(11 Nov 2021) As Big Deals start to disappear, the desire that motivated them—easy and instant access to massive amounts of content – doesn’t. In response to cutting subscription access, many institutions put in place ‘alternative access’ strategies to provide pathways to accessing content that was previously available via subscription. In this resource, SPARC explores…
(20 Sep 2021) SPARC releases the results of its COVID Impact Survey, which was undertaken to better understand academic libraries’ pandemic-related budgetary challenges and approaches, with a focus on understanding how they affected attitudes towards content, collections, and open initiatives. The full text of the report can be found here. The SPARC COVID Impact Survey…
(30 Sept 2020) SPARC Europe is releasing an anticipated new report: Open Access: An Analysis of Publisher Copyright and Licensing Policies in Europe, 2020. This analysis, which presents the results of a research study that was completed in the summer of 2020, explores copyright and licensing practices amongst prominent journal publishers and OA publishers in DOAJ in Europe. …
(31 Oct 2019) In July of this year, The Directive on open data and the re-use of public sector information, also called the “Open Data Directive” went into effect. To aid in the implementation of this new legislation, of which members states have until 16 July 2021 to transpose, SPARC Europe today is releasing a summary…
(14 Aug 2019) Today, SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) submitted a detailed filing to the U.S. Department of Justice urging federal antitrust enforcers to block the proposed merger between college textbook publishing giants Cengage and McGraw-Hill Education. The merger would create the largest publisher of college course materials in the United States and the world’s…
(9 Aug 2019) Details of the “big deals” struck by university libraries and academic publishers have now been published as part of the Big Deal Knowledge Base. The database, launched yesterday by open-access advocacy group SPARC, includes thousands of pricing details on journal subscriptions as well as unredacted license agreements. Source: Inside Higher Ed
SPARC (The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) has announced that the theme for this year’s 8th International Open Access Week will be “Open for Collaboration.” The theme highlights the ways in which collaboration both inspires and advances the Open Access movement—from the partnerships behind launching initiatives such as PLOS and ImpactStory, to the working relationships…
(5 February 2015) The seminar, What should we do for expanding “Green Contents?” takes place 9 March 2015 from 1pm at the National Institute of Informatics. Details are here.
(April 16, 2013) Today, SPARC released a new community resource, Article-Level Metrics — A SPARC Primer, delving into Article-Level Metrics (ALMs) an emerging hot topic in the scholarly publishing arena. Article-Level Metrics (ALMs) are rapidly emerging as important tools to quantify how individual articles are being discussed, shared, and used. This new SPARC primer is designed to…
Open access legislation has been introduced to the U.S. Congress. Called The Fair Access to Science and Technology Research (FASTR) Act of 2013, it has some way to go before becoming law. The sponsors of FASTR argue that because tens of billions of government dollars result in tens of thousands of research papers annually –…