Celebrating ten years of Access Lab: Registrations are open for Access Lab UK & EMEA!

Making access to knowledge easy is a community endeavor. That’s why, for ten years, we’ve been bringing the OpenAthens community together regularly at Access Lab.

It’s exciting, then, that for the first Access Lab of 2026 we’ve returned to an in-person format. You can now register for Access Lab UK & EMEA and importantly, as this is the first face-to-face Access Lab since the pandemic moved it online, you can expect the program to include lots of opportunities to reconnect with familiar faces, make new contacts and explore ideas with guest speakers over a coffee. Our UK & EMEA event will take place at the Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester, UK on Wednesday 25 February 2026!

Who’s it for? 

Access Lab is for librarians and information managers, researchers, IT managers, publishers and vendors of content and digital services: people right across the scholarly publishing community. That’s one of its key strengths. This allows the different areas of the industry to share ideas, issues and developments more widely. We’re looking forward to introducing another year of speakers from across the industry. 

Collaborative solutions

As commercial director Jon Bentley says:

We have lots of recordings of people who have done just that, and provided informative, enjoyable sessions. Here’s a couple, from 2024. In the first, elevating patron access, Anton Poppe and Kathryn Duncan from Swinburne University of Technology describes how implementing OpenAthens and integrating LibKey Nomad has revolutionized user access, while the second is another implementation story, but with a twist. In GALILEO and OpenAthens: five years on, the GALILEO Consortium’s Russell Palmer explains how they have harnessed federated authentication, championed systems interoperability and made accessibility and UX design absolute priorities as they created and manage Georgia's Virtual Library, a portal that gives all residents of the state of Georgia access to licensed content that’s not available elsewhere. 

We also often feature round table conversations where customers and partners have helped to take issues forward. These are largely not recorded sessions which allows for open and honest conversation. Attendees can come along knowing that their discussions will not be shared more widely. 

If you’d like to know more about how we foster community and build collaborative approaches, take a look at the recording of growing our OpenAthens community, a session at Access Lab in 2024. In it we discussed our survey of library and publisher contacts to find out what was exercising their minds at the time, our ideas to help and how industry partners might contribute. Two years on, there will be plenty of opportunities at Access Lab 2026 to find out how far things have moved on, and you also can stay up to date with the conversation going forward by signing up to our Listserv. 

Why you should come 

We hope you’ll invest a day of your time and join us in Manchester. Comments from attendees at previous events show it’s worth it: 

“I learned a great deal. I will be having some conversations with my IT department on future authentication processes” 

“I liked the discussion groups and getting to talk with EBSCO and OpenAthens staff, it felt very ‘community’ like” 

“The sessions I attended were really good” 

“Excellent topics and speakers” 

“I always learn something new!”