Open Access News

SPARC is, first and foremost, a strategic organization, and its agenda and programs have therefore evolved over its lifetime. In this article, I will sketch SPARC’s past accomplishments, outline ways that the organization has evolved, and share a sense of the direction SPARC will move in during the coming year....SPARC was created by the Association of Research Libraries in 1998, to serve as a catalyst for action and to reduce barriers to the access and use of information. As an alliance of more than 200 academic and research libraries, SPARC’s mission is to correct imbalances in the scholarly publishing system that have driven up the cost of scholarly journals and diminished the community’s ability to access information. At the core of our mission is the belief that these imbalances inhibit the advancement of scholarship and are at odds with fundamental needs of scholars and the academic enterprise. Since 2002, SPARC’s highest priority and most visible activity has centered on advancing the goal of open access to scholarly literature, and this will continue to be our main focus....

To achieve its mission, SPARC’s activities center around three program areas: educating stakeholders on issues in scholarly communication, advocating policy changes that support the potential of digital systems to advance scholarly communication, and incubating market-based initiatives that demonstrate business and publishing models that advance changes benefitting scholarship and the academy....SPARC’s campaign promoting awareness and adoption of open access has been, and will continue to be, the most visible of our educational projects. In addition to using traditional print channels, SPARC supports a series of rich Web-based resources articulating the benefits of open access. The “SPARC Open Access Newsletter” and the “Open Access News Blog,” both created and edited by Peter Suber, are vibrant channels that provide information on open access activities worldwide. Updates appear in the blog on a daily basis, and these are supplemented by Suber’s thoughtful and thorough analyses in the monthly newsletter.

SPARC’s advocacy program has risen to the forefront of our activities. Initially the program focused on outreach targeted at stakeholder groups internal to the scholarly communication faculty and editorial boards along with communications and public relations activities. During the past two years, however, it has been greatly expanded to include an extremely active public policy focus. SPARC has gained national and international attention with its active advocacy work for open access. SPARC has been outspoken in support of policies related to public access to federally funded research results, in particular on the recently implemented NIH Public Access Policy.... The focus on public access to federally funded research led SPARC to spearhead the formation of the Alliance for Taxpayer Access, a unique alliance of leading library groups, public interest organizations, and patient advocacy groups....SPARC will actively seek to back initiatives that explicitly recognize that dissemination is an essential, inseparable component of the scientific research process and that address questions of access to data as well as to the primary literature.

Update. Also see Heather's presentation at the UBC Library / SLAIS Colloquium, University of British Columbia Library, SPARC Futures : an evolving agenda.