The SPARC Open Access Newsletter (SOAN) is a monthly newsletter authored by Peter Suber and offering news and analysis of the open access movement —the worldwide movement to disseminate scientific and scholarly research literature online, free of charge, and free of unnecessary licensing restrictions. SOAN was launched in July 2003 to continue Peter's Free Online Scholarship (FOS) Newsletter (March 2001 - September 2002). The newsletter is the same; only the title has changed to reflect the role of SPARC in sponsoring and publishing it. Peter's views in SOAN are his own and do not necessarily represent the views of SPARC. Peter is also the author of the Open Access News blog.

The SPARC Open Access Forum (SOAF) is a moderated discussion forum that accompanies the newsletter. Subscribers are invited to post questions, comments, and conversation about the open access movement, broadly conceived. In addition to these discussion postings, Peter will often post email from readers, relevant postings from other lists, press releases, calls for papers, announcements, and other documents too large for the blog and worthy of full quotation rather than mere summary in the newsletter.

Subscriptions to the newsletter and the forum are free of charge. Subscribers to the Forum will receive email updates regularly. Subscribers to the Newsletter will receive one email each month. Both are available online for those who don't wish to subscribe by email.

To subscribe to the SPARC Open Access Newsletter:

Send any message to <SPARC-OANews-feed@arl.org>.

To unsubscribe:

Send any message to <SPARC-OANews-off@arl.org>.

To read and search back issues:

Visit the openly accessible SPARC Open Access Newsletter Archive.

To subscribe to the SPARC Open Access Forum:

There are three ways to subscribe:

FEED Mode:
After a message is posted, it is distributed to all users subscribed in the FEED mode. The message appears on the web site at the same time. To subscribe to the FEED mode, send any message to
<SPARC-OAForum-feed@arl.org>.

DIGEST Mode:
A digest message contains a set of the messages posted to the forum since the time the previous digest was composed. To subscribe to the DIGEST mode, send any message to
<SPARC-OAForum-digest@arl.org>.

INDEX Mode:
A list index message contains the same digest header, TOC, and TOC trailer, but it does not contain the posted messages themselves and it does not contain the digest trailer. List index messages are created at the same time the list digest messages are created. For the SOA Forum, this is every 24 hours at 5:00am EST. To subscribe to the INDEX mode, send any message to
<SPARC-OAForum-index@arl.org>

To unsubscribe:

Send any message to <SPARC-OAForum-off@arl.org>.

To post messages:

Send your message to <SPARC-OAForum@arl.org>. (For subscribers only.)

To read and search previous postings:

Visit the Forum Archive. This archive does not include postings from the older FOS Forum, the discussion list associated with the FOS Newsletter. However, the older forum's archive is still online. Both the new and old archives are accessible by non-subscribers.