Making Publicly Funded Research Available
SPARC®, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, is an international alliance of academic and research libraries working to promote a more open system of scholarly communnication. Its pragmatic focus is to stimulate the emergence of new scholarly communication models that expand the dissemination of scholarly research and reduce financial pressures on libraries.
The Sheridan Group is working with SPARC to expand the pivotal open access policy in place at the National Institute of Health and ensure all research funded by the federal government is free and accessible to the public. Most people are not aware that publicly funded research is not publicly available, and TSG is working with SPARC to build public awareness and political will for open access policies across government agencies. To accomplish this goal TSG has outlined a comprehensive engagement strategy for SPARC to raise their political profile and hone their message in order to achieve full open access across for the research funded by the federal government.
SPARC recently filed legislation, Fair Access to Science and Technology Research (FASTR), in both the House and Senate for the 113th Congress. This legislation would require publicly funded research be made available to the public within six months of being published in an academic journal. It would also allow for the full reuse of research articles help individuals and businesses to apply ideas generated from this research into their development cycles and speeds the launch of new services and products into the marketplace.
