ACRL News Issue (B) of College & Research Libraries 648 / C& RL News ■ O c to b e r 2002 SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATION SPARC and ACRL Working together to reform scholarly communication by Rick Joh nson A CRL a n d th e S ch o larly P u b lish in g a n d Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) have w o rk e d closely together since SPARC’s inception. W ith th e la u n c h o f ACRL’s n e w sc h o larly c o m ­ m u n ic a tio n s initiative1 ‚ SPARC a n d ACRL h a v e b e c o m e e v e n m o re in tim a te p a rtn e rs . W h ile SPARC is still a relatively y o u n g o rg an izatio n , it has h a d notable successes facilitating constructive c h a n g e in th e scientific pu b lish in g m arketplace. T h ese successes h av e given SPARC a fo u n d atio n from w h ic h to p la n o u r n e x t steps, a n d w e lo o k fo rw ard to im p le m e n tin g n e w strategies in alli­ ance w ith ACRL’s Scholarly C om m unication Com­ m itte e a n d th e n e w ACRL visiting p ro g ra m o f­ ficer for scholarly com m unication. As o u r tw o o rg a n iz a tio n s m o v e fo rw a rd to achieve th e goal o f reform ing scholarly com m uni­ cation, a n d as th e ACRL Scholarly C o m m u n ica­ tio n C o m m ittee o u tlin e s its o w n ob jectiv es for th e fu tu re , I w o u ld lik e to d e s c rib e th e w a y s SPARC ex p e c ts to develop. W h a t w e 'v e achieved As m an y C&RL News readers know , SPARC a n d SPARC Europe are alliances o f universities, research libraries, a n d organizations built as a response to m arket dysfunctions in th e scholarly com m unica­ tion system, w hich have re d u c e d dissem ination o f scholarship a n d crippled libraries. SPARC serves as a catalyst for action, helping to create systems that e x p a n d inform ation dissem ination a n d use in a n e tw o rk ed digital environm ent, w hile re­ spo n d in g to the n eed s o f scholars a n d academe. Since its fo rm al la u n c h in J u n e 1998, SPARC h as advanced o u r m em bers’ agenda by: • dem onstrating that n e w journals can success­ fully c o m p e te fo r a u th o rs a n d quickly establish quality; • effectively driving d o w n th e cost o f journals; • cre a tin g a n e n v iro n m e n t in w h ic h editors a n d editorial b o a rd m em b ers claim m o re prom i­ n e n t roles in the business aspects o f their journals; • stim ulating th e d e v e lo p m e n t o f in c re a se d p u b lish in g c a p a c ity in th e n o t-fo r-p ro fit se c to r a n d encouraging n e w players to enter the market; • providing help a n d guidance to scientists and librarians interested in creating change; a n d • caπying the m ethods a n d m essage o f change to international stakeholders. T o d ay , m e m b e r s h ip in SPARC a n d SPARC E u ro p e n u m b e rs ap p ro x im ately 240 institutions in N o rth A m erica, th e U.K., E u ro p e , Asia, a n d A ustralia; SPARC is affiliated w ith m a jo r library organizations in Australia, Canada, D enm ark, N ew Zealand, th e UK a n d Ireland, a n d North America. N e x t steps SPARC’s p rio ritie s fo r th e fu tu re b u ild o n o u r e x p e r ie n c e o f t h e p a s t se v e ra l y e a rs. B u t o u r c e n tra l o b je c tiv e r e m a in s t o e n h a n c e b r o a d a n d c o s t-e ffe c tiv e a c c e ss to p e e r - re v ie w e d sc h o la rs h ip . T h is o b je c tiv e is p u r s u e d v ia th r e e in te r re la te d th ru sts: • In c u b a tio n o f alternatives to c u rre n t high- p riced journals a n d digital aggregations. Actions s p e a k lo u d e r th a n w o rd s, so SPARC is first a n d A b ou t th e auth or Ri ck Johnson is SPARC Enterprise director, e-mail: rick@arl.org mailto:rick@ari.org C&RL News ■ October 2002 / 649 foremost concerned with bringing tangible change to the established system of scholarly communi­ cation. To accomplish this, we assist in launching and winning acceptance of alternative journals, organize and develop robust information com­ munities, and create library-friendly business plans to sustain innovative scholarly communication ventures. We rally market support of deserving initiatives through our publisher partnership pro­ grams and provide advisory services that help scholarly publishing initiatives operate on a sound basis. • Public advocacy of fundamental changes in the system and the culture of scholarly commu­ nication. SPARC advocacy emphasizes outreach targeted at scholarly communication stakeholder groups (e.g., librarians, faculty, and editorial boards), as well as ongoing communications and public relations activities that publicize key is­ sues, initiatives, and success stories. These ef­ forts leverage the impact of SPARC’s publishing partnerships, providing broad awareness of the possibilities for change and emboldening schol­ ars to act. • Education campaigns aimed at enhancing awareness of scholarly communication issues and supporting expanded institutional and scholarly community roles in and control over the schol­ arly communication process. In addition to advocacy and educational work, ACRL has identified coalition building with higher education and scholarly associations as a high priority. These will be fruitful areas for col­ laborative work with SPARC and will provide enhanced traction to the work of both organiza­ tions. SPARC’s future activity will emphasize pro­ viding expanded practical assistance to innova­ tive publishing initiatives that embody SPARC values, especially the facilitation of library- scholar partnerships in support of scholarly com­ munication. Under this umbrella, SPARC seeks to build successful publishing plans, reduce barri­ ers to market entry, make effective use of avail­ able resources, and apply lessons learned to other projects. Activity will cluster around initiatives to: 1) Encourage developm ent o f instit tional repositories for the w ork o f schol­ ars. SPARC has launched a vigorous interna­ tional drive for creation of “institutional reposi­ tories” for scholarship. Such repositories offer an immediate and valuable complement to the ex­ isting scholarly publishing model, while stimu­ lating innovation that will cause the publishing u structure to evolve and improve over time. (More on this subject, below.) 2 ) Support scholar-led journal pub­ lishing initiatives. When scholars are ready to take action and assert control over scholarly communication, they must have concrete options. Regardless of the future of journals, it is through this filter that most scholars today engage with the issues. Hence, SPARC continues its support of scholar-led initiatives in which editorial boards are “declaring independence” or testing new eco­ nomic models. 3 ) Develop new collaborative digital p u b lish in g e n te r p r is e s an d m o d els. BioOne (http://www.BioOne.org) has been a notable success and offers a base of experience applicable to other initiatives. Along with other SPARC engagements, it suggests the power of uniting various players in the information chain— societies, libraries, consortia, academic comput­ ing centers, and university presses—in pursuit of shared objectives. Moving forward, SPARC will be closely involved in cultivating projects that harness this power to offer scholars better ways of disseminating their research. SPARC will support these kinds of ventures, including affordable alternatives and open access initiatives, through a range of activities. These will aim at sharing information, applying and trans­ ferring specialized expertise (especially business and financial planning) through publication of practical manuals and guides and through the SPARC Consulting Group, and providing mar­ keting services to qualified publishing partners. “Gaining Independence: A Manual for Plan­ ning the Launch of a Nonprofit Electronic Pub­ lishing Venture” is SPARC’s newest project to encourage planning for sustainability. Available on the Web free of charge2 ‚ “Gaining Indepen­ dence” is a detailed, step-by-step guide that leads readers through the creation of a business plan for start-up and early-stage electronic publishing ventures, including digital repositories and jour­ nals. It will help universities, libraries, societies, and others conceive, plan, and implement alter­ natives to commercially published scholarly and ­ scientific information. It provides background on relevant electronic publishing models and fo­ cuses on areas of business planning that may be unfamiliar to those considering new communica­ tions initiatives. Th e o p e n a c c e ss o p p o r t u n it y SPARC believes that open access is an especially http://www.BioOne.org 6 5 0 / C&RL News • October 2002 im p o rtant op p ortu nity . B o th SPARC and SPARC Europe participated in the creation o f the Budapest O pen A ccess Initiative (BOAI) and have signed the founding statement o f intent, w hich was also recently endorsed by the ACRL Board. BOAI aims to accelerate progress in the international effort to make research articles in all academic fields freely available on the Internet. T he OSI Informa­ tion Program o f the Soros Foundations Net­ w ork has committed funding o f $1 million (US) per year for three years in support of BOAI and op en access projects.3 SPARC and SPARC Europe became involved in BOAI because access to knowledge is the cen­ tral purpose o f scholarly communication. A sys­ tem built on op en access offers the prospect o f being less expensive to operate and of better serv­ ing scholars, the scholarly process, and society. Given these fundamentals, experiments with open access will inevitably lead us toward enduring so­ lutions. With others involved in BOAI, SPARC is pur­ suing two complementary strategies to implement open access: • O pen -access jou rn a ls. A number of SPAR publishing partners have already achieved success as peer-reviewed open access journals (see http:// w w w . a r l . o r g / s p a r c / c o r e / i n d e x . a s p ? page=cO) and have signed BOAI, as well. Workimg with SPARC partners, affiliates, and members, we will expand existing efforts to demonstrate on a broader scale the possibility, benefits, and finan­ cial underpinning of new economic models for supporting the cost o f publication. We also will work actively with researchers, libraries, and uni­ versities to facilitate partnerships and explore their roles in enhancing the effectiveness of scholarly communication. BOAI doesn’t demand change by the societies, university presses, and other pub­ lishers; instead, it promotes the benefits o f open access and seeks to demonstrate how to make such ventures economically sustainable. O n l i n e r e s o u r c e s • SPARC: http://www.arl.org/sparc • Create Change: http://www.createchange.org • D eclaring In d ep en d ence: http://www. arl.org/sparc/DI • Gaining Independence: http://www.arl.org/ sparc/GI C • S elf-archivin g. SPARC envisions a long-term scenario in which scholarly and scientific research is openly available to users through interoperable institutional and disciplinary repositories hosted by universities, societies, and consortia. SPARC’s goal during the next several years is to encourage and facilitate efforts that have the potential to move scholarly publishing toward this outcome. SPARC took a step toward this goal with the release of a major white paper, “The Case for Instit­ utional Repositories: A SPARC Position Paper.”1 Institutional repositories— in this context, de­ fined as digital collections capturing and preserv­ ing the intellectual output of a single or multi­ university community—provide a compelling re­ sponse to two strategic issues facing academic in­ stitutions. Such repositories: 1) provide a critical component in reforming the system of scholarly communication— a com­ ponent that expands access to research, reasserts control over scholarship by the academy, increases competition and reduces the monopoly power of journals, and brings economic relief and height­ ened relevance to the institutions and libraries that support them; and ’s 2) have the potential to serve as tangible indi­ cators of a university’s quality and to demonstrate die scientific, societal, and economic relevance of its research activities, thus increasing the institution’s visibility, status, and public value. Institutional repositories represent the logical convergence of faculty-driven self-archiving ini­ tiatives, library dissatisfaction with the monopo­ listic effects o f the traditional and still-pervasive journal publishing system, and the availability of digital networks and publishing technologies. In­ stitutional repositories build on a growing grassroots faculty practice of posting research online, most often on personal Web sites, but also on departmental sites or in disciplinary reposito­ ries. This demonstrates a desire for expanded ex­ posure of, and access to, their work. Academic libraries can play a critical role in building this awareness through outreach programs and reposi­ tory initiatives that demonstrate the practical im­ pact of such change. While the fundamental attitudinal shift has to com e from faculty themselves, libraries are the logical institutional catalyst to introduce this shift. The SPARC position paper explores the im­ pact that institutional repositories can have on evolving models of scholarly communication, their implications for current stakeholders in the pro­ cess, and the potential benefit they deliver to the http://www.arl.org/sparc/core/index.asp http://www.arl.org/sparc http://www.creaiecbange.aig http://www http://www.arl.oig/ C&RL News ■ October 2002 / 651 institutions that sponsor them. SPARC intends its paper to facilitate a practical discussion of insti­ tutional repository policy and management issues among operational decision-makers. This discus­ sion will necessarily engage participants from a variety of perspectives—faculty as principal con­ tributors and stakeholders, librarians as implemented, and provosts and deans as vital ad­ ministration proponents. It is a discussion that readers of C&RL News are urged to initiate at their institutions. A d v o c a c y , e d u c a tio n , a n d y o u SPARC has been an effective advocate for cul­ tural changes in scholarly publishing that benefit the academic community. But SPARC will con­ tinue to be effective only to the extent that our efforts are energetically supported at the grassroots level. SPARC needs you to carry the message of change. The Create Change initiative5 (launched by SPARC, ARL, and ACRL) and the Declaring Independence program6 (created by SPARC with support from the Triangle Research Libraries Net­ work) give you tools to educate and serve as activists within your community. Please use them and develop your own, as well. SPARC has worked closely with ACRL and its other partners, affiliates, and members to create relevant, effective solutions that will reverberate throughout the scholarly communication system. As ACRL further develops its priorities and strat­ egies, we would like to expand on the close col­ laboration that already exists and create an even stronger working relationship in pursuit of our common goals. We encourage feedback, com­ ments, and involvement among librarians, faculty, and administrators. SPARC can be reached by e- mail at sparc@arl.org. Notes 1. Ray English and Deborah Dancik, “ACRL’s new scholarly communication initiative, C&RL News (May 2002): 356-58. Also on the Web at http://www.ala.org/acrl/engdancik.html. 2. Visit http://www.arl.org/sparc/GI/. 3. Detailed information on BOAI is available on the SPARC and SPARC Europe web sites at http://www.arl.org/sparc and http:// www.sparceurope.org; the text of the initiative is at http://www.soros.org/openaccess. To find out how you can participate in BOAI, please see http://www.soros.org/openaccess/help.shtml. 4. Available at http://www.arl.org/sparc/ core/index.asp?page=f60. 5. Visit http://www.createchange.org/. 6. Visit http://www.arl.org/sparc/DI/. ■ mailto:sparc@arl.org http://www.ala.org/acrl/engdancik.html http://www.arl.org/sparc/GI/ http://www.arl.org/sparc http://www.sparceurope.org http://www.soros.org/openaccess http://www.soros.org/openaccess/help.shtml http://www.arl.org/sparc/ http://www.createchange.org/ http://www.arl.org/sparc/DI/