DOAJ Receives 2009 SPARC Europe Award

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

*Apologies for cross-posting*

Press Release

The Directory of Open Access Journals Receives SPARC Europe Award 
for Outstanding Achievements in Scholarly Communications, 2009

2 July 2009

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

Toulouse, France - As part of the LIBER 38th Annual General 
Conference, held at the University of Toulouse 1 in France, the 
Directory of Open Access Journals has been presented with the 
2009 SPARC Europe Award for Outstanding Achievements in Scholarly 
Communications.

SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) 
Europe initiated the Award in 2006 to recognize 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 
problems within the current systems. In making the Award to the 
Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) the judging panel noted 
their ground-breaking promotion of open access journals, their 
work on setting copyright, metadata, and preservation standards, 
and their development of a sustainable model of support.  Since 
its launch in 2003 the DOAJ has become a vital part of the OA 
infrastructure.

Presenting the Award, Bas Savenije, Chair of the SPARC Europe 
Board, said "The DOAJ is one of the most successful projects 
within the OA movement, globally recognized and used, which also 
has developed a sustainability model."

Lars Bjornshauge, Director of the Lund University Libraries and 
head of the DOAJ received the Award.  He commented that the SPARC 
award "is a recognition of the outstanding work of the DOAJ team 
at the Head Office of Lund University Libraries and a much 
welcomed encouragement for the further operation and development 
of services for the constantly increasing support for worldwide 
free access to research results for the benefit of research. We 
are very proud of receiving the award and we will do our outmost 
to continue to support the open access movement in the future as 
we have done it in the past."

This is the fourth time the SPARC Europe Award for Outstanding 
Achievements in Scholarly Communications has been made. The first 
Award, in 2006, went to the Wellcome Trust, the second in 2007 to 
the SHERPA Group, and the third in 2008 to Leo Waaijers.

About the Directory of Open Access Journals

The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is service provided 
by the Head Office, Lund University Libraries in Sweden.  It was 
launched in 2003 with the aim of increasing the visibility and 
ease of use of open access scientific and scholarly journals, 
thereby promoting their increased usage and impact. DOAJ is the 
authoritative source for open access scientific and scholarly 
journals that use a quality control system to guarantee the 
content.

Today, DOAJ lists over 4250 journals published in 100 countries 
in more than 50 languages covering all scientific subjects with 
more than 1575 titles searchable at article level (covering 
almost 300,000 articles).  In addition, through partnerships the 
DOAJ works to set standards in copyright, metadata, and 
preservation issues.

The operations of DOAJ are dependent on contributions from the 
community. Current sponsors are the National Library of Sweden 
and the Swedish Library Association. Kommercial aggregators, 
library consortia and academic & corporate libraries are 
contributing via the DOAJ membership programme.

More information on the DOAJ: www.doaj.org

About SPARC Europe

SPARC Europe is an alliance of over 110 European research 
libraries, library organisations and research institutions in 14 
European countries. SPARC Europe provides a voice for the 
academic and library communities, and the support and tools they 
need in order to bring about positive change to the system of 
scholarly communications.

More information on SPARC Europe: http://www.sparceurope.org/

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