This year's Open Technology Research (OTR) Symposium, themed “Shaping the Open Transition”, moves from diagnosis to action: from mapping the landscape to charting the path forward. With keynotes anchored in what is already working, and sessions designed to translate research directly into policy recommendations and practice, the event is both a stocktaking exercise and a forward-looking call to build a more united, evidence-based global research agenda ON – one that strengthens open technology's role as a shared foundation for resilience and sovereignty, reinforces public interest governance, and mobilises research and evidence to drive collective action.

Participants are welcome to submit papers or presentations across seven key themes, which they will then present at the event:

• Theme #1: Economic Value and Impact – As open technology's strategic importance is increasingly recognised at the highest levels of policy, the research base must go beyond macro-level economic estimates to produce decision-maker-ready evidence that speaks to the questions procurement officers, line ministries, and budget units actually face – not just return on investment and total cost of ownership, but the political, strategic, and resilience value that conventional economic metrics fail to capture.
• Theme #2: Governance – As major open ecosystems increasingly operate under hybrid models combining community, firm, and government oversight, the governance arrangements that determine how open technologies are stewarded, contested, and sometimes captured have outpaced the research base designed to evaluate them.
• Theme #3: Public Procurement Ecosystem – As public procurement emerges as a critical lever for open technology adoption, the research base must address both sides of the equation: the policy and institutional conditions that open doors for open technology, and the supplier capacity, talent pipelines, and upskilling infrastructure needed to walk through them.
• Theme #4: Sustainability and Business Models – Addressing the chronic under-resourcing of open technology ecosystems relative to the value they generate requires both stronger evidence and new institutional mechanisms that make the relationship between value extraction and contribution more legible and accountable, as well as up-to-date models of how value is created and captured in open technology markets and for open technology organisations.
• Theme #5: Behavioural Change/Adoption – The hardest barriers to open technology deployment are organisational and cultural rather than technical, yet the research base remains thinner here than in almost any other area: what works to build internal capacity, overcome institutional resistance, and sustain momentum through leadership transitions, budget cycles, and competing priorities is still more practitioner folklore than evidence.
• Theme #6: Security – As open technologies are deployed across an increasingly diverse range of critical contexts, the research community must continue to substantiate and refine the security case for openness across different technology types, threat models, and governance arrangements for both open source software and hardware.
• Theme #7: Research Infrastructure – As open source tools, open data, and open standards become foundational to how knowledge is produced, shared, and validated, the research base must catch up with both their transformative role in enabling scientific discovery and collaboration, and the governance and funding arrangements needed to sustain the open infrastructure that research increasingly depends on.

To submit your paper or presentation, it must fall within one of these themes. When submitting, please include a 150-300-word abstract for review by the OTR Symposium 2026 Programme Committee. Submitters are also encouraged to add further details about their paper or presentation, and any other considerations for the organisers, as part of the Description section. A more detailed overview of the submission requirements for each category can be found below. (Note: Submissions for presentations that do not fall into one of these broad themes can be submitted through an ‘Other’ category, but may not be prioritised for inclusion in the final programme.)

Additionally, given the international nature of the conference, proposals in English will be considered a priority for inclusion in the programme, but we will also make space for submissions in the Spanish language. If there is a concentration of high-quality proposals in the Spanish language. Multiple members of the OFA Symposium Programme Committee for the event speak Spanish and will be assigned to review those proposals.

Submissions close on 2026-07-05 23:59 (Europe/Madrid), 3 weeks, 1 day from now.