SHERPA (Securing a Hybrid Environment for Research Preservation and Access) is an organisation originally set up in 2002 to run and manage the SHERPA Project.^{[definition needed]}

SHERPA began as an endeavour to support the establishment of a number of open access institutional repositories based in UK universities. SHERPA, the organisation, is sometimes erroneously referred to as the SHERPA Project. SHERPA was founded in 2002 by Stephen Pinfield, who continued as its director until 2012. Throughout its life, SHERPA has been managed by Bill Hubbard, first as its manager then as director from 2012 onwards.

As well as a staff team based at Jisc (formerly the University of Nottingham), 33 research institutions and organisations comprise the SHERPA Partnership. The makeup of this partnership includes many, if not all, of the most research active institutions in the UK and provides practitioner-led experience to the project team.

SHERPA's work in supporting open access and repositories on a national and international level was recognised in 2007 with the award of the SPARC Europe Award for Outstanding Achievements in Scholarly Communication.

SHERPA is involved as a full or advisory partner in a number of projects and services, which include:

SHERPA/RoMEO is a service run by SHERPA to show the copyright and open access self-archiving policies of academic journals. RoMEO is an acronym for Rights MEtadata for Open archiving.

The database used a colour-coding scheme to classify publishers according to their self-archiving policy. This shows authors whether the journal allows preprint or postprint archiving in their copyright transfer agreements. It currently holds records for over 22,000 journals. The colour codes were retired in 2020, with the launch of a new site.

SHERPA/Juliet is an online database of open access mandates adopted by academic funding bodies. It is part of the SHERPA suite of services around open access and is run by Jisc (formerly the University of Nottingham).