Press Release SPARC Europe Announces Award for Outstanding Achievements in Scholarly Communications New Award to Honour Leaders in Field of Scholarly Communications January 17, 2006 For more information, contact: David Prosser, david.prosser@bodley.ox.ac.uk Oxford, UK — SPARC Europe (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), a leading organization of European research libraries, today announced the inauguration of the SPARC Europe Award for Outstanding Achievements in Scholarly Communications. The new annual Award will be presented to 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 judging panel, formed from members of the SPARC Europe Board of Directors, has issued a call for nominations for the Award. Nominations are open to all who have made major contributions in the field of scholarly communications, and the judging panel particularly wishes to receive nominations of individuals of groups working in any of the following areas: Research that helps illuminate the scholarly communications landscape Advocacy for new models of scholarly communications Development of new tools to aid scholarly communication (e.g. repository software) Interesting new projects or products Implementation of policies that promote new scholarly communication models. Nominations (together with a short outline of the nominee’s work) should be sent to David Prosser, Director of SPARC Europe no later than 10th February 2006. The Award will be present at the Third Nordic Conference on Scholarly Communication, to be held at Lund, Sweden 24 - 25 April 2006.   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. .