In its Strategic Plan for 2005–2009, ARL speaks of the importance of working with others in the national and international library, academic, and scholarly communities to advocate for “the development and assessment of imaginative and practical strategies for new functionally complete systems of scientific and scholarly communication and the roles of research libraries in these systems.” The Scholarly Communication program collaborates with others who share its vision of creating effective, extensible, sustainable, and economically viable models of scholarly communication that provide barrier-freeaccess to quality information.
A primary goal of the ARL Federal Relations and Information Policy program is to influence legislative action that is favorable to the research library and higher education communities. The program analyzes, responds to, and seeks to influence public initiatives on information, intellectual property, and telecommunications policies.
SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, is an alliance of universities, research libraries, and organizations created as an ARL initiative in 1997 to be a constructive response to market dysfunctions in the scholarly communication system. 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 academe.
The Information Access Alliance (IAA), formed by ARL and other library associations, believes that a new standard of antitrust review should be adopted by state and federal antitrust enforcement agencies in examining merger transactions in the serials publishing industry. When reviewing proposed mergers, antitrust authorities should consider the decision-making process used by libraries–the primary customers of STM and legal serial publications–to make purchasing decisions.
Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) is dedicated to supporting the transformative promise of networked information technology for the advancement of scholarly communication and the enrichment of intellectual productivity. Its memberships consists of some 200 institutions representing higher education, publishing, network and telecommunications, information technology, and libraries and library organizations.
The purpose of the Library Copyright Alliance (LCA) is to work toward a unified voice and common strategy for the library community in responding to and developing proposals to amend national and international copyright law and policy for the digital environment. The LCA is composed of five major library associations.
Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) supports an array of programs and activities that help fulfill its mission of “enhancing scholarly communication and assisting members to provide full support for postgraduate study and research.”
In January 2002, the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) launched its Scholarly Communication initiative to increase access to scholarly information; foster cost-effective alternative means of publishing, especially those that take advantage of electronic information technologies; and encourage scholars to assert greater control over scholarly communications.