Libraries

The Electronic SPARC

Suzanne Fedunok

[Ed: Links to web pages which have become inactive since the publication of this article have been enclosed in curly brackets { }. Replacement links have been provided where possible.]

Last fall, I was one of a small group of NYU librarians interviewed for an article in the New York Times about an upcoming merger of two scientific publishing giants, Reed/Elsevier and Harcourt Publishing. Although the article (1) covered the story very well from a business perspective, it was not the story we NYU science librarians would have written. The piece included little information about what occupies much of our time these days: the revolution in scholarly communication occasioned by new information technology. Perhaps due to the scope of the Times article, it omitted any mention of a key organization that is deeply involved in tracking these changes and addressing the resultant issues that arise: SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Research Coalition (www.arl.org/sparc/).

SPARC is an international group of over 175 institutions created under the auspices of the Association of Research Libraries to facilitate a more effective and responsive system of scholarly communication. Some faculty members may know SPARC through CREATE: New Systems of Scholarly Communication {www.createchange.org/resources/brochure.html}, a brochure co-sponsored by SPARC that was sent to NYU editors of scientific and health sciences journals last fall. One section of the brochure is particularly relevant to readers of Connect. It makes some important points about electronic publishing:

Some publishers seek to restrict access to electronic information through legislation and technical protection.
Many of the electronic resources available on a campus are governed by licenses which often restrict how faculty and students can use the content.
Small societies and university presses do not have the capital to invest in the new media.
Societies worry that individual faculty will drop their memberships if the societies' journals are available on a campus network.
Societies and presses fear that they may not be able to attract quality manuscripts if faculty members are uncertain about the perceived value of electronic publications in the promotion and tenure process.
Libraries are concerned with the long-term preservation and archiving issues raised by electronic media.

What SPARC is Doing

Fostering a more competitive and diverse marketplace through support of high-quality, economic alternatives to high-priced journals was one of SPARC's first initiatives. SPARC is not a publisher; it partners with key learned societies like the American Chemical Society, the Royal Society of Chemistry, and the Institute of Physics to offer member subscription support of new journals that offer faculty high-quality, more affordable places to publish. Organic Letters from the American Chemical Society was the first of these journals. SPARC also supports what it calls "leading edge" journals that have no paper versions and exploit the possibilities of electronic publishing, such as multimedia figures. The Internet Journal of Chemistry {http://www.ijc.com/} is one example; the New Journal of Physics is another.

A new consortium called BioOne is an even more innovative venture in electronic publishing, bringing together SPARC, the American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS), the University of Kansas, the Big Twelve Plus Library Consortium and Allen Press to create full-text electronic versions of dozens of high-impact biological, ecological and environmental sciences titles. The 59 small learned societies which make up the AIBS membership will be able to compete against commercial publishers and reinvest subscription revenue in the scientific process. The sixty-odd SPARC members contributed seed money towards this project, which begins offering the first of 14 journals in spring 2001.

SPARC also awards funds to projects aimed at fostering new digital science publishing ventures based in academe. The idea is to stimulate and accelerate the creation of new non-profit information communities for users in key fields of science, technology or medicine. Two such projects are eScholarship and MIT CogNet.

eScholarship

Hosted by the California Digital Libraries, the motto of this initiative is: "Scholar-led innovations" in scholarly communication. Right now this means creation of "eScholarship communities"--discipline-specific electronic archives managed by scholars ready to make the move toward self-publishing. The pioneering Los Alamos National Laboratory arXiv is the model, and a link to it appears on the eScholarship welcome page for Physics/ Mathematics/Computer Science, along with links to subject platforms for Archaeology, Dermatology, and International and Area Studies. From this foundation it is expected that new forms of electronic resources will develop for scholars as new technologies appear. Special features such as alerting, review, citation and annotation services are mentioned. In 2001, migration of existing electronic journals and creation of new ones are envisioned, as is the addition of electronic books from the University of California Press to the discipline platforms.

MIT CogNet

MIT CogNet is an example of a focused platform for a series of related disciplines, with six core areas of cognitive science: philosophy of mind, computational intelligence, cognitive psychology, linguistics, neuroscience and cognitive anthropology. It has an impressive digital library for books, journals, conference proceedings, poster sessions and key reference works. MIT Press' list of books and journals in the cognitive and brain sciences are all in electronic form or are being digitized for access through CogNet, and these files are readily searchable. The aims of the service are similar to those of eScholarship, and they point to what many scholars feel is needed in the new electronic environment:

A central repository for the most current and topical electronic resources.
Dynamic partnerships with users, professional societies, academic departments and publishers to create links and deposit relevant material on an ongoing basis.
A range of customized services.

What Faculty Can Do

SPARC encourages faculty members to join the effort to refashion the system of scholarly communication. You can make a difference in a number of ways, such as encouraging discussion of scholarly communication issues and proposals for change in departments and schools, lending support to learned societies' publishing efforts, and encouraging them to consider creating enhanced competitors to expensive commercial titles. Lending support to learned societies' electronic publishing programs by submitting papers, reviewing and serving on editorial boards is also recommended. If a society's publications are already contracted to commercial publishers, encourage the exploration of alternatives.

Becoming aware of intellectual property rights policies and modifying, if appropriate, any contract with a publisher to ensure one's right to use the work, including posting on a public archive, is important, as is faculty examination of the pricing, copyright and licensing agreements of any published journal one contributes to as an author, reviewer or editor. It is also important for faculty to work with librarians by including them in meetings with publishers' representatives and inviting them to departmental meetings and seminars to discuss communication issues.

Some members of the NYU community believe that development of the Library collection may safely be left in the capable hands of the Library staff. Issues such as publisher mergers and the technology and economics of scholarly publishing have been of little interest to the University community at large. However, now that the Library collection increasingly requires access to electronic resources beyond the Library walls, those in the University community who create scholarly information must get involved in deciding how these resources are paid for, retrieved, and stored. As the SPARC brochure says: "Projects and proposals to transform the system are being shaped primarily by stakeholders outside the faculty: publishers, librarians, administrators, state legislatures, information technologists. Involvement by faculty is critical to ensuring a new system that meets your needs and those of future scholars."

To get involved, contact your Library Faculty Liaison. A directory is available in the Faculty Guide to Libraries and ITS. http://www.nyu.edu/its/pubs/facultyguide/.

(1) "Mergers Keep Pushing Up Journal Costs"; David D. Kirkpatrick; New York Times; Nov. 3, 2000; Late Edition (East Coast); p. C1. [ C ]

Suzanne Fedunok is the Head of the NYU Bobst Library Coles Science Center.
suzanne.fedunok@nyu.edu

Posted February 16, 2001. Revised July 10, 2007.