SPARC Open Access Conference

Washington, DC – SPARC (The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) has announced it will host its first North American meeting on Open Access in 2012. The first of its kind, the event will expand on the successful biennial SPARC Digital Repositories meeting.

Convened by the organization since 2004 and hosted in the UK, Europe, Japan, and North America, these meetings have played an integral part in advancing the potential of open online repositories to expand the dissemination of scholarship and transform scholarly communication. The SPARC Meeting regularly draws hundreds of participants from around the globe.

At the 2010 conference in Baltimore, MD, participants expressed a desire for SPARC to coordinate a broader forum to enable an exploration of the role of repositories in the overall Open Access movement. Repositories are inextricably and positively entwined with federal and local policies, open-access publishing, and author rights management. The new SPARC Open Access meeting will provide a biennial, North American-based forum for a full discussion on the many threads of the Open Access movement, with an emphasis on how the community can continue to effectively collaborate on making Open Access the norm for the communication of scholarship and research.

“There is a clear need for a regular, North American event where the community can get together and discuss all aspects of the burgeoning Open Access movement,” said Heather Joseph, Executive Director of SPARC. “While open repositories will continue to be a core focus of conversation at the SPARC meeting; it just makes sense that these conversations take place alongside complementary discussions on creation of policies, development of open-access journals, and more. It will be our pleasure to provide a locus for this crucial exchange.”

The SPARC 2012 Open Access meeting will be held March 11-13 at the Kansas City Intercontinental Hotel. Further details will be available on the SPARC Web site this fall.