SHERPA Partnership wins Second SPARC Europe Award

["David Prosser" <david.prosser@bodley.ox.ac.uk>]

*Apologies for Cross Posting*
Press Release

SHERPA Receives SPARC Europe Award for Outstanding Achievements 
in Scholarly Communications, 2007

April 18, 2007

For more information, contact: David Prosser, 
david.prosser@bodley.ox.ac.uk

CERN, Geneva, Switzerland - As part of OAI5 - the 5th Workshop on 
Innovations in Scholarly Communication, held at the CERN 
Laboratories in Geneva, Switzerland, the SHERPA partnership 
<http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/> was presented with the 2007 SPARC 
Europe Award for Outstanding Achievements in Scholarly 
Communications.

SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) 
Europe initiated the Award in 2006 to recognise the work of an 
individual or group within Europe that has made significant 
advances in our understanding of the issues surrounding scholarly 
communications and/or in developing practical means to address 
the problems with the current systems. In making the Award to 
SHERPA (Securing a Hybrid Environment for Research Preservation 
and Access) the judging panel noted their advocacy for the 
adoption of institutional repositories and their development of a 
suite of tools in support of Open Access, including OpenDOAR (a 
world-wide directory of repositories hosting freely available 
peer-reviewed publications), JULIET (a listing of funding bodies' 
policies regarding deposit mandates) and RoMEO (listing 
publishers' copyright policies in relation to articles deposit).

SHERPA was nominated for the SPARC Europe Award for Outstanding 
Achievements in Scholarly Communications by Dr Judith Wusteman of 
University College Dublin.  'SHERPA is a trusted source of 
information,' said Dr Wusteman, and 'SHERPA's online services, 
namely OpenDOAR, JULIET and ROMEO, are its greatest contribution 
to Open Access and the development of institutional 
repositories.' Dr Wusteman noted that a 2006 study by the Johns 
Hopkins University identified SHERPA's OpenDOAR directory to be 
the best directory (out of 24 directories tested) of repositories 
worldwide.

Bill Hubbard, SHERPA Manager, said 'I am delighted to be able to 
accept this award on behalf of the SHERPA partnership and in 
particular on behalf of the SHERPA core team at the University of 
Nottingham. We would like to thank SPARC Europe for the honour of 
being chosen for this award for our advocacy activities and 
online services in the area of Open Access repositories. We are 
pleased that the community has found these to be valuable and are 
honoured by this recognition.

'We are proud of the services that we offer - RoMEO, JULIET and 
OpenDOAR - and hope that these will make a contribution to the 
success of Open Access. Our thanks to all those who have 
contributed or helped to build these and we look forward to 
continuing community contributions.'

This is the second time the SPARC Europe Award for Outstanding 
Achievements in Scholarly Communications has been made.  The 
first Award, in 2006, went to the Wellcome Trust for their 
groundbreaking work in scholarly communication.  It is planned 
that the 2008 Award will be made during the Fourth Nordic 
Conference on Scholarly Communication, held at Lund, Sweden in 
April of next year.

SPARC Europe <http://www.sparceurope.org/> is an alliance of 110 
research-led university libraries from 14 European countries. It 
is affiliated with SPARC <http://www.arl.org/sparc/> based in 
Washington, D.C., which represents over 200 institutions, mainly 
in North America. SPARC Europe and SPARC work to develop and 
promote new models of scholarly communication that increase the 
access to and utility of the research literature.

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