Sparc

SPARC — the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition — is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that works to advance open systems for research and education so that people can access, contribute to, and benefit from scholarly knowledge. Its stated agenda has three pillars: driving policy change, supporting member action, and cultivating communities of practice. The organization's program areas are open access, open education (including open educational resources), and open data.

SPARC works with decision makers at local, national and international levels to align policy and incentive structures with open knowledge sharing, and supplies its members with resources, targeted briefings and in-depth analyses. It also organizes topic-specific communities of practice and broader networks spanning its program areas. Public outputs include webinar recordings, a guide for authors complying with U.S. federal agency public access and publisher policies, landscape analyses of publishing and research analytics companies, comment submissions to U.S. federal bodies such as OMB on proposed revisions to federal financial assistance rules, and community events including policy office hours for members and International Open Access Week.

SPARC also maintains researchsharing.sparcopen.org, a community resource for tracking, comparing and understanding current and future U.S. federal funder requirements for sharing research publications and research data, organized by agency public access plans.