• 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)

  • 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)

  • 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)

  • A call for nominations for the Second SPARC Europe Award for Outstanding Achievements in Scholarly Communications has been issued. Launched in 2006, the Award recognises an individual or group within Europe that has made significant advances in our understanding of the issues surrounding scholarly communications and/or in developing practical means to address the problems with the current systems. The First Award, in 2006, was presented to the Wellcome Trust.

    You can find more details in the Press Release. (12/02/07)

  • 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).

  • Registration is now open for OAI5 - the 5th Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, which will take place from 18th - 20th April 2007. Part sponsorsed by SPARC Europe, the OAI series of workshops is one of the biggest international meetings of technical repository-developers, library Open Access policy formulators, and the funders and researchers that they serve. (12/01/07)
  • 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)
  • The Early Bird registration for Open Scholarship 2006: New Challenges for Open Access Repositories closes on the 31 August (£150) and the registration fee rises to £180 after that date.

    This inaugural conference will be held at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, UK on 18-20 October 2006 and is aimed at Librarians, University Administrators, funders, academics and technical specialists. To register and for further information about the conference, including the programme go to: http://www.lib.gla.ac.uk/openscholarship (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.(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)

  • 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 dates for the next CERN workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication (OAI4) to be held at CERN, Geneva, Switzerland have been announced as 20 to 22 October 2005. This will be the latest installment in this highly successful series that began in 2001. It brings together activists who are at the forefront of scholarly communication change. A call for contributions and web site will follow shortly. (15/02/05)
  • 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)
  • In the US, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has issued its Policy on enhancing public access to publications resulting from NIH-funded research. The final policy 'requests' NIH-funded investigators to submit to PubMed Central an electronic version of the authors' final manuscript upon acceptance. At the authors' discretion the papers will be made publicly available through PubMed Central within 12 months of publication. The policy has changed from the draft that gained public support and so has received a muted welcome from open access advocates. (03/02/05)
  • 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)
  • The Science and Technology Committee of the UK House of Commons has published it much-anticipated Report into Scientific Publishing. The Committee concludes that 'the current model for scientific publishing is unsatisfactory' and makes a number of recommendations to the UK Government and funding bodies. These include the recommendations suggested by SPARC Europe in our evidence: 1) Funding bodies should require that authors retain copyright; 2)
    Funding bodies should require that authors deposit a copy of their final papers in suitable repositories; 3) Funding bodies should make funds available to pay publication charges in open access journals. (20/07/04)
  • Phase 2 of the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) has been launched. 'As of today 270 of the 1100 journals are searchable on the article level and both numbers are growing. Researchers can now search more than 46,000 articles through the Directory of Open Access Journals and be sure to get access to the articles.' This is a major advance in the functionality of the DOAJ. (03/06/04)
  • News that should have been posted earlier: On 30 January, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) issued a 'Declaration on Access to Research Data from Public Funding.' The Declaration, signed by over 34 Countries (including most European countries) stated that ‘…an optimum international exchange of data, information and knowledge contributes decisively to the advancement of scientific research and innovation’ and ‘…open access will maximise the value derived from public investment in data collection efforts.’

SPARC Press Releases

Last updated: 30 October 2006