Science Commons Announcements

["Donna Wentworth" <dwentworth AT creativecommons.org>]

SPARC Europe and DOAJ launch the SPARC Europe Seal for Open Access Journals

April 25th, 2008 by dwentworth

SPARC Europe and the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) have announced the launch of the SPARC Europe Seal for Open Access Journals.

The seal is aimed at increasing the usefulness and "discoverability" of open access (OA) journals, clarifying the kinds of reuses that are allowed and using metadata to make the content easier to find. To qualify for the seal, a journal must use the Creative Commons By (CC-BY) license and provide metadata for all their articles to the DOAJ, which will then make the metadata OAI-compliant. From the media release:

"Legal certainty is essential to the emergence of an internet that supports research. The proliferation of license terms forces researchers to act like lawyers, and slows innovative educational and scientific uses of the scholarly canon," said John Wilbanks, Executive Director of Science Commons. "Using a seal to reward the journals who choose to adopt policies that ensure users' rights to innovate is a great idea. It builds on a culture of trust rather than a culture of control, and it will make it easy to find the open access journals with the best policies."

Bravo to SPARC Europe and DOAJ for setting a standard that can help spur innovation by expanding the zones of legal certainty for research.

You can find additional notes and commentary by Peter Suber @ Open Access News.

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Donna Wentworth
Communications Specialist
Science Commons
http://sciencecommons.org
dwentworth AT creativecommons.org
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