[BOAI] SPARC honors The World Bank for Open Access Policy

[Peter Suber]

[Forwarding from SPARC.  --Peter Suber.]


For Immediate Release
July 2, 2012

For more information, contact:

Andrea Higginbotham
andrea at arl.org
(202) 296-2296

SPARC honors The World Bank for Open Access Policy

Washington, D.C. – July 2, 2012 – The World Bank employs 9,000 people in
more than 168 countries. As economists, educators, and scientists,
they produce a wealth of knowledge that has the potential to help solve
some the biggest problems faced by developing countries.

Now, with the adoption of a new Open Access policy by the Bank, that
information and research is freely available to anyone.

On July 1, the Bank enacted its new policy to open up access to all of
its research outputs and knowledge products. In April, it launched a new
Open Knowledge Repository, which currently hosts 4,410 documents. The Bank
also now uses a Creative Commons license that allows reuse of all
its materials. Since 2010, the Bank has made its data freely available.

For being a pioneer in sharing research on such a global scale, the
Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC)
recognizes the World Bank as its June 2012 Innovator.

“The World Bank has taken a leadership role in opening up access to the
wealth of information that it produces and funds,” says
Heather Joseph, Executive Director of SPARC in Washington, D.C. “They have
thoughtfully and systematically applied the concept of Open Access to all
of their research outputs, which has the potential to greatly enhance its
impact. They are in a unique position to demonstrate the power that Open
Access can have on their development agenda.”

When an organization makes such a transformation, there are costs. But
managers at the Bank say there is also a cost of not moving
forward toward openness. “As an institution dedicated to the eradication of
poverty, we chose to focus on the opportunity cost of not adopting open
access rather than on revenue,” says Carlos Rossel, World Bank’s Publisher.

Alma Swan, co-founder of Key Perspectives Ltd. in the U.K. who served as a
consultant to the Bank on the project, says the World Bank’s lead
holds promise for other organizations: “They are blazing a trail in
the right direction. This had made major headlines around the world. It’s
hard to exaggerate the impact.”
The July 2012 SPARC Innovator Profile is online at
http://www.arl.org/sparc/innovator.

The SPARC Innovator program recognizes advances in scholarly
communication propelled by an individual, institution, or group. Typically,
these advances exemplify SPARC principles by challenging the status quo in
scholarly communication for the benefit of researchers, libraries,
universities, and the public. SPARC Innovators are featured on the SPARC
Web site semi-annually and have included PLoS One, Biological
Anthropologist Ventura R. Pérez, Mike Rossner, Executive Director of the
Rockefeller University Press (RUP) in New York; The Optical Society of
America, R. Preston McAfee of the California Institute of Technology in
Pasadena; Harvard University FAS; student leaders; Ted and Carl Bergstrom;
Melissa Hagemann of the Open Society Institute; the University of
California; and Herbert Van de Sompel of the Los Alamos
National Laboratory. SPARC Innovators are selected by the SPARC staff in
consultation with the SPARC Steering Committee.

Individuals can nominate their colleagues as potential SPARC Innovators at
http://www.arl.org/sparc/innovator/nominate.html. For further
information or a list of previous SPARC Innovators, please see the SPARC
Web site at http://www.arl.org/sparc.

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SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), with
SPARC Europe and SPARC Japan, is an international alliance of more than 800
academic and research libraries working to create a more open system of
scholarly communication. SPARC’s advocacy, educational, and publisher
partnership programs encourage expanded dissemination of research. SPARC is
on the Web at http://www.arl.org/sparc/.
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