Excerpts from: ShelfLife, No. 74 (3 October 2002) ISSN 1538-4284
PARTNERSHIP STRENGTHENS EFFORTS TO PROMOTE OPEN ACCESS
The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) has been working
closely with the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition
(SPARC) to help create systems that expand information dissemination
and use in a networked digital environment, while responding to
the needs of scholars and academe. With the launch of ACRL's new
scholarly communications initiative, the partnership has grown even
closer, as SPARC pursues two complementary strategies to implement
open access. One, expanding existing open-access journals, promotes
the benefits of open access and seeks to demonstrate how to make such
ventures economically sustainable. The second initiative, self-archiving,
foresees 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. Institutional repositories represent the logical convergence
of faculty-driven self-archiving initiatives, library dissatisfaction
with the monopolistic effects of the traditional and still-pervasive
journal publishing system, and the availability of digital networks
and publishing technologies. Such repositories also 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
repositories, demonstrating a desire for expanded exposure of, and access
to, their work. (ACRL 18 Sep 2002)
http://www.ala.org/acrl/sparcacrl.html
Received on Thu Oct 03 2002 - 16:59:14 BST