Scholarly Communications

SPARC is an alliance of universities, research libraries, and organizations built as a constructive response to market dysfunctions in the scholarly communication system. These dysfunctions have reduced dissemination of scholarship and crippled libraries. SPARC serves as a catalyst for action, helping to create systems that expand information dissemination and use in a networked digital environment while responding to the needs of scholars and academe. SPARC introduces new solutions to scientific journal publishing, facilitates the use of technology to expand access, and partners with publishers that bring top-quality low-cost research to a greater audience. SPARC strives to return science to scientists. SPARC's worldwide membership and network of affiliates and endorsers support SPARC's projects in North America, the U.K. and Ireland, Europe, Asia, Australia and New Zealand.

For more on SPARC, click here.

The International Consortium for the Advancement of Academic Publication is a research and development organization devoted to the advancement of electronic scholarly communication. Our mission includes technological support, publication, and enhancement of scholarly journals and educational resources, with the goals of greater accessibility, recognition and communication within the academic community.

As part of the NCSU Libraries Learning and Research Center for the Digital Age (LRCDA), the Scholarly Communication Center supports the university's research, teaching, and service mission by guiding both the Libraries and NC State's faculty, students, and staff in matters relating to the dissemination and use of knowledge. We strongly encourage and support the role of the research library in the scholarly communication process, including the exercise of full rights under the fair use section of the copyright law.

New Horizons in Scholarly Communication highlights trends affecting the process of creating, disseminating, retrieving, and using information for instruction and research at the university level.

Project Euclid's mission is to advance scholarly communication in the field of theoretical and applied mathematics and statistics. Project Euclid is designed to address the unique needs of low-cost independent and society journals. Through a collaborative partnership arrangement, these publishers join forces and participate in an online presence with advanced functionality, without sacrificing their intellectual or economic independence or commitment to low subscription prices. Full-text searching, reference linking, interoperability through the Open Archives Initiative, and long-term retention of data are all important components of the project.

Project MUSE was launched in 1995 by the Johns Hopkins University Press, in collaboration with the Milton S. Eisenhower Library at Johns Hopkins University, to offer the full text of JHUP scholarly journals via the world wide web. In 1999, MUSE expanded to become a unique partnership of not-for-profit publishers, increasing its ability to offer essential periodicals in the humanities, the arts, and the social sciences. Project MUSE has been hailed for its library-friendly licensing and usage policies, easy online navigation, reasonable pricing, and generous discount plans for consortia and various categories of libraries.

ArXiv is an e-print service in the fields of physics, mathematics, non-linear science and computer science. The contents of arXiv conform to Cornell University academic standards. arXiv is owned, operated and funded by Cornell University, a private not-for-profit educational institution. ArXiv is also partially funded by the National Science Foundation.

eScholarship stimulates and facilitates innovation in scholarly communication in support of research and teaching. This includes creation, production, peer review, management, and dissemination of scholarly output.

A program of the University of California, eScholarship is hosted by UC's California Digital Library. In partnership with librarians, scholars, academic publishers, information technologists, and professionals in other memory organizations (e.g., archives, historical societies, museums), eScholarship works to explore and enable new modes of scholarly publication, including:

• repositories for research and scholarly output, including pre-publication scholarship as well as peer-reviewed content
• web-based dissemination of digitally reformatted publications
• support for presentation and dissemination of interactive publications and teaching materials
• technologies that enhance peer review while accelerating dissemination of scholarly publication
• electronic editions of academic monographs of interest to both scholarly and general-interest readers

The Open Archives Initiative develops and promotes interoperability standards that aim to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content. The Open Archives Initiative has its roots in an effort to enhance access to e-print archives as a means of increasing the availability of scholarly communication. Continued support of this work remains a cornerstone of the Open Archives program. The fundamental technological framework and standards that are developing to support this work are, however, independent of the both the type of content offered and the economic mechanisms surrounding that content, and promise to have much broader relevance in opening up access to a range of digital materials. As a result, the Open Archives Initiative is currently an organization and an effort explicitly in transition, and is committed to exploring and enabling this new and broader range of applications. As we gain greater knowledge of the scope of applicability of the underlying technology and standards being developed, and begin to understand the structure and culture of the various adopter communities, we expect that we will have to make continued evolutionary changes to both the mission and organization of the Open Archives Initiative.

The Budapest Open Access Initiative arises from a small but lively meeting convened in Budapest by the Open Society Institute (OSI) on December 1-2, 2001. The purpose of the meeting was to accelerate progress in the international effort to make research articles in all academic fields freely available on the internet. The participants represented many points of view, many academic disciplines, and many nations, and had experience with many of the ongoing initiatives that make up the open access movement. In Budapest they explored how the separate initiatives could work together to achieve broader, deeper, and faster success. They explored the most effective and affordable strategies for serving the interests of research, researchers, and the institutions and societies that support research. Finally, they explored how OSI and other foundations could use their resources most productively to aid the transition to open access and to make open-access publishing economically self-sustaining. The result is the Budapest Open Access Initiative. It is at once a statement of principle, a statement of strategy, and a statement of commitment.
Guide to Business Planning for Launching a New Open Access Journal
(http://www.soros.org/openaccess/pdf/business_planning.pdf)
Guide to Business Planning for Converting a Subscription-based Journal to Open Access
(http://www.soros.org/openaccess/pdf/business_converting.pdf)

The Public Library of Science (PLoS) is a non-profit organization of scientists committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a public resource.
We are working to establish online public libraries of science that will archive and freely distribute the complete contents of every published scientific article, and:

• Greatly expand access to scientific knowledge by giving any scientist, physician, student - or anyone with access to the internet, anywhere in the world - unlimited access to the latest scientific research.
• Facilitate research, informed medical practice and education by making it possible to freely search the full text of every published article to locate specific ideas, methods, experimental results and observations.
• Enable scientists, librarians, publishers and entrepreneurs to develop innovative new ways to access and use the information in this immensely rich but highly fragmented resource.

PubMed Central (PMC) is the U.S. National Library of Medicine's digital archive of life sciences journal literature. Access to PMC is free and unrestricted.

BioMed Central is an independent publishing house committed to providing immediate free access to peer-reviewed biomedical research.

The Open Archives Forum provides a Europe-based focus for dissemination of information about European activity related to open archives and, in particular, to the Open Archives Initiative. The aim of the Forum is to facilitate clustering of IST projects, national initiatives and other parties interested in the open archives approach. In order to do so, the Forum brings interested parties together to build a community of interest, enable exchange of information and establish a web-based European information source for open archives. In addition, the Forum undertakes comparative reviews of technical and organisational issues.