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.
For a complete partner list, please see our partners page.
Membership in SPARC numbers approximately 200 institutions in North America, Asia, and Australia. An additional 100 institutions belong to SPARC Europe, formed when SPARC worked with the Ligue des Bibliothèques Européennes de Recherche (LIBER) and other European organizations to establish this offshoot. SPARC continues to investigate the potential for a similar initiative in Japan.
Through affiliate memberships, SPARC has ties with major library organizations in Australia, Canada, Denmark, New Zealand, the UK and Ireland, and North America. For a complete list, please see our members page.<
SPARC members pledge through a purchase commitment to support the SPARC-endorsed journals that fit their collection development agenda. SPARC members have a strong record of purchasing SPARC-endorsed journals and participating in related initiatives. Journals are purchased through serials agents or directly from the publisher.
Institutions that are not SPARC members are also encouraged to purchase these journals, which provide top-quality research while advancing the case for science published by scientists.
The high and fast-rising cost of journals has had a devastating effect on the flow of scientific communication, the research community, and library collections. The situation is especially dire for journals in the scientific, technical and medical (STM) fields. SPARC was created to offer a constructive response to this issue. It works to find common ground among libraries, publishers and scientists who share the goal of making scientific communication responsive to the goals of science.
Data gathered by the Association of Research Libraries shows that libraries are spending more and getting less. This study showed that serials spending was 152 percent higher in 1998 than a dozen years earlier — yet there has been a seven percent decline in the number of titles libraries are getting for their money. Journals in the sciences rated the highest average journal cost.
The strain of rising journal prices is compounded by the availability of new media — such as Web editions of existing journals — and ever-more-specialized journals competing for available budgets.
Most importantly, the growing commercialization of scientific communication has turned upside-down the traditional “gift exchange” between researchers, societies and publishers. Research used to be gifted to societies by authors and returned to the community in the form of low-cost journals. Now, researchers — whose work is paid for by the university or the federal government — increasingly give away their research to commercial journals, which then charge universities hefty subscription fees in order to buy it back.
Researchers are in search of society (or otherwise non-commercial) journals to which to submit their work — journals motivated by service to the research community rather than by profit. SPARC works to facilitate the development of such journals and in the process stimulate competition in the realm of scientific communication.
For more information please read our whitepaper.
SPARC members support SPARC through annual membership dues.
SPARC is not a publisher. SPARC helps stimulate competition in the market by nurturing high-quality, low-cost journals published by researchers, societies or publishers with scientist—and library-friendly values and practices.
SPARC’s programs include SPARC Alternatives, SPARC Leading Edge and SPARC Scientific Communities. For a current list of partners, go to our partners page.
SPARC Alternatives
Alternatives partnerships offer the scientific community high-quality, low-cost journals which compete head-to-head with high-priced journals.
SPARC Leading Edge
Leading Edge partnerships nurture scientific community-based e-journals that use technology to obtain competitive advantage or introduce innovative business models.
SPARC Scientific Communities
Scientific Communities partnerships recognize the importance of building new outlets for scientific communication around the needs of the communities they serve. They also recognize a shift in focus from journals to articles in the new digital information environment.
Libraries that join SPARC are taking action to preserve their future and the future of research-centered, affordable journals for their faculty. Supporting SPARC and subscribing to SPARC-endorsed journals gives libraries a choice, and gives researchers the option to publish their findings in forums that support science rather than publisher profits.
SPARC aims to introduce top-quality STM journals at a significantly lower price than those currently available. Ultimately, SPARC-endorsed journals give libraries the opportunity to more than offset their costs with reductions in the number of high-priced journals to which they subscribe.
SPARC library subscription support gives journals a strong readership from the first few issues forward. This subscription base is the foundation upon which a new journal can build prestige, attract authors, and become a true alternative.
SPARC-endorsed journals are both print and electronic. All SPARC-endorsed journals that appear in print also appear as web editions. Two journals, New Journal of Physics and Internet Journal of Chemistry, are electronic-only.
SPARC and its partners aim to ensure fair use of electronic resources while strengthening the proprietary rights and privileges of authorship. SPARC also works closely with its licensing advisory council to provide guidance for new journals on policies that will make the title as library-friendly as possible.
SPARC advocates for comprehensive archiving for electronic publications and is involved with a variety of projects working to create this reality.
SPARC, along with the American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS), the University of Kansas, the Big 12 Plus Libraries Coalition, and Allen Press, collaborated in the creation, development and maintenance of BioOne, and continues to provide consulting and logistical support. SPARC supported BioOne to provide journal publishers a community publishing solution and has advocated for its adoption by the SPARC membership and institutions at large.
SPARC’s financial support of journals generally takes the form of subscriptions placed by its members rather than through direct funding. SPARC provides many other services to its publisher-partners, including: an advisory role in the planning and development phases; advertising, publicity and promotion to the broad marketplace; and sales and marketing focused on encouraging SPARC member purchases.
SPARC’s Scientific Communities Initiative, a one-time grant program announced in spring 1999, awarded $500,000 in development funds to three new electronic journals: Columbia Earthscape, MIT CogNet, and eScholarship (California Digital Library). These funds are administered over a three-year period. The awardees are now part of SPARC’s Scientific Communities publisher partner program.
SPARC has concentrated on the scientific, technical, and medical fields, where journal prices are highest, but has more recently also engaged in institution-based projects and publisher partnerships in the humanities or social sciences. This positive contribution supports SPARC’s overall mission to encourage scholars who have received and acted upon SPARC’s message of change.
SPARC is involved in a number of initiatives that promote increased accessibility to research, such as the Alliance for Taxpayer Access, and others that pply technology to improve the process of scholarly communication and reduce the costs of production and distribution. For example, SPARC supports the Open Archives Initiative, which is working to create the technical foundation for a worldwide repository of research papers, available at no charge to scientists.
SPARC produces the bimonthly SPARC e-News, an electronic newsletter distributed to SPARC members, others interested in scholarly communications issues, and the media. SPARC also supports activist Peter Suber’s monthly round-up of developments associated with open-access publishing, known as the SPARC Open Access Newsletter.
SPARC also maintains an electronic announcement list for individual news releases. To be included on this list, please send your request to sparc@arl.org.
SPARC is an initiative of the Association of Research Libraries, and the two organizations continue to collaborate on a number of projects, including those within ARL’s Office of Scholarly Communication. SPARC is supported by its own membership, which includes many libraries and institutions beyond ARL.
SPARC’s Assistant Director/Public Programs, Julia Blixrud, is available to speak at conferences and to libraries and faculty departments about SPARC and scholarly communications issues. SPARC also refers institutions to (Ms.) Pat Cavill, an advocacy trainer with a background in SPARC, who can train library staff in methods of advocating reform of the scholarly communications system.
Please see SPARC in the News and SPARC News pages.
Meet the SPARC staff by reading their brief bios on the SPARC staff page.