Press Release SHERPA Receives SPARC Europe Award for Outstanding Achievements in Scholarly Communications, 2007 April 18, 2007 For more information, contact: David Prosser, david.prosser@bodley.ox.ac.uk CERN, Geneva, Switzerland – As part of OAI5 (the 5th Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication), held at the CERN Laboratories in Geneva, Switzerland, the SHERPA partnership was presented with the 2007 SPARC Europe Award for Outstanding Achievements in Scholarly Communications. SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) Europe initiated the Award in 2006 to recognise the work of 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. In making the Award to SHERPA (Securing a Hybrid Environment for Research Preservation and Access) the judging panel noted their advocacy for the adoption of institutional repositories and their development of a suite of tools in support of Open Access, including OpenDOAR (a world-wide directory of repositories hosting freely available peer-reviewed publications), JULIET (a listing of funding bodies’ policies regarding deposit mandates) and RoMEO (listing publishers’ copyright policies in relation to articles deposit). SHERPA was nominated for the SPARC Europe Award for Outstanding Achievements in Scholarly Communications by Dr Judith Wusteman of University College Dublin. ‘SHERPA is a trusted source of information,’ said Dr Wusteman, and ‘SHERPA’s online services, namely OpenDOAR, JULIET and ROMEO, are its greatest contribution to Open Access and the development of institutional repositories.’ Dr Wusteman noted that a 2006 study by the Johns Hopkins University identified SHERPA’s OpenDOAR directory to be the best directory (out of 24 directories tested) of repositories worldwide. Bill Hubbard, SHERPA Manager, said ‘I am delighted to be able to accept this award on behalf of the SHERPA partnership and in particular on behalf of the SHERPA core team at the University of Nottingham. We would like to thank SPARC Europe for the honour of being chosen for this award for our advocacy activities and online services in the area of Open Access repositories. We are pleased that the community has found these to be valuable and are honoured by this recognition. ‘We are proud of the services that we offer - RoMEO, JULIET and OpenDOAR – and hope that these will make a contribution to the success of Open Access. Our thanks to all those who have contributed or helped to build these and we look forward to continuing community contributions.’ This is the second time the SPARC Europe Award for Outstanding Achievements in Scholarly Communications has been made. The first Award, in 2006, went to the Wellcome Trust for their groundbreaking work in scholarly communication. It is planned that the 2008 Award will be made during the Fourth Nordic Conference on Scholarly Communication, held at Lund, Sweden in April of next year. SPARC Europe is an alliance of 110 research-led university libraries from 14 European countries. It is affiliated with SPARC based in Washington, D.C., which represents over 200 institutions, mainly in North America. SPARC Europe and SPARC work to develop and promote new models of scholarly communication that increase the access to and utility of the research literature. .