Launch of the SPARC Europe Seal for Open Access Journal

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

*Apologies for Cross-posting*

Press Release

Lund, Sweden - 23 April 2008

SPARC Europe and the Directory of Open Access Journals Announce 
the Launch of the SPARC Europe Seal for Open Access Journals

Seal to Set Standards for Open Access Journals

For more information, contact: David Prosser, 
david.prosser@bodley.ox.ac.uk or Lars Bjornshauge, 
lars.bjornshauge@lub.lu.se

Oxford, UK and Lund, Sweden - SPARC Europe (Scholarly Publishing 
and Academic Resources Coalition), a leading organization of 
European research libraries, and the Directory of Open Access 
Journals (DOAJ), Lund University Libraries today announced the 
launch of the SPARC Europe Seal for Open Access journals. 
Growing numbers of peer-reviewed research journals are opening-up 
their content online, removing access barriers and allowing all 
interested readers the opportunity of reading the papers online, 
with over 3300 such journals listed in the DOAJ, hosted by Lund 
University Libraries in Sweden.

However, the maximum benefit from this wonderful resource is not 
being realised as confusion surrounds the use and reuse of 
material published in such journals.  Increasingly, researchers 
wish to mine large segments of the literature to discover new, 
unimagined connections and relationships. Librarians wish to host 
material locally for preservation purposes.  Greater clarity will 
bring benefits to authors, users, and journals.

In order for open access journals to be even more useful and thus 
receive more exposure and provide more value to the research 
community it is very important that open access journals offer 
standardized, easily retrievable information about what kinds of 
reuse are allowed.  Therefore, we are advising that all journals 
provide clear and unambiguous statements regarding the copyright 
statement of the papers they publish.  To qualify for the SPARC 
Europe Seal a journal must use the Creative Commons By (CC-BY) 
license which is the most user-friendly license and corresponds 
to the ethos of the Budapest Open Access Initiative.

The second strand of the Seal is that journals should provide 
metadata for all their articles to the DOAJ, who will then make 
the metadata OAI-compliant.  This will increase the visibility of 
the papers and allow OAI-harvesters to include details of the 
journal articles in their services.

"We want to build on the great work already done by the 
publishers of many open access journals and improve the standards 
of open access titles," said David Prosser, Director of SPARC 
Europe.  "Working with the DOAJ means that we can provide help 
and guidance to journals who wish to move beyond the first step 
of free access to full open access and our long-term aim is to 
ensure that all journals listed in the DOAJ can attain the 
standards expressed within the Seal."

"Improving the standards of the rapidly increasing numbers of 
open access and contributing to the widest possible visibility, 
dissemination and readership of the journals is very much in line 
with our mission," said Lars Bjornshauge, Director of Libraries 
at Lund University. "We are very happy to see the enormous usage 
of the DOAJ and the support from our membership."

"Legal certainty is essential to the emergence of an internet 
that 
supports
research. The proliferation of license terms forces researchers to act 
like
lawyers, and slows innovative educational and scientific uses of the
scholarly canon," said Johan Wilbanks, Executive Director of 
Science 
Commons.
"Using a seal to reward the journals who choose to adopt policies 
that
ensure users' rights to innovate is a great idea. It builds on a culture 
of
trust rather than a culture of control, and it will make it easy to find 
the

"This is an excellent program with two important recommendations. 
CC-BY licenses make OA journals more useful, and interoperable 
metadata make them more discoverable.  The recommendations are 
easy to adopt and will accelerate research, facilitate 
preservation, and make OA journal policies more open and more 
predictable for users.  I hope all OA journals will adopt them 
--not to get the Seal from SPARC Europe and the DOAJ, but for the 
same reasons that moved these organizations to launch the 
program: to make OA journals more visible and useful than they 
already are," said Peter Suber, Open Access Advocate & Author of 
Open Access News.


SPARC Europe is an alliance of 110 research-led university 
libraries from 14 European countries. It is affiliated with 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.

Lund University Libraries has developed a number of digital 
library services and has been operating the Directory of Open 
Access Journals since May 2003 starting with 300 journals. Now 
more than 3300 open access journals are listed in the DOAJ. The 
development and operation of the DOAJ is entirely dependent on 
the support from sponsors and members. The introduction of the 
SPARC Europe Seal will generate more work, which means that more 
support is needed. Join the increasing number of individuals, 
universities, research centres & library consortia how have 
already signed up for membership here: http://www.doaj.org/.

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