Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Wednesday, July 07, 2004

Review of SPARC's extensive work, esp. for OA

Bas Savenije, The SPARC initiative: a catalyst for change, a presentation at the TICER workshop, The Digital Library and e-Publishing for Science, Technology, and Medicine (Geneva, June 13-18, 2004). From the abstract: "SPARC was started in 1997 by a number of large research libraries in the US. Its main goal was restore a competitive balance of the STM journals publishing market....Since two years SPARC puts a special emphasis on Open Access, including institutional repositories. The paper gives an overview of the activities of SPARC and its partners in these areas. The results are evaluated and compared with the measures defined in 1997. Finally, the paper describes the possibilities for libraries to contribute to the realization of SPARC's goals." (PS: SPARC's work is so extensive that any review of it will overlap significantly with a review of the recent progress, and future prospects, of OA more widely. Savenije's review does just this. Full disclosure: SPARC publishes my newsletter.)