As we reflect on this eventful year, we wanted to take a moment to reflect back on the work we’ve done to date on your behalf. As always, our primary goal at SPARC is to support our members in the areas that are most pressing to you and where we as an organization are uniquely positioned to help. In close collaboration with you all, we’ve made significant progress this year on a number of fronts, including:
Driving Policy Change
- Regularly engaging with policymakers to support open research and education policies in a rapidly changing environment.
- Proactively tracking policy priorities and quickly communicating implications to members.
- Hosting monthly members-only policy briefings to explore policy impacts in-depth.
- Ensuring continued implementation of federal public access policies in the face of sustained pushback by the publishing industry.
- Providing timely and clear guidance to help libraries support their campuses with policy compliance, including our Core Elements of Federal Public Access Policies Resource and Guide for Authors Complying with U.S. Federal Agency Public Access and Publisher Policies.
- Providing resources like the Legal Pathways to Open Access white paper series in partnership with Authors Alliance to help educate libraries and campuses on legal aspects of public access policies.
- Advocating for continued federal funding for the U.S. Open Textbook Pilot, building on $61 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.
- Supporting the inclusion of open access and open research practices into the priorities of the G7, G20, and Global Research Council, and supporting the organization of the 4th UN Open Science & Open Scholarship Conference.
Improving Libraries’ Negotiating Position with Publishers
- Significantly increasing our support for libraries’ negotiations work to provide timely support to members facing challenging budgetary environments.
- Providing monthly opportunities for members to deepen their understanding on key topics in vendor negotiations (vendor AI restrictions, exercising financial exigency clauses, using on-demand purchasing in place of big deals), and providing member-only resources to support this work.
- Expanding our popular vendor-specific negotiation discussions series to include health sciences, business, and AI products.
- Continuing to provide extensive negotiations resources, including exit interview series, contracts library, big deal cancellation tracker, guidance on data analysis for negotiation, and more.
- Revising our draft data processing addendum and piloting this updated language for libraries to strengthen privacy and data protection terms in vendor negotiations.
- Providing timely updates to members on developments in the publishing market, including Wiley’s acquisition of Emerald and Holtzbrinck’s planned acquisition of Springer Nature.
- Publishing updated Financial Landscape Analyses of Scholarly Publishing & Research Analytics Companies and Education Publishers documenting the impact of AI on these firms and potential downstream effects on libraries.
- 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.
Advancing Equitable Models for Research Communication
- Promoting adoption of non-APC business models, including continued development of the S20 model. More than 125 publishers now offer S20 options covering over 400 journals.
- Convening the North American Diamond OA Knowledge Exchange Community to promote better understanding of this emerging model, and better support community-led publishing opportunities.
- Supporting the “Gold Open Access 2026: Articles in Journals 2021-2025” series on business models supporting open access journals.
Realigning Research Incentives
- Supporting the work of new Action Collaboratives to continue the work of the U.S. National Academies Roundtable on Aligning Incentives for Open Scholarship.
- Convening the Open Research Funders Group (ORFG) to advance private funder policies and practices supporting open research.
- Publishing the ORFG’s 2026 Funder Policy Landscape Analysis and Recommendations that documents the strengthening of private funders’ open research policies.
- Convening the HELIOS Open community to catalyze changing research incentives across higher education institution campuses.
- Expanding HELIOS Open 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 new “PIDs 101” and “Collections & Open Access” series that build on our well-received OA 101 events.
- Supporting USRN Community Calls to provide regular opportunities for community members to discuss topics of shared interest.
- Providing member-only programming, including current topical issues, member-only meetings, and rapid response national policy briefings.
- Organizing the 2025 Open Education Conference under the event’s community-elected board.
- Leading community development of the Open Education Association, a new national initiative for individual practitioners 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.