2002 Volume 45 Issue 5 Pages 336-347
In academic publication market driven by commercial publishers and due to such a situation that academic libraries are suffering from hike in subscription fees and annual reduction in library budgets, we often hear about crisis in academic communication from universities/colleges, academic libraries and scholars. To solve it there are some initiatives emerging that urge to create low-cost high quality journals which are competitive with the current commercial journals, and promise to produce new types of publication models. SPARC is one of those initiatives. The author briefs how it was born, SPARC memberships and achievements, partnership, prestige of journals created under SPARC, SPARC’s impact on pricing of academic journals, SPARC’s advocacy in creating new academic journals, technical issues of the open access, and future priorities of SPARC.
