[BOAI] February 2015 SPARC Innovator Award Announced

[Iryna Kuchma]

[Forwarded message from Shawn Daugherty]

*For Immediate Release*
February 3, 2015

For more information, contact:
Heather Joseph
(202) 296-2296
heather at arl.org <andrea at arl.org>

Washington, DC – A meeting of international student medical associations in
the spring of 2013 in Baltimore, MD would be unlike any other conference
Joe McArthur and David Carroll would attend. These activists and friends
would bond over the frustration they felt when they regularly hit pay walls
restricting access to articles, and become inspired to develop a
revolutionary open-access tool that would change the trajectories of both
of their careers.

Their idea, which would soon be known as the Open Access Button, is a
simple one. When a user encounters an article they want to access that
charges a fee, an app (The Open Access Button) allows them to simply click
a button on their browser, registering the incident. This information is
then displayed on the Open Access Button website, providing, for the first
time, a sense of the scale of the problem of paywalls. The incidents are
also displayed on a map of the world, which provides an important visual
representation of the scope of the problem.
“David and Joe epitomize what it means to be a catalyst for action,” said
Heather Joseph, Executive Director of SPARC. “They spotted a problem that
has vexed the community for years, and, rather than complaining about, they
jumped in with both feet to take action to try and fix it.”

For creating the Open Access Button, SPARC is pleased to honor Joe McArthur
and David Carroll with its first Innovator Award of 2015. The February 2015
SPARC Innovator Profile on the Open Access Button is online at
http://www.sparc.arl.org/initiatives/innovator.
The SPARC Innovator program recognizes advances in scholarly communication
propelled by an individual, institution, or group. Typically, these
advances exemplify SPARC's 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
website semi-annually and have included Electronic Information for
Libraries (EIFL), John Willinsky, the San Francisco Declaration on Research
Assessment (DORA), Michael Nielsen, Health Research Alliance, The World
Bank, R. Preston McAfee, Harvard University FAS, Ted and Carl Bergstrom,
Melissa Hagemann, among others.

For further information or a list of previous SPARC Innovators, please see
the SPARC website <http://www.sparc.arl.org/initiatives/innovator/former>.

###

*SPARC*
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.sparc.arl.org.

-- 
Shawn M. Daugherty
Assistant Director for Programs & Operations

SPARC
21 Dupont Circle, Suite 800
Washington, DC 20036
p: 202.296.2296 ext. 121
m: 202.503.7688
www.sparc.arl.org
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