SPARC Recognizes Ted and Carl Bergstrom as SPARC Innovators

SOURCE: SPARC Email Release

Father-son team named for pivotal work on journal pricing and assessing the value of scholarly information

Washington, DC - June 5, 2007 - SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) has recognized Ted Bergstrom and Carl Bergstrom as the new SPARC Innovators. The father-son team advances the open sharing of scholarly information through original research and the creation of innovative tools that are used widely by the academic community to assess the value of research.

Ted and Carl are best known for their collaborations on Ted's journal pricing Web pages and, more recently, on the Eigenfactor.org Web site produced by Carl's research lab. Ted's journal pricing page, which offers data reporting price per article and price per citation for about 5,000 academic journals, has centralized pricing information so it can be explored and compared in ways that were previously impossible. The site has become a vital resource for researchers and librarians alike. Carl's Eigenfactor.org site offers a completely new and innovative approach to assessing the value of journals; it provides researchers, librarians and others a new mechanism to evaluate based on a diverse array of criteria.

Ted, an economist, holds the Aaron and Cherie Raznick Chair of Economics in the Economics Department at the University of California Santa Barbara. Carl, a theoretical and evolutionary biologist, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biology at the University of Washington. To read in more detail about the Bergstroms' contributions to scholarly publishing, please see the SPARC Innovator Web page at http://www.arl.org/sparc/innovator/.

"It's clear that father and son place a high value on the open sharing of information, and they have devoted their careers to probing the notion of defining value in scholarship," said SPARC Director Heather Joseph. "Although they work in different fields, they come at the basic questions of fairness and access in ways that will impact scholarly communication for generations. It's entirely reasonable to believe that, together, they have the ability to change the way journals are measured and purchased."

"It is an honor to be recognized by SPARC, whose goals I share," Ted Bergstrom said. "And a great pleasure to share this honor with Carl, who has made our projects a lot of fun."

"I very much appreciate this honor, and I am particularly pleased to be sharing it with my father," said Carl Bergstrom. "I've deeply enjoyed working with him, and it means a great deal to me to know that others find our work to be useful and interesting."

The SPARC Innovator program recognizes advances in scholarly communication realized 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 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 named by the SPARC staff in consultation with the SPARC Steering Committee.