As we reflect on this particularly eventful year, we are proud to share the progress we’ve made on your behalf. We have successfully transitioned SPARC to an independent nonprofit organization —a strategic shift designed to ensure more cost-effective operations while centering our values and community interests. We remain committed to regularly examining and revising our operations, finances, and strategies to best serve our members. In close collaboration with SPARC member libraries, we’ve also made significant progress this year in areas where we are uniquely positioned to have an impact, including:
Driving Policy Change
- Regularly engaging with policymakers to promote policy agenda supporting open research and education in a rapidly changing environment.
- Proactively tracking developments relating to SPARC policy priorities and quickly communicating potential impacts to members, including hosting a dozen policy briefings.
- Leading advocacy efforts on the effective implementation of the landmark OSTP Memorandum ensuring open access to $90 billion in federally funded research outputs.
- Equipping our members with resources to support their campuses, including publication and data sharing policy resource and tracker on the implementation of the OSTP Memo.
- Partnering with Authors Alliance on white papers, including Open Access and U.S. Federal Information Policy and The Legal Basis for U.S. Federal Public Access Mandates.
- Supporting the inclusion of open access and open research practices into priorities of global intergovernmental fora, including the G7, G20, and the Global Research Council.
- Advocating for continued federal funding for the U.S. Open Textbook Pilot, building on $54 million in cumulative appropriations for campuses secured to date.
- Actively monitoring and engaging on OER-related bills in U.S. state legislatures, sharing information in SPARC’s State Policy Tracker.
- Expanding expertise and resources on federal agency open research policies, emerging AI regulations and policies, persistent digital identifiers (PIDs) and metadata practices.
Improving Libraries’ Negotiating Position with Publishers
- Increasing the cadence of vendor-specific discussions to enable libraries to negotiate more effectively with publishers in reducing library costs and improving contract terms.
- Creating regular opportunities for members to connect with a community of peers navigating similar publisher negotiations issues.
- Providing support to libraries that have left or are considering exiting large journal deals.
- Providing extensive negotiations resources, including unbundling profiles, contracts library, big deal cancellation tracker, guidance on data analysis for negotiation, and more.
- Running data processing addendum pilot to support libraries in strengthening privacy and data protection terms.
Advancing Equitable Models for Research Communication
- Promoting adoption of non-APC business models among libraries and publishers.
- Developing the S20 model and facilitating its adoption by publishers and libraries. More than 125 publishers now offer S20 options covering over 400 journals.
- Developing a new North American Diamond Open Access Knowledge Exchange Community to promote adoption of community-led publishing opportunities.
- Supporting the U.S Repository Network (USRN) and conducting a year-long Discovery Pilot Project resulting in more than 730,000 new items becoming openly available.
- Supporting “Gold Open Access 2020-2024: Articles in Journals,” the tenth in a series of SPARC-funded studies of business models supporting open access journals.
Realigning Research Incentives
- Convening the U.S. National Academies of Science “Roundtable on Realigning Research Incentives” to support changes in research evaluation and associated practices.
- Convening philanthropies through the Open Research Funders Group (ORFG) to support open and equitable sharing of research in their grantmaking processes.
- Supporting the HELIOS Open community of presidents, provosts, and vice presidents in exploring ways to explicitly reward open scholarship.
- Co-hosting HELIOS Open Leadership Meeting bringing together leaders from 50 institutions to share progress on modernizing campus policies to reward open scholarship.
- Providing case studies, videos and other resources on changes institutions have made or are planning to make to their research evaluation processes to support open scholarship.
Providing Timely Professional Development
- Cultivating communities of practice across key areas of focus for our members, including negotiations, privacy & surveillance, and repositories.
- Hosting an Open Access 101 series exploring key topics including visibility and impact, problematizing “predatory” publishing, and authors rights.
- Organizing the Open Education 101 Series exploring foundational concepts, practical applications, and emerging issues in open education.
- Launching the USRN Community Conversation Series to provide regular opportunities for community members to raise and discuss topics of shared interest.
- Providing member-only programming, including current topical issues, member-only meetings, and rapid response national policy briefings.
- Expanding resources to help campuses navigate the growth of automatic textbook billing and the challenges it presents for OER advocacy, including updates to SPARC’s Inclusive Access contract library and InclusiveAccess.org.
- Organizing 2025 Open Education Conference under the event’s community-elected board.
- Leading community development of the Open Education Association, a new national initiative to advance open education across the United States through strategic coordination and collaborative action.
- Creating opportunities for libraries to promote openness by organizing International Open Access Week around the theme “Who Owns Our Knowledge.”
- Organizing community groups to explore emerging issue areas, such as antitrust, privacy, and AI.