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Welcome to SPARC® Europe, the alliance of European research
libraries, library organizations, and research institutions.
We advocate change in the scholarly communications market,
support competition, and encourage new publishing models (in
particular, open access models) that better serve the international
researcher community.
Several national organizations and institutions in Europe
sponsor SPARC Europe, including: the Joint Information Systems
Committee (JISC) in the UK; the Society of College, National
and University Libraries (SCONUL) of the UK and Ireland; and
UKB, the Netherlands Cooperative of Research Libraries, in
collaboration with IWI, the SURF Foundation program for innovation
in scientific information supply. LIBER also participates
in SPARC Europe.
SPARC Europe collaborates with the international SPARC organization
based in Washington, DC, but it develops Europe-focused initiatives
under the direction of a Board of Directors and the SPARC
Europe Director. Membership of SPARC Europe is open to national
and academic libraries, library organizations and research
institutions in the region.
In these pages you will find more information on SPARC Europe
(on the 'about us' page), together
with details of the initiatives and programmes we support
('resources'). SPARC Europe
is a member organization and we encourage you to contact us
with suggestions and comments on how to accelerate change
in scholarly communications

David Prosser, Director
SPARC Europe
Bodleian Library
Broad Street
Oxford
OX1 3BG
United Kingdom
Tel: +44 (0) 1865 277 614
E-mail: david.prosser@bodley.ox.ac.uk
What's New:
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Another UK research funding body, the Arts
& Humanities Research Council (AHRC) has issued
a deposit mandate for all research papers resulting from
AHRC fundings. Now 6 of the 7 UK Research Councils have
mandates in place. (See the up-dated table
describing the positions of each Research Council.) (07/10/07)
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The SHERPA partnership
is the recipient of the Second SPARC Europe Award for
Outstanding Achievements in Scholarly Communications.
The Award was presented during OAI5 - the 5th Workshop
on Innovations in Scholarly Communication, held at the
CERN Laboratories in Geneva, Switzerland.
The decision to present the Award to SHERPA was made
in recognition of their advocacy for the adoption of institutional
repositories and their development of a suite of tools
in support of Open Access, including OpenDOAR, JULIET,
and RoMEO. You can find more details in the
Press Release. (25/04/07)
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Want to know where the nearest repository is? Try the
Repository Map
Mashup site put together by Stuart Lewis at the University
of Wales Aberystwyth. It is in an early stage of development,
but already gives a great visual representation of the
spread of repositories. (03/04/07)
-
Two of the UK's research funding bodies (the CCLRC and
the PPARC) have merged to form a new Research Council,
the Science
and Technology Facilities Council (STFC). The STFC
has adopted a deposit mandate for all research papers
resulting from STFC funding. Now 5 of the 7 UK Research
Councils have mandates in place. (See the up-dated table
describing the positions of each Research Council.) (03/04/07)
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The EC has published its Communication
on Scientific Information in the Digital Age: Access,
Dissemination and Preservation. (Also available in
French
and German.)
The highlights include the commitment to include publishing
costs in research projects and €50 million for work
on infrastructures, in particular digital repositories,
in 2007-2008. The Communication stopped short of a deposit
mandate, but did say that 'specific guidelines [will be]
issued, within specific programmes, on the publication
of articles in open repositories'. This takes the EC one
step closer to mandating deposit. (20/02/07)
-
On Thursday 15 February a delegation led by Sijbolt Noord,
on behalf of the European University Association, presented
the 'Guaranteed public access to publicly-funded research
results' petition to Janez Potocnik, EU Commissioner for
Science and Research. The petition had been singed by
over 17,500 individuals and 743 intuitions and called
on the EC to implement the recommendations of the "EU
Study on the Economic and Technical Evolution of the Scientific
Publication Markets of Europe". The petition
is still open for additional signatures and now contains
over 21,000 signatories. (20/02/07)
-
In the wake of the publication of the report from the
"EU
Study on the Economic and Technical Evolution of the Scientific
Publication Markets of Europe" SPARC Europe,
together with a consortium of partners, is sponsoring
a petition to the European Commission to demonstrate support
for Open Access and for the recommendations in the report.
Signatures may be added on behalf of individuals or institutions.
Please register your support for Open Access in this way.
To sign the petition, please go to http://www.ec-petition.eu/
In addition to SPARC Europe, the sponsoring organisations
are JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee, UK), SURF
(Netherlands), DFG (Deutsches Forschungsgemeinschaft,
Germany), DEFF (Danmarks Elektroniske Fag- og Forskningsbibliotek,
Denmark).
- A fifth UK Research Councils has issued a self-archiving
mandate for all the research papers it funds. The Particle
Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC)
has announced that for grants arising from proposals submitted
after 1 December 2006 it will be a requirement of grant
that copies of papers published as a result if those grants
must be deposited in a suitable repository (where one exists
and in compliance with publisher's copyright and licensing
policies). This means that only two of the UK's eight research
Councils have no policy supporting open access. (See the
up-dated table
describing the positions of each Research Council.) (30/10/06)
- A fourth UK Research Councils has issued a self-archiving
mandate for all the research papers it funds. The Natural
Environment Research Council (NERC) will require from 1
October 2006 that copies of peer-reviewed papers resulting
from new funded awards be deposited at the earliest opportunity
in an e-prints repository. NERC will establish an institutional
repository for the work of its staff members and this repository
will be available for authors whose institutions do not
have their own repository. Now half of the UK Research Councils
have strong self-archiving mandates in place. (See the up-dated
table
describing the positions of each Research Council.) (21/08/06)
- Three of the Research Councils in the UK have issued self-archiving
mandates for all the research papers they fund. This is
part of a long-awaited policy
on open access from Research Councils UK (RCUK), the umbrella
group for the eight Research Councils, and represents the
first Government funding bodies worldwide to impose such
mandates. SPARC Europe welcomes
the statements and encourages other funding bodies to
follow this lead. (SPARC Europe has produced a table
to show the positions of each Research Council.) (11/07/06)
- The European Commission has published a “Study on
the economic and technical evolution of the scientific publication
markets in Europe,” a comprehensive and independent
review of the scholarly publishing market. (See http://ec.europa.eu/research/science-society/pdf/scientific-publication-study_en.pdf).
The report provides insights into how and why the current
system fails to meet the needs of researchers and points
the way, through a series of recommendations, to addressing
many aspects of a dysfunctional market. SPARC Europe has
strongly
endorsed the key conclusion that “policies should
make sure that the market is sufficiently competitive and
‘dissemination-friendly.'" (11/07/06)
- The SPARC Create
Change website has been comprehenively up-dated to provide
information, perspectives, and tools to enable researchers
to play an active role in advancing scholarly information
exchange in the networked environment. (29/06/06)
- The SPARC Europe office has moved into one of Oxford’s
most distinctive buildings – the Clarendon
Building. The Clarendon is part of the Bodleian library
(who generously provides office space for SPARC Europe)
and was built in the early 18th Century by architect Nicholas
Hawksmoor (most famous for his churches built in London
following the great fire). It has just had a major refurbishment
and now houses the Oxford University Library System administration.
The address is given above. (02/05/06)
- The Wellcome Trust is the recipient of the first SPARC
Europe Award for Outstanding Achievements in Scholarly Communications.
The Award was presented during the conference dinner of
the Third Nordic Conference on Scholarly Communication held
in Lund, Sweden.
The decision to present the Award to the Wellcome Trust
was made in recognition of the Trust’s truly groundbreaking
work in scholarly communication, from the commissioning
of incisive research into the market, through to the formulation
and implementation of clear policy in support of the widest
dissemination of the research outputs funded by the Trust.
You can find more details in the
Press Release. (24/04/06)
- The
Institutional Repository, a new book by Richard
Jones, Theo Andrew and John MacColl has just been published.
It draws on the authors' experiences of setting-up and running
the repository at Edinburgh University. (18/01/06)
- Research Councils UK has published its draft
policy on access to research outputs. The policy would
promote open access by making it a condition of grant that
researchers deposit copies of their journal articles and
conference proceedings (subject to copyright restrictions)
in suitable open repositories. The Research Councils will
also make funds available to pay for open access publication
charges. SPARC Europe has strongly
welcomed the policy. (14/07/05)
- The creation of a Directory
of Open Access Repositories (DOAR) has been announced.
DOAR will provide a comprehensive and authoritative list
of institutional and subject-based repositories, as well
as archives set up by funding agencies. Users of the service
will be able to analyse repositories by location, type,
the material they hold and other measures. The DOAR is a
joint collaboration between the University of Nottingham
in the UK and the University of Lund in Sweden and is funded
by the Open Society Institute (OSI), along with the JISC,
CURL, and SPARC Europe.(14/02/05)
- The exchange on open access between the UK Government
and the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee
continues. Following the publication of the Committee's
original
report, the Government made a formal
response in which it dismissed the 'author pays' model
and refused to provide extra funding for institutional repositories
saying that this was the responsibility of individual institutions.
The Committee was not satisfied with the response and requested
further thought from the Government. A second
response has been published, basically restating the
Government's position. With a UK General Election likely
in May 2005, it would appear that the political debate on
open access in the UK is temporarily on hold. (26/01/05)
- The Wellcome Trust has issued a Position
Statement in Support of Open Access Publishing. Specifically,
the 'Wellcome Trust ....supports open and unrestricted access
to the published output of research, including the open
access model...., as a fundamental part of its charitable
mission and a public benefit to be encouraged wherever possible.'
(11/04)
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Last updated: 3 April 2007
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