University of Southampton announces institutional Open Access mandate

The University of Southampton announced a University-wide Open Access mandate at the Open Repositories (OR08) conference last week (4 April).

The University became the first* in the UK to announce that it would henceforth require all academic staff to make all their published research available online. The announcement was made by University Librarian Dr Mark Brown, speaking at the Open Repositories conference which, fittingly, was hosted by the University’s School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS). In 2001 ECS became the first in the world to adopt a self-archiving mandate.

ECS has been at the forefront of the Open Access movement worldwide, providing tools, data and policy models. The EPrints archiving software which it developed and supports was the first of its kind and is now widely used worldwide, currently supporting 251 known archives with over 440,000 records of research publications.

Professor Stevan Harnad, a founding figure of the Open Access movement, holds a Chair in ECS. He has warmly welcomed the Southampton mandate, as well as a mandate at Stirling University, announced almost simultaneously with Southampton’s, and notes in his blog that the OA momentum is notably gathering force in Europe, with the European University Association (EUA) unanimously recommending OA self-archiving mandates for its 791 universities in 46 countries.

*or second - Stirling University announced its own mandate on 9 April.