Scholarly Communication Resources

Create Change: A Resource for Faculty and Librarian Action to Reclaim Scholarly Communication
Includes FAQs for faculty and sample letters to journal publishers and editors. Sponsored by the Association of Research Libraries, the Association of College and Research Libraries (a division of the American Library Association), and SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition).

SPARC: The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition
"SPARC is a worldwide alliance of research institutions, libraries and organizations that encourages competition in the scholarly communications market. SPARC introduces new solutions to scientific journal publishing, facilitates the use of technology to expand access, and partners with publishers that bring top-quality, low-cost research to a greater audience. SPARC strives to return science to scientists."

Creative Commons
a publishing initiative that balances copyright with open access

Science Commons
an offshoot of the Creative Commons providing authors with tools to share their work, making it easier for scientists, universities, and enterprises to share scientific literature, data, and materials.

Discipline Repositories
One response has been for publishers, societies, and scholars to create new mechanisms for distribution of scholarship, within disciplines or disclipinary groups.

Institutional Repositories
Many academic institutions archive their scholarly output. Some include published and unpublished works (grey literature); others include only unpublished. Some include works by students as well as faculty; some only by faculty.

Multidisciplinary Repositories
Commercially available multidisciplinary repositories (as opposed to institutional repositories) provide archived, full-text, digital access to published journal articles in a variety of fields. The purpose of these initiatives is to provide affordable access to scholarly publications while also meeting the needs of publishers. They are frequently collaborative projects between universities and publishers, and their existence as not-for-profit entities helps to mitigate some of the corporate monopolization issues present in the scholarly communication environment. The most highly visible of these initiatives are JSTOR and PROJECT MUSE, both of which began their archiving efforts in the mid-1990s. These content repositories make an important contribution toward creating a sustainable publishing environment.