What a difference a decade makes. In 2007, SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) celebrates its tenth anniversary, now with an expansive mission to work not only on behalf of libraries but for the welfare of the higher education community at large, and for individual researchers and the public. “It’s pretty amazing to me to look back and see how far we’ve come to with the organization,” SPARC Executive Director Heather Joseph, who replaced Rick Johnson in 2005, told the LJ Academic Newswire. “We began with real community-based, grass-roots efforts, like alternative journals. We still do that kind of work but we’ve branched out more into things like our advocacy program. Today, we spend so much more time talking with policy makers about how to create an overall better climate. The day-to-day work very little resembles what we were doing when SPARC first started.”
Back on the eve of SPARC’s five-year anniversary, then executive-director Johnson playfully told the LJ Academic Newswire he’d be quite happy to see the next five years bring an end to the problems plaguing libraries and scholarly communication to the point where SPARC was no longer needed. Of course no one, including Johnson, expected that to happen and, accordingly, SPARC has continued to grow, both in terms of its agenda, as well as its presence, with new organizations now launched both in the UK and Japan. “We’re still at our heart a library membership organization,” Joseph said, operating under the Association of Research Libraries umbrella, with primary funding coming from membership dues. “But we’re now much more coalition-driven.” That “coalition-driven” approach, Joseph says, has been successful in getting the message out. Membership is up 15 percent over the last two years, now numbering more than 200 institutions in North America, Asia, and Australia, with an additional 100 institutions belonging to SPARC Europe.
With its partners, SPARC’s agenda has included some high-profile battles on behalf of open access and public access initiatives, such as the 2005 effort to support the National Institutes of Health’s public access policy. While SPARC has concentrated recently on such activities, Joseph says SPARC remains committed to three program areas: education, such as its Create Change and Author’s Rights campaigns; incubation and business development, such as its involvement with BioOne and Project Euclid; and advocacy campaigns, such as the NIH effort. “Advocacy in 2005 took a lead, and in 2006, we reinvigorated our education campaign,” Joseph said. “Incubation has lagged behind,” she conceded, but asserted that the three-prong commitment, implemented by Johnson and the SPARC steering committee, remains “fantastically stable and productive.”
Much more remains to be done, she adds. “I do think SPARC has made an impact. We don’t really talk about the serials crisis any more, for example, it’s sort of a given. What [constituents are] interested now is what tools we can give them to work with.” Where would Joseph like to see SPARC be in five years? “I’d like us to be positioned as an organization that facilitates new opportunities,” she says, “rather than addressing a crisis.”
Library Journal Academic Newswire, Jan. 18, 2007
