EPrints developer wins UKUUG Award 2005

UKUUG (UK Unix and Open Systems User Group) has made its 2005 Award to Christopher Gutteridge of the School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, for his work on the Open Archive Software: GNU EPrints.

Christopher, who has been a systems programmer and web developer since 1997, has been developing and supporting GNU EPrints 2 package over the last four years. The package is now used worldwide in universities and research institutions to enable researchers to share their research effectively, via the web, and to provide accessibility to scientific findings.

‘EPrints is both a practical tool and the crystallization of a philosophy,’ said Christopher. ‘It enables research to be accessible to all, and provides the foundation for all academic institutions to create their own research repositories.’

The School of Electronics and Computer Science has been one of the prime movers in the global movement towards open access publishing. The University of Southampton is the first UK university to announce that it would be establishing its own institutional repository and requiring all its academic staff to self-archive their research.

The UKUUG awards an annual prize to give particular recognition to the development of free and open source software in the UK. As part of his prize Christopher wins a trip to the Open Source Convention in Portland, Oregon.

The UKUUG judges also noted as 'highly commended' Dr Thomas Leonard, also of the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, for his work as primary author of the free software projects ROX Desktop (a graphical desktop for Linux and Unix type system, which he created to combine the elegance of the filer-centric RISC OS with the power of Linux and Zero Install.