On the warm morning of Tuesday 29th of June, Astrid van Wesenbeeck, SPARC Europe’s new Executive Director, launched the SPARC Europe annual meeting during the LIBER 39th Annual Conference, held at the Aarhus State and University Library in Denmark. Wim van der Stelt (Springer, The Netherlands) and Johan Bollen (Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing, USA) were also present (notes on their presentations will follow).

The discussions mainly referred to what activities should SPARC Europe be focusing on in the future. Some important issues that were addressed:

• advocating and lobbying for Open Access at a political level;
• flashing out economic aspects of Open Access;
• liaising with funding parties;
• focusing on quality improvement of Open Access journals/publishing and repositories;
• creating awareness amongst researchers;
• creating a follow up plan for mandatory policies;
• creating an Open Access Road Map; and
• establishing liaisons and partnerships between publishers and repository managers.

Based on the outcomes Astrid will set up, in the upcoming months, a work plan for 2011 and a strategic plan for the 2011-2015 period. SPARC Europe will of course continue cooperation and strengthen partnerships with other organisations such as SPARC Japan and SPARC US, COAR, eIFL, LIBER, OASPA, OpenAIRE, etc. All our activities, initiatives and projects should be further developed to the benefit of universities, researchers and Open Access within Europe and beyond.

In the coming months, we will also aim at bringing regular updates to our website, from information on initiatives, ongoing projects to publications and studies related to Open Access as well as news on our work plan and related activities, discussions. We invite you to give us your feedback at sparc.europe@kb.nl.