The Higher Education Commission (HEC), through the National Digital Library Programme (NDLP), has invited faculty members, researchers, postgraduate scholars, ORIC and QEC teams, and library professionals from Pakistani universities to participate in the Wiley Open Access Webinar Series 2026. The initiative brings together HEC’s ongoing digital library infrastructure with Wiley’s publishing expertise, aiming to give the country’s academic community more direct access to conversations around scholarly publishing and the open access model, an area that has grown increasingly central to how research gets shared and cited internationally in recent years. The first online session in the series is titled “Understanding Open Access and the Open Future” and is scheduled for September 15, 2026, running from 2:00 to 3:00 PM, giving participants a focused hour long introduction before any follow up sessions in the broader series.
According to the promotional material shared by HEC, the session is designed to provide valuable insights into the evolving open access landscape, current trends in scholarly publishing, and the range of opportunities available to researchers who choose to publish under open access terms rather than traditional subscription based models. For many faculty members and postgraduate scholars in Pakistan, open access publishing remains a relatively underexplored area despite its growing relevance internationally, particularly as more funding bodies and academic institutions abroad begin to require or strongly encourage open access publication as a condition of grants and collaborations. By packaging this as a structured webinar series rather than a single one off session, HEC and Wiley appear to be aiming for sustained engagement with the topic rather than a single introductory briefing that risks being quickly forgotten.
Registration for the first session is being handled through a dedicated link, with HEC also providing a QR code on its promotional materials to make signing up more accessible for faculty and students viewing the announcement on mobile devices. The inclusion of library professionals and ORIC and QEC teams alongside faculty and postgraduate scholars in the target audience suggests HEC is trying to reach the administrative and support staff who often play a quieter but essential role in helping researchers navigate publishing decisions, quality assurance requirements, and institutional research output tracking. This broader framing indicates the webinar series is meant to build capacity across the wider research support ecosystem at Pakistani universities rather than speaking only to individual academics.
The webinar series fits into HEC’s ongoing National Digital Library Programme, which has been positioned as a central piece of the commission’s effort to widen access to academic resources and publishing knowledge across Pakistani higher education institutions. Whether this specific webinar series translates into a meaningful uptick in open access publishing among Pakistani researchers will likely depend on how well HEC follows up with subsequent sessions in the series and how effectively the content translates into practical guidance that scholars can actually apply when navigating their own publishing decisions. For now, the September 15 session marks the starting point for what HEC and Wiley are positioning as a sustained effort to demystify open access publishing for the country’s academic community.
Follow the SPIN IDG WhatsApp Channel for updates across the Smart Pakistan Insights Network covering all of Pakistan’s technology ecosystem.
