Artificial Intelligence, and library data analytics and reporting to the impact of library budgets and user experience and accessibility. Some sessions and discussion groups will be region and language specific.
You can also expect to hear customer case studies and take part in OpenAthens related discussion groups to get you thinking about improvements you could make in your own organization.
This year’s program was shaped by a program advisory group of customers and partners.
Senior marketing manager and program lead, Jane Charlton commented:
“We want to thank all the customer volunteers who helped to develop this year’s Access Lab program and lead topic-based discussion groups. Your session ideas and continued support are essential for making this a true community event.”
UX Awards 2025
A highlight of the event is the OpenAthens UX Awards. Now it its sixth year, the awards will celebrate the vendor that demonstrates strength in innovation, and durability and sustainability in their investment and organization-wide approach to UX. The 2025 award winner will be announced on Thursday 27 February at 10:00 EST/ 15:00 GMT.
Take a look at the Access Lab 2025 program for more information and to register.
How to register
Registration for Access Lab is now open. Simply register for the conference to attend live or watch sessions on demand after the conference.
If you have any questions or are interested in sponsoring the event, please contact Laura Bloomfield Hall, senior events manager; events@openathens.net.
About This Organization
About OpenAthens
We make it easy for people to access knowledge through single sign-on. Our mission is to enable people to achieve great things by connecting them to knowledge and information, whenever and wherever they need it.
We strive to be the world’s most user-friendly single sign-on experience and help more than 3,000 organizations worldwide to provide simple and secure access to online resources for their end users.
OpenAthens is part of Jisc.