SPARC is pleased to announce that it has been awarded a $75,000 grant from Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin, to support its work to create and support initiatives that enable the academic community to retain and/or regain control of crucial infrastructure – and attendant data – underpinning the open scholarly ecosystem. Work on this initiative got underway in 2018 with SPARC producing an extensive financial and strategic landscape analysis, and this funding will enable the organization to produce a comprehensive accompanying ‘Solutions Roadmap’ outlining strategic and tactical courses of action for the community to consider taking.
Heather Joseph, Executive Director of SPARC, said, “Arcadia is a leader in the open movement, and we are honored to receive funding from this organization. With these additional resources, we aim to press forward on making community-controlled infrastructure a default part of the core of next-generation open scholarly research.”
SPARC, a project of the New Venture Fund, is a global coalition committed to making open the default in research and education. Its mission is built on open as an enabling strategy in order to democratize access to knowledge, accelerate discovery, and increase the return on public research and education investments for the betterment of society.
Arcadia is a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin. It supports charities and scholarly institutions that preserve cultural heritage and the environment. Arcadia also supports projects that promote open access and all of its awards are granted on the condition that any materials produced are made available for free online. Since 2002, Arcadia has awarded more than $663 million to projects around the world. http://www.arcadiafund.org.uk/