Jisc has joined Sparc Europe – Jisc scholarly communications

"Earlier this year, Jisc became a member of Sparc Europe, which may come as a bit of a surprise since Jisc and Sparc Europe have collaborated on various things over the years, such as the Research Data competition with the University of Cambridge, and Jisc provided founding support for the organisation back in 2003, along with Research Libraries UK (RLUK) and SURF in the Netherlands. Jisc is also a supporter of The Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services (SCOSS), and Sherpa Romeo, the Jisc service which aggregates and analyses publisher open access policies, is a direct beneficiary of the crowd sourcing initiative. Part of the reason Jisc joined now, arguably, is precisely because of those engagements, as well as that during COVID, many organisations like Jisc, continue to see the value of promoting open access and open research as much as we can. Sparc Europe was one of the main contributors to the recently published Diamond OA Study, which included an in-depth report and associated recommendations arising from a study of open access journals across the world that are free for readers and authors; the other major contributor to that study was OPERAS, which stands for “open scholarly communication in the European Research Area for Social Sciences and Humanities”, of which Jisc is also a member. Jisc is also active in LIBER, the Association of European Research Libraries; even though we’re not members of Liber, there is much overlap in how both entities support libraries, and Sparc Europe again is actively engaged in that space. Jisc also has a representative who sits on the board of Sparc Europe. Therefore, it increasingly became obvious that both Sparc Europe and Jisc were working so closely together that it made perfect sense to be even more closely connected...."