SPARC | Comments to RCUK

Open Access Working Group Responds to Call for Comments

Research Councils United Kingdom
Draft Position Statement on Research Outputs

This memorandum presents the views of several leading U.S. organizations concerned with the wide, affordable, and effective dissemination of scientific and scholarly research results: the American Association of Law Libraries, the American Library Association, the Association of Academic Health Sciences Libraries, the Association of College and Research Libraries, the Association of Research Libraries, the Medical Library Association, and SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition).

We commend the Research Councils’ decision to establish a policy designed to improve access to the results of publicly funded research, and in particular, applaud the four principles upon which this policy based. We appreciate the RCUK’s decision to actively seek comments from a wide range of stakeholders. Although our organizations are not located in the United Kingdom, we offer our views because the scholarly publishing process and journals markets are highly international – involving authors, subscribers, readers, and research funding from many nations. Additionally, there is substantial cooperation among stakeholders on both sides of the Atlantic in seeking solutions. The views expressed herein are closely aligned with those of SPARC Europe (www.sparceurope.org), a coalition of European libraries based at Oxford University in the U.K., which advocates changes in the scholarly publishing market to better serve the international research community ...