“Today, we’re announcing a shift in how SPARC supports OpenCon to reflect the OpenCon community’s evolution. Instead of hosting a global conference in 2019, we will focus on laying the long-term foundation for the OpenCon community, and will host a reconfigured global meeting in 2020. This decision was driven by the community’s commitment to put equity at the core of its work and represents the culmination of OpenCon’s first five years.

Since launching in 2014, OpenCon has grown from an idea into a global community of next generation leaders working to make research and education more open and equitable. Driven by these emerging leaders, OpenCon has evolved into a global network that has now hosted events in 44 countries and 24 unique languages, reaching more than 9,500 participants. Community members have helped advance open policies at all levels, launched projects and organizations, built new tools, and fostered the adoption of open practices in their local communities. Throughout these efforts, OpenCon’s community has made it clear that equity is essential and inclusion is non-negotiable, and that these values must be built into the foundation of this work—not added on afterward.

From the beginning, the aspirations for open research and open education have been connected to equity: the idea that open systems can be fairer than closed ones and should be explicitly built to address the causes of marginalization. As open research and open education transition from aspiration to implementation, we have an unprecedented opportunity. In redesigning systems for creating and sharing knowledge to be open, we can address deep inequities in the current system….”