Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) Europe, UK and the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) Lund University Libraries have announced the launch of the SPARC Europe Seal for Open Access journals. The seal is expected to set standards for open access (OA) journals.
Growing numbers of peer-reviewed research journals are opening up their content online, removing access barriers and allowing all interested readers the opportunity of reading the papers online, it is observed. Over 3,300 such journals are listed in the DOAJ, hosted by Lund University Libraries in Sweden.
To qualify for the SPARC Europe Seal a journal must use the Creative Commons By (CC-BY) licence which is projected as a user-friendly licence corresponding to the ethos of the Budapest Open Access Initiative. The second strand of the Seal is that journals should provide metadata for all their articles to the DOAJ, which will then make the metadata OAI-compliant. This will increase the visibility of the papers and allow OAI-harvesters to include details of the journal articles in their services.
SPARC Europe is an alliance of 110 research-led university libraries from 14 European countries. It is affiliated with SPARC, which represents over 200 institutions, mainly in North America. SPARC Europe and SPARC work to develop and promote new models of scholarly communication that increase the access to and utility of the research literature.
Lund University Libraries has developed a number of digital library services and has been operating the DOAJ since May 2003 starting with 300 journals. The development and operation of the DOAJ is entirely dependent on the support from sponsors and members.
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