AIMOS 2026, the 8th annual conference of the Association for Interdisciplinary Meta-Research and Open Science, runs 30 November to 2 December 2026 at Te Herenga Waka - Victoria University of Wellington, and is the first AIMOS conference held outside Australia. The programme covers meta-research (metascience) and open-science talks, workshops, hackathons and discussions, with keynotes from Simine Vazire, Ian Hussey and Kate Williams.
When the Association for Interdisciplinary Meta-Research and Open Science gathers for its eighth annual conference, it will do so outside Australia for the first time, bringing several hundred researchers to Wellington from 30 November to 2 December 2026. AIMOS 2026 is hosted at Te Herenga Waka - Victoria University of Wellington, and it gathers scientists who study science itself: the fast-growing field of metascience, or meta-research, concerned with how research is actually done and how it could be done better.
The conference is run by AIMOS, the Association for Interdisciplinary Meta-Research and Open Science, a registered research organisation and charity founded in 2019 to build an interdisciplinary community around open and robust research practices. Its annual conference is the field's main gathering in the Australasian region, and past editions have been held in Australia, including the inaugural 2019 meeting at the University of Melbourne, the 2024 conference at the Australian National University in Canberra, and the 2025 conference at the University of Sydney.
The 2026 edition is co-hosted by a local organising committee based at Victoria University of Wellington, the first time the conference has crossed the Tasman. Confirmed keynote speakers are Simine Vazire of the University of Melbourne, Ian Hussey of the University of Bern, and Kate Williams of the University of Melbourne.
The audience is researchers, open-science practitioners and research-infrastructure specialists from across disciplines rather than a single field. The programme mixes meta-research talks with skills workshops, hackathons and moderated discussion groups, a format that draws early-career researchers, methodologists, librarians and research-policy people as well as established academics. It is a working, participatory conference rather than a trade-show-style congress.
The conference is based at Victoria University of Wellington's Kelburn campus on Kelburn Parade, on the hillside immediately above the central city. Wellington's compact scale is the practical draw: the Kelburn campus, the CBD and the waterfront sit within a short distance of one another, and Wellington International Airport serves the city directly, putting delegates arriving by air close to campus and accommodation. The university environment supplies lecture theatres and breakout rooms suited to the talks-plus-workshops-plus-hackathons structure the organisers have set out.
An established international academic conference choosing Wellington for its first edition outside its home country is a meaningful data point for the capital's business-events sector. It demonstrates that a university campus can anchor a multi-day, several-hundred-delegate scholarly event, and it brings an international research audience into the city at the start of the New Zealand summer. Conferences of this type tend to recur and rotate, so a well-run Wellington edition can seed future bids for metascience and open-science meetings across the country.
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