SHERPA wins prestigious European award

The award, presented at a conference at the CERN Laboratories in Geneva,recognises the work of ‘an individual or group within Europe that has made significant advances in our understanding of the issues surrounding scholarly communications and in developing practical means to address the problems with the current systems.’

SHERPA, based at the University of Nottingham, hosts a range of Jisc-funded projects, including the Repositories Support project, and has attracted additional funding from other sources, including the Open Society Institute and the Wellcome Trust.

In making the award, the judging panel noted SHERPA’s ‘advocacy for the adoption of institutional repositories and their development of a suite of tools in support of Open Access, including OpenDOAR (a world-wide directory of repositories hosting freely available peer-reviewed publications), JULIET (a listing of funding bodies’ policies regarding deposit mandates) and RoMEO (listing publishers’ copyright policies in relation to articles deposit).’

 

Bill Hubbard, SHERPA Manager, said ‘I am delighted to be able to accept this award on behalf of the SHERPA partnership and in particular on behalf of the SHERPA core team at the University of Nottingham. We would like to thank SPARC Europe for the honour of being chosen for this award for our advocacy activities and online services in the area of Open Access repositories.  We are pleased that the community has found these to be valuable and are honoured by this recognition. 

‘We are proud of the services that we offer - RoMEO, JULIET and OpenDOAR – and hope that these will make a contribution to the success of Open Access. Our thanks to all those who have contributed or helped to build these and we look forward to continuing community contributions.

‘Our thanks go the SPARC Europe for their kind words and the Award: and our thanks also go to our funders - Jisc; CURL; SPARC Europe; the Open Society Institute; European Commission, and the Wellcome Trust for their generous support for our work and for their belief in our goals.’ 

To read SPARC Europe’s press release, please go to: SPARC Europe 

 

For further information on SHERPA, please go to: SHERPA