SPARC Expands Worldwide Efforts
to Lower Journal Prices
The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) welcomed two new members August 30: Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and the Université Catholique de Louvain in Belgium. Both universities, facing inadequate budgets and serials cutbacks, joined SPARC to support its goal of transforming the scholarly communications market and lowering journal prices.
“Journal publishing is a global enterprise, and librarians everywhere have been struggling with a way to maintain quality while serial prices have gone through the roof,” said Rick Johnson, SPARC enterprise director. Min-min Chang, library director at Hong Kong UST, observed that “SPARC membership will help raise our faculty’s awareness of the problem of high and rising journal prices.”
Founded in 1998 as an initiative of the Association of Research Libraries, SPARC is an alliance of universities and research libraries that support increased competition in scientific journal publishing. Its membership currently numbers about 170 institutions and consortia.
Posted September 6, 1999.
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