SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition)

SPARC is an alliance of academic and research libraries established to address market dysfunction in the scholarly communications publishing system. Its focus has been on serving as a catalyst in the establishment of alternative mechanisms that take advantage of the networked environment to disseminate research. SPARC, begun as an initiative of the Association of Research Libraries in 1997, now has a membership base of over 200 institutions, a number of supporting organizations, and a counterpart organization, SPARC Europe, with over 70 members in fourteen countries. Through its projects, advocacy, and educational work, SPARC is demonstrating that it is possible to develop high-quality, affordable competitors to high-price commercial journals. It has also provided information and support to help motivated editors and authors to be their own agents of change.

Because the nature of scholarly communication is complex within disciplines and their varying traditions, SPARC encourages and supports a variety of experiments. The focus is on linking the broad advocacy of change with real-world demonstration projects. Three key strategies continue to form the basis of SPARC activities:

• Expand competition in the journals marketplace. SPARC seeks to introduce new competitive forces in the journals market as a means of controlling prices. This strategy promotes more effective journal price signaling and supports the start-up of affordable alternative journals.
• Introduce alternatives to the subscription model. SPARC encourages new business models that support open electronic access to research by recovering publication costs via means other than subscriptions (such as publication fees).
• Disaggregate the core functions of scholarly publication. To address costs within the publishing process, this strategy focuses on the separation of scholars' articles with the distinct services that enhance their value. SPARC supports the development of interoperable "open archives" of articles (e.g., institutional or disciplinary repositories) that interact with value-added services such as peer review, linking, and searching.

These SPARC strategies are advanced specifically through:

• Incubation of alternative publishing ventures and initiatives. SPARC helps reduce the risk faced by alternative publications and economic models through publisher partnership programs that organize library support for innovative new journal publishing programs and business planning services that help nonprofit ventures plan their sustainability. The SPARC Alternatives Program supports lower-cost, directly competitive journals as an alternative for academic disciplines formerly dependent on high-priced journals, the SPARC Leading Edge Program supports ventures that demonstrate open access or otherwise innovative business models, and SPARC Scientific Communities support development of non-profit portals that serve the needs of a discrete scientific community by aggregating peer-reviewed research and other content.
• Advocacy of fundamental changes in the system and culture of scholarly communication. SPARC reaches out to various stakeholder groups (e.g., librarians, faculty, editorial boards, higher education administrators, research funding agencies) and conducts communication activities to build support for expanded institutional and scholarly community roles in and control over the scholarly communication process.
• Education activities aimed at enhancing public awareness of scholarly communication issues and options.

SPARC publishing partners include scholarly societies, university presses, individual academic institutions, and independent publishers. The journals they publish are generally traditional electronic journals (issues with articles); many also provide print counterparts, either in parallel with the electronic version or as a compilation at the end of the year for archival purposes. SPARC itself is not a publisher, but it does provide resources and business planning documents for its partners and others interested in publishing journals.

The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is also a SPARC partner. Included in that directory are those journals defined as "open access" by the Budapest Open Access Initiative: journals that use a funding model that does not charge readers or their institutions for access. The journals are those that take the right of "users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles." The directory includes research journals, which report primary results of research or overviews of research results to a scholarly community. The directory also uses the periodical definition of a serial appearing or intended to appear indefinitely at regular intervals, generally more frequently than annually, each issue of which is numbered or dated consecutively and normally contains separate articles, stories, or other writings. The records in the DOAJ can be downloaded into a comma-delimited format for loading into local systems, metadata can be harvested (OAI-PMH), and the DOAJ also is now OpenURL-compliant. Over 760 titles now are included in the directory. Phase 2 of the project will include a searchable index of the articles from journals in the directory.

References

SPARC
www.arl.org/sparc/ (external link)

Directory of Open Access Journals
www.doaj.org (external link)

Budapest Open Access Initiative
www.soros.org/openaccess/ (external link)

Julia C. Blixrud
Assistant Executive Director, External Relations, ARL
Assistant Director, Public Programs, SPARC

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