The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), in partnership with SPARC Europe and SPARC Japan/National Institute of Informatics, has announced the SPARC Digital Repositories Meeting 2008, to be held November 17-18, 2008 at the Renaissance Harborplace Hotel in Baltimore, Maryland. This is the first North American SPARC digital repositories conference since the organisation's popular 2004 meeting, which drew hundreds of participants from around the globe and set the stage for some of the key developments of the past four years.
Coming on the heels of two new US developments - a recent vote by Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences enabling the university to offer access to their articles in an institutional repository and implementation of a new National Institutes of Health public access policy - as well as unprecedented advancement in the international sphere over the past year, the meeting will enable stakeholders to explore next steps for the burgeoning open archiving movement. Librarians, researchers, funders, administrators, government officials, publishers, and technologists from across the globe will share their experiences and best practices in building and supporting institutional and disciplinary digital repositories. The focus will be on effective engagement with scholars and scientists to expand the sharing of research outputs via open repositories.
The programme, developed by a diverse and expert programme committee, will delve into four key areas - The Policy Environment, New Horizons, Campus Publishing Strategies, and Value-Added Services. These tracks will be supplemented with an Innovation Fair, where new technologies, strategies, and approaches will be highlighted, and a Practicum on marketing and advocacy. The committee has called for proposals for presentations at the November meeting. All details on the programme are available at the conference website at http://www.arl.org/sparc/meetings/ir08/. The deadline for submissions is May 30, 2008.
