*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.sparceurop
e.org/> is an alliance of 110
research-led university libraries from 14 European
countries. It
is affiliated with SPARC <http://www.arl.org/spar
c/> 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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