News Archive

US's 6th Green OA Mandate, Planet's 58th

13/11/2008/  Autism Speaks (US* funder-mandate)

Institution's/Department's OA Eprint Archives
Institution's/Department's OA Self-Archiving Policy
All researchers who receive an Autism Speaks grant will be required to deposit any resulting peer-reviewed research papers in the PubMed Central online archive, which will make the articles available to the public within 12 months of journal publication.

Alma Swan on "Reasons researchers really rate repositories"

10/03/2008/
Les Carr has posted a call:
    Looking for Evidence of Researcher Engagement with Repositories
."a collection of success stories -- anecdotes of how repositories have been able to improve the lot of researchers -- for appealing to institutional repository nay-sayers and open access agnostics"

and the redoubtable Alma Swan has, as always, responded with data, posting:
    Reasons researchers really rate repositories

EPrints chosen by India's largest political party

Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is using open source software, including ECS's EPrints, in its bid to become one of the most high-tech political parties in the world.

Switzerland's 3rd OA Mandate; Planet's 57th

17/10/2008
ETH Zürich (SWITZERLAND* institutional-mandate)

Institution's/Department's OA Eprint Archives

Institution's/Department's OA Self-Archiving Policy

China's First OA Mandate Proposal: Hong Kong, Multi-Institutional

17/10/2008
Hong Kong University (CHINA* proposed-multi-institutional-mandate)

Institution's/Department's OA Eprint Archives

Proposed OA Self-Archiving Policy and accompanying paper.

Brisbane Declaration on Open Access

10/10/2008/ The Brisbane Declaration on Open Access at last puts some real practical policy content and substance into the Budapest/Bethesda/Berlin series, along the lines of the UK Select Committee Recommendation and Berlin 3. If this is implemented planet-wide, we have universal Open Access within a year.

UK's 19th Green Open Access Mandate, Scotland's 4th, Planet's 56th

10/10/2008/
University of Glasgow (UK* funder-mandate)
Institution's/Department's OA Eprint Archives
Institution's/Department's OA Self-Archiving Policy

Canada's 4th Green Open Access Mandate, Planet's 55th

10/10/2008/
National Cancer Institute of Canada (CANADA* funder-mandate)
Institution's/Department's OA Eprint Archives
Institution's/Department's OA Self-Archiving Policy

Germany's 1st OA Mandate, Planet's 54th: Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft

19/09/2008 Those who said Green OA Self-Archiving could not be mandated in Germany please take notice. Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft has been the first to do the "impossible" (from ROARMAP, via Informationsplattform Open Access and Peter Suber's Open Access News): Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft (GERMANY* institutional-mandate)

Institution's/Department's OA Eprint Archives

Institution's/Department's OA Self-Archiving Policy

Open Access and Research Conference 2008: Brisbane 24-25 September

Open Access and Research Conference 2008

STAMFORD PLAZA HOTEL, BRISBANE, QUEENSLAND 24-25 SEPTEMBER
"The way we create and disseminate knowledge has undergone profound change over the last ten years...
"...we have seen a worldwide move towards establishing frameworks in which we can optimise access to and reuse of research especially that which is publicly funded...
"This has been supported by the development of open access repositories, new publishing tools and models and more strategic management of copyright at the individual and institutional level.
"QUT along with many other institutions throughout the world has been a pioneer in putting in place the management practices and necessary infrastructure to promote access and innovation.
"We are proud to announce what we believe will be a truly landmark conference that will draw on experts from Australia and around the world speak on a range of topics such as evolving publishing models, repository management, e-Research, policy development, and legal and technical issues."

Research Evaluation, Metrics and Open Access in the Humanities

Research Evaluation, Metrics and Open Access in the Humanities
Coimbra-Group Workshop
Trinity College Dublin
18-20 September 2008
-- Aimed at Arts and Humanities researchers, Deans of Research, Librarians, research group leaders and policy makers within the Coimbra-Group member universities and the Irish University sector...
-- To compare established and innovative methods and models of research evaluation and assess their appropriateness for the Arts and Humanities sector...
-- To assess the increasing impact of bibliometrical approaches and Open Access policies on the Arts and Humanities sector...

53rd Green OA Self-Archiving Mandate: Macquarie University, Australia

28/08/2008/ Macquarie University(HEA) has adopted the planet's 53rd Green OA Self-Archiving mandate Australia's 7th; the 26th institutional/departmenal mandate overall). Official text to be posted soon.

52nd Green OA Self-Archiving Mandate: Comhghairdeas, Eire!

11/08/2008/ Ireland's Higher Education Authority (HEA) has adopted the planet's 52nd Green OA Self-Archiving mandate (Ireland's 2nd mandate; the 27th funder mandate overall) and it chose the optimal mandate model: EURAB's.

Comhghairdeas, Eire! The mandate's text is well worth reading (and emulating) in detail.

51st Green OA Self-Archiving Mandate: European Union's 7th Framework

22/08/2008/ The European Commission has now mandated Green OA self-archiving for 20% of its 7th Framework Funding. This is the 51st Green OA Mandate worldwide (and the 26th funder mandate: The European Research Council (ERC), another European research funder, had earlier likewise mandated Green OA.)
    From ROARMAP: Institution's/Department's OA Self-Archiving Policy
    The pilot covers approximately 20% of the FP7 budget and will apply to specific areas of research under the 7th Research Framework Programme (FP7): Health, Energy, Environment, Information and Communication Technologies (Cognitive Systems, Interaction, Robotics), Research Infrastructures (e-Infrastructures), Socio-economic Sciences and Humanities, Science in Society.
    New grant agreements in the areas covered by the pilot will contain a clause requiring grant recipients to deposit peer reviewed research articles or final manuscripts resulting from their FP7 projects into their institutional or if unavailable a subject-based repository... within six or twelve months after publication, depending on the research area.

Use And Misuse Of Bibliometric Indices In Scholarly Performance Evalua

12/08/2008/ Ethics In Science And Environmental Politics (ESEP)
ESEP Theme Section: The Use And Misuse Of Bibliometric Indices In Evaluating Scholarly Performance + accompanying Discussion Forum
Editors: Howard I. Browman, Konstantinos I. Stergiou

"Quantifying the relative performance of individual scholars, groups of scholars, departments, institutions, provinces/states/regions and countries has become an integral part of decision-making over research policy, funding allocations, awarding of grants, faculty hirings, and claims for promotion and tenure. Bibliometric indices...are heavily relied upon in such assessments... often used as a replacement for the informed judgement of peers... are misunderstood... often misinterpreted and misused. The articles in this ESEP Theme Section present a range of... approaches, tools and metrics [toward] a more balanced role for these instruments."

50th Green OA Self-Archiving Mandate Worldwide: France's ANR/SHS

30/07/2008/ The Humanities and Social Sciences branch of France's Agence Nationale de la recherche has just announced its Green OA self-archiving mandate -- France's first funder mandate (France' second mandate overall, and the world's 50th). See ROARMAP

National Research Council (Canada): 49th Green OA Self-Archiving Manda

17/7/2008/ With today's Green OA Self-Archiving Mandate announcement from Canada's National Research Council, that makes 49 mandates adopted and 12 more proposed. See ROARMAP (Registry of Open Access Repository Material Archiving Policies).
      Let us hope that NRC will sensibly require that authors deposit directly in their own Institutional Repositories, from which NRC's planned central repository, NPArC, can then harvest the deposit, rather than needlessly requiring -- as NIH currently does -- direct institution-external deposit. The optimal mandate is of course ID/OA (immediate deposit/optional access) rather than delayed or optional deposit.

Understanding Open Access in the Academic Environment: A Guide

01/07/2008 From the OAK Law Project: by Kylie Pappalardo (with the assistance of Professor Brian Fitzgerald, Professor Anne Fitzgerald, Scott Kiel-Chisholm, Jenny Georgiades and Anthony Austin):

Understanding Open Access in the Academic Environment: A Guide for Authors aims to provide practical guidance for academic authors interested in making their work more openly accessible to readers and other researchers. The guide provides authors with an overview of the concept of and rationale for open access to research outputs and how they may be involved in its implementation and with what effect. In doing so it considers the central role of copyright law and publishing agreements in structuring an open access framework as well as the increasing involvement of funders and academic institutions. The guide also explains different methods available to authors for making their outputs openly accessible, such as publishing in an open access journal or depositing work into an open access repository. Importantly, the guide addresses how open access goals can affect an author’s relationship with their commercial publisher and provides guidance on how to negotiate a proper allocation of copyright interests between an author and publisher. A Copyright Toolkit is provided to further assist authors in managing their copyright.

Stanford School of Education Mandates Green OA Self-Archiving

26/06/2008 John Willinsky has just announced at ELPUB 2008:

Stanford School of Education Mandates Green OA Self-Archiving

46th mandate worldwide, 23rd University mandate, 2nd in US.

AAUP 2008: Open Access: From the Budapest Open to Harvard's Addendum

18/06/2008 The Association of American University Presses (AAUP) annual meeting in Montreal 26-28 June will have a Plenary Session on Open Access: From the Budapest Open to Harvard's Addendum Moderated by Sandy Thatcher (Director, Penn State University Press) with presentations by Stevan Harnad (UQAM & Southampton) and Stanley Katz (Princeton).

ELPUB 2008: Open Scholarship

18/06/2008 ELPUB 2008, with the theme of Open Scholarship, meets in Toronto, Canada, June 25-27 2008.
   Les Carr (U. Southampton) will conduct a workshop on "Repositories that Support Research Management"
   John Willinsky (UBC & Stanford) will deliver the opening keynote:The Quality of Open Scholarship: What Follows from Open?
   Stevan Harnad (UQAM & Southampton) will deliver the closing keynote: Filling OA Space At Long Last: Integrating University and Funder Mandates and Metrics.

Harvard Law School Unanimously Adopts Green OA Self-Archiving Mandate

07/05/2008 Harvard Law School has unanimously adopted a Green OA Self-Archiving Mandate -- Harvard's 2nd, the US's 4th, and the world's 44th (with 7 more proposed mandates under consideration, including the EUA council's unanimous recommendation to its 791 member universities in 46 countries).

Updated Definition of OA: "Weak" OA and "Strong" OA

29/04/2008 The definition of Open Access (OA) has been updated to reflect OA developments and evolving usage. Access barriers take two forms: price-barriers and permission-barriers. Making documents price-free (online) is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition for making them permission-free. Henceforth being accessible online price-free will be called "Weak OA" and being accessible price- and permission-free will be called "Strong OA." Green and Gold remain the two means of providing OA (OA self-archiving and OA publishing, respectively), but so far most Green OA as well as Gold OA are only Weak OA. Once Green OA mandates from institutions and funders have generated universal Weak OA, Strong OA will not be far behind.

SPARC/SCIENCE-COMMONS White Paper on Optimal OA Mandate

29/04/2008  The SPARC / SCIENCE COMMONS WHITE PAPER on "what faculty authors can do to ensure open access to their work through their institution" proposes the key modification that will upgrade the Harvard self-archiving mandate to the optimal alternative -- a universal, no-opt-out, Deposit Mandate, plus a licensing clause with an opt-out option -- making the mandate suitable for adoption by all universities and funders worldwide. The crucial difference is that the deposit clause must be no-opt-out -- a true mandate. (Let's hope Harvard too will consider making the tiny change that would upgrade its mandate to this optimal alternative.) This upgraded mandate, more powerful even than what the White Paper notes, should now also make it more evident why it is so important to integrate university and funder mandates, both converging deposit on (and then harvesting from) the repositories of the institutions that are the providers of all the research (attention NIH!).

ECS developers win $5000 repository challenge

Developers from ECS, Southampton, and Oxford University won a $5000 challenge competition which took place at the OR08 Open Repositories international conference.

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).

Stirling: Scotland's First University Green Self-Archiving Mandate

09/04/2008 Scotland's first University-Wide Green OA self-archiving mandate has been adopted by University of Stirling.
    This is actually Scotland's second Green OA self-archiving mandate: The first was a funder mandate: Scottish Executive Health Department. It is also the 17th UK Green OA mandate (13 funder mandates, 2 institutional mandates, 2 departmental mandates: Southampton ECS (2 Jan 2003), Brunel ICSM (6 Dec 2006), U Southampton (squeeking in 4 Apr 2008), and now U Stirling) (9 April 2008).
    There are now 41 mandates in all, worldwide.(The UK continues to lead the world in both funder and institutional mandates, but watch out for the waking giant! The 791 universities in 46 countries in the European University Association (EUA), whose Council has unanimously recommended that its individual universities mandate Green OA self-archiving.)

NIH Invites Recommendations on Implementing its OA Mandate

01/04/2008/ NIH is calling for a round of public recommendations on the best way to implement and monitor compliance with its OA Self-Archiving mandate. It is important to make the NIH mandate efficient and successful for NIH and its fundees and to ensure that it reinforces and converges with the growing number of complementary university self-archiving mandates (such as Harvard's): (1) NIH's preferred locus of direct deposit for the postprint should be the fundee's Institutional Repository (IR) (from which it can then be downloaded to NIH) and that (2) the fulfillment conditions on the NIH grant should stipulate that the fundee institution monitors that the deposit has been made. Please make your own recommendations here

OR08 to set new missions for universities

Powerful new ways in which universities are self-archiving their research output are being showcased at the Open Repositories 2008 (OR08) conference, hosted by ECS.

Integrate University and Funder Open Access Mandates

06/03/2008 There is a simple way to integrate research funder OA mandates (such as NIH's) and university OA mandates (such as Harvard's) to make them synergistic. Both universities and funders should mandate the deposit of all peer-reviewed final drafts into each author's own university Institutional Repository immediately upon acceptance for publication. Access to that deposit may be set immediately as Open Access if copyright conditions allow; otherwise Closed Access, pending copyright negotiations or embargoes. As a result, (1) there will be a common deposit locus for all research output worldwide; (2) university mandates will reinforce and monitor compliance with funder mandates; (3) funder mandates will reinforce university mandates; (4) legal details concerning OA-setting will be applied independently of deposit itself, according to the conditions of each mandate; (5) opt-outs will apply only to copyright negotiations, not to deposit itself, nor its timing; and (6) central OA repositories (like PubMed Central) may harvest the postprints from the authors' IRs under the agreed conditions at the agreed time.

Harvard Adopts 38th Green Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate

12/2/2008/ Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences on Tuesday February 12 adopted the world's 38th Green Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate -- the 16th of the institutional or departmental mandates.

An OA mandate from Harvard is especially significant, timely and welcome for the worldwide Open Access movement, as Harvard will of course be widely emulated, and many other universities are now proposing to adopt OA mandates.

However, the current wording of the Harvard mandate has one crucial (but easily corrected) flaw. It mandates copyright retention (and must consequently allow opt-out). The solution is to separate the deposit requirement (with no opt-out allowed) from the copyright retention requirement (with opt-out allowed).

EUA Recommends OA Mandates for its 791 Universities in 46 Countries

27/01/2008 The Council of the European University Association unanimously adopted the recommendation of the EUA Working Group on Open Access that all European Universities should create institutional repositories and should mandate that all research publications must be deposited in them immediately upon publication (and made Open Access as soon as possible thereafter) as already mandated by RCUK, ERC, and NIH, and as recommended by EURAB, and that this self-archiving mandate should also be extended to all research results arising from EU research programme/project funding.

1st DRIVER Summit Report

27/01/2008 Highlights from the 1st DRIVER Summit Report:

"The conditions to populate repositories with content and to implement a coherent European and global digital repository based eInfrastructure are more favourable than ever before. The Council's Conclusions on Scientific Information, the European Research Council Open Access mandate and the current preparation of an Open Access mandate for all EC funded research publications can draw from the existing infrastructure efforts which must be accelerated in the coming months... The EC-funded DRIVER II project is leading the way as the largest initiative of its kind in helping to enhance repository development worldwide.

European Research Council Mandates Green OA Self-Archiving

As a historic matter: The European Research Council has finalised its Green OA Self-Archiving Mandate (and it did so 19 days before the NIH mandate!):
   "The ERC requires that all peer-reviewed publications from ERC-funded research projects be deposited on publication into an appropriate research repository where available, such as PubMed Central, ArXiv or an institutional repository, and subsequently made Open Access within 6 months of publication."
   Bravo to both the US and Europe. Now it is time for the other US and EC funding agencies -- and, even more importantly, all the US and European universities -- to follow suit with Green OA Self-Archiving Mandates of their own.

PPTs from Universities UK Research Management Workshop

01/01/2008 Universities UK Research Information and Management Workshop
Professor Bernard Rentier, Rector, University of Liege: EurOpenScholar
Dr Alma Swan, Director, Key Perspectives Ltd: The whole picture: the overall scholarly information landscape
Professor Stevan Harnad, University of Southampton: Mandates and Metrics: How Open Repositories Enable Universities to Manage, Measure and Maximise their Research Assets
Professor David Eastwood, Chief Executive, HEFCE: Optimising research management and assessment processes; the role of funders
Dr. Michael Jubb, Director, Research Information Network: Overview: outline of the evolution of scholarly information, what advantages new changes will bring and economic impact for the UK [addendum: US NIH Mandate ]

US NIH Green OA Self-Archiving Mandate Became Law On December 26 2007

26/12/2007 The US NIH Green OA Mandate was made law on December 26 2007
Worldwide, that now makes 21 funder-mandates, 11 institutional mandates, and 3 departmental mandates, plus 5 proposed funder mandates, 1 proposed institutional mandate, and 2 proposed multi-institutional mandates -- a total of 35 mandates already adopted and 8 more proposed so far. See ROARMAP.
  2008 will now be the year of institutional Green OA self-archiving mandates. Research funder mandates cover funded research output in the funder's field. Institutional mandates cover all of research output, across all fields and nations.
  The optimal way for funder and institutional mandates to complement one another and to ensure that mandates swiftly and systematically scale up to encompass all of research output worldwide is for both kinds of mandates to require deposit directly in the researcher's own Institutional Repository. Central Repositories, indexers, and search engines can then harvest from the distributed network of OAI-interoperable Institutional Repositories.

Victory for Labour, Research Metrics and OA Repositories in Australia

24/11/2007/ Labour have won in Australia.
   Labor will abolish the Howard Government’s flawed Research Quality Framework, and replace it with a new, streamlined, transparent, internationally verifiable system of research quality assessment, based on quality measures appropriate to each discipline. These measures will be developed in close consultation with the research community.
   Arthur Sale: "It should now be crystal clear to every university in Australia that citations and other measures will be key in the future. It should be equally clear that they should do everything possible to increase their performance on these measures. Any university that fails to immediately implement an ID/OA mandate (Immediate Deposit, Open Access when possible) in its institutional repository is simply deciding to opt out of research competition."

UK Research Evaluation Framework and Institional Repositories

23/11/2007/ Three things need to be remedied in the UK's proposed HEFCE/RAE Research Evaluation Framework: (1) Make sure to use a full, rich battery of candidate metrics -- especially online metrics -- in all disciplines. (2) Make sure to cross-validate them against the panel rankings in the last parallel panel/metric RAE in 2008. (3) Make sure all university Institutional Repositories (IRs) systematically archive all their research output assets (especially publications) so they can be counted and assessed (as well as accessed!), along with their IR metrics (downloads, links, growth/decay rates, harvested citation counts, etc.).

Meeting to Promote Open Access Mandates in Brazil

24/10/2007 On Wednesday, October 17, one day before EurOpenScholar was launched by the Rector of the University of Liège, the Rector of the University of Brasilia (UnB) launched a Brazilian Open Access Task Force at a meeting hosting the rectors of six major Brazilian universities and the head of IBICT (Brazilian Institute for Information on Science and Technology). By way of a practical follow-up to the many manifestos and declarations already signed by Brazil's research institutions, the Task Force will inform the Brazilian university community about how researchers can provide open access by establishing institutional repositories and mandate policies in Brazil's universities and research institutions. OASIS.Br will also provide a central portal to Brazilian repositories and Open Access e-journals.

NIH Green OA Mandate Passed By US Senate: Universities Needn't Wait

24/10/2007 The US Senate has now passed the NIH Green OA Mandate by a big majority: There is no need for US Universities to keep waiting now (to see whether it is implemented, or vetoed by President Bush).  Universities can already go ahead, knowing they have the blessing of both Houses of Congress, and adopt Green OA Mandates for their own institutional research output, deposited in their own Institutional Repositories -- and not just for the NIH-funded biomedical research, but for all their research output (along the lines of the US Federal Research Public Access Act [FRPAA], which is also soon to be revived).  And so can research funders (including the NIH!). The handwriting is on the wall, and it is Green. And meanwhile, daily, weekly, monthly research access and impact are still being lost, needlessly, and cumulatively, at the expense of research productivity and progress for us all.

Video to Promote Open Access Mandates and Metrics

18/10/2007 You are invited to use this video to promote OA mandates and metrics at your institution: download video

Accompanying 3 figures as PPT or as PNG  (plus an older PPT, with many more figures you can use to explain and promote OA.)

EurOpenScholar Launched by European University Rectors

18/10/2007 The European University Rectors' Conference on Open Access, convened by Bernard Rentier, Rector of the University of Liège has launched EurOpenScholar to promote OA to European researchers as well as to their universities, research funders and policy-makers, the R&D industry, the media and the general public.

Peter Suber Interviewed by Richard Poynder

26/10/2007 Richard Poynder, the de facto chonicler of the Open Access Movement (and beyond), has at long last done one of his characteristically probing and always insightful interviews with "the de factor leader of the open access (OA) movement," Peter Suber. Read, learn, and admire.

"The self-archiving principle"

12/10/2007  Singh, N.K. (2007) The self-archiving principle: a momentous trek. Postgraduate Medical Journal. 83: 564-567

Abstract: In the existing scholarly publishing empire, authors give away their valued research work to various commercial journals, thereby restricting free accessibility to the published work. Triggered by the gargantuan promise of the internet, the self-archiving principle is a new and revolutionary concept which potentially lets all research work become freely available online. It involves deposition of research documents at a publicly accessible website, and its proponents see the initiative as a means to set entire author works free of all access and impact barriers. This review briefly discusses the allied concepts, the course and implications of the initiative.

"Publishers Disavowing PRISM So Far: Nine and Counting"

11/4/2007/ From Peter Suber's Open Access News: "How many publishers have publicly disavowed PRISM or distanced themselves from it?  Nine and counting (with links to their public statements): Cambridge University Press, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, Columbia University Press, MIT Press, Nature Publishing Group, Oxford University Press, Pennsylvania State University Press, Rockefeller University Press, University of Chicago Press.  How many publishers have been identified on the PRISM web site as members of the PRISM 'coalition'? Zero."
   Hiring the high-profile PR 'pitbull' Eric Dezenhall seems to be turning into something of a high-priced, high-profile PR disaster for the publishers' anti-OA lobby

Success Rate of the First of the Self-Archiving Mandates

01/10/2007 Adopted in January 2003, the self-archiving mandate of the U. Southampton ECS Department was the world's first and has since served as a model for a growing number of Green OA self-archiving mandates worldwide. (32 institutional/departmental and research-funder mandates have been adopted, and 8 more proposed, as of October 2007.) In 2004-5, author surveys by Alma Swan had predicted that the willing compliance rate for self-archiving mandates would be over 80%. In 2005-6, Arthur Sale then estimated from actual Australian repository deposit data that mandates would reach Swan's predicted compliance rate in about two years.
    Now Southampton's Les Carr has confirmed Swan's survey predictions and Sale's Australian extrapolations: ECS's deposit rate in 2006 is over 80% for an ISI Web of Knowledge sample and nearly 100% for an ACM Digital Library sample.This should encourage other universities to adopt self-archiving mandates and help persuade US legislators to upgrade the failed NIH policy to a mandate in the next US Senate Appropriations Bill.

Comhghairdeas, Eire: Ireland Proposes Optimal OA Mandate

19/09/2007 The Irish Research Council for Science, Engineering & Technology's (IRCSET's) proposed Green Open Access self-Archiving Mandate is not only timely and welcome, but the optimal funder mandate. IRCSET proposes mandating immediate deposit, without exception, in an OA Repository (Institutional or Central) and it puts a maximum cap of 6 months on the length of the allowable access embargo, after which access to the deposit must be made Open Access rather than Closed Access.

Institutional Mandates and Institutional OA Repository Growth

19/09/2007 Thomas, Chuck & McDonald, Robert H. (2007) Measuring and Comparing Participation Patterns in Digital Repositories: Repositories by the Numbers, Part 1. D-lib Magazine 13 (9/10)
Excerpt: "As for mandatory-deposit repositories, the limited available data indicate authors represented in such repositories tend to contribute more of their intellectual output. Sale (2006) predicted institutions establishing deposit mandates were likely to see such results within three years of implementing these policies. Harnad (2006) cited surveys showing 95% of scholars comply if their university mandates depositing in an institutional repository. This study's findings only reinforce such predictions and arguments favoring institutional mandates. As the data in this article show, a mandate is arguably the "tipping point" described by Gladwell (2000) that can make depositing behavior among scholars not just widespread, but also more of an ingrained and complete behavior."

More Reasons for Immediate-Deposit Mandate and Eprint Request Button

16/09/2007

   Drenth, JPH (2003) More reprint requests, more citations? Scientometrics 56: 283-286. "Reprint requests are commonly used to obtain a copy of an article. [A] 10-year-sample... [found] an excellent correlation between the number of requests and citations to article... Articles that received most reprint requests are cited more often."
   Swales, J. (1988), Language and scientific communication. The case of the reprint request. Scientometrics 13: 93–101. "This paper reports on a study of Reprint Requests (RRs). It is estimated that tens of millions of RRs are mailed each year, most being triggered by Current Contents..."
   Garfield, E. (1999) From Photostats to Home Pages on the World Wide Web: A Tutorial on How to Create Your Electronic Archive. The Scientist 13(4):14. "It is the utopian expectation of those who live in cyberspace that eventually most researchers will create Web sites containing the full text of all their papers... The social, economic, and scholarly impact of this development has major consequences for the future...
Garfield, E. (1965) Is the 'free reprint system' free and/or obsolete? Essays of an Information Scientist 1:10-11.
Garfield, E. (1972) Reprint Exchange. 1. The multimillion dollar problem ordinaire, Essays of an Information Scientist 1:359-60.

British Academy Report on Peer Review and Metrics

04/09/2007 (1) Peer review just means the assessment of research by qualified experts.
(2) Peer review, like all human judgment, is fallible, and susceptible to error and abuse.
(3) Funding and publishing without any assessment is not a solution:
   (3a) Everything cannot be funded and even funded projects first need some expert advice in their design.
   (3b) Everything does get published, eventually, but there is a hierarchy of journal peer-review quality standards, serving as an essential guide for users, to guide them in what they can take the risk of trying to read, use and build upon.
(4) So far, nothing as good as or better than peer review (i.e., qualified experts vetting the work of their fellow-experts) has been found, tested and demonstrated.
(5) Peer review's efficiency can be improved in the online era.
(6) Metrics are not a substitute for peer review, they are a supplement to it.

Coming Revolution in Scholarly Communications & Cyberinfrastructure

CTWatch Quarterly Volume 3 Number 3 August 2007

Incentivizing the Open Access Research Web:
Publication-Archiving, Data-Archiving and Scientometrics

Tim Brody, U. Southampton; Les Carr, U Southampton; Yves Gingras, UQAM; Chawki Hajjem, UQAM; Stevan Harnad, U Southampton & UQAM; Alma Swan, U Southampton & Key Perspectives

Demonstration of EPrints "Fair Use" Button

03/08/07/ The only thing standing between the research community and 100% Open Access (OA) is:
    K  E  Y  S  T  R  O  K  E  S
Universities and Research Funders need to mandate those keystrokes with the
Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access (ID/OA) Mandate:

EITHER
     Immediate Deposit + Immediate Open Access (62%)
OR (optionally, in case of a publisher embargo)
    Immediate Deposit + Closed Access + “Fair Use Button” (38%)

Click here for a demonstration of how the EPrints Fair Use Button can provide almost-immediate, almost-OA even during a publisher embargo (or try it yourself at demoprints).

OA mandate for NIH clears another hurdle

17/07/07 From Peter Suber's Open Access News:
   The US House of Representatives voted Tuesday, July 17, 2007, on the appropriations bill establishing an OA mandate at the NIH.
     Sec. 217: The Director of the National Institutes of Health shall require that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication.
   The section creating the OA mandate (ß217) was read. The amendment window opened briefly and then closed. No amendments were offered.
   This victory reflects the groundswell of public support for OA at the NIH. House members definitely heard the message.
   The House vote is in a few days, and then the Senate vote, which is still unscheduled. Then a Presidential signature.

What drives Stevan Harnad?

ECS Professor Stevan Harnad has been profiled in a long interview by Richard Poynder, covering his influence on the Open Access movement, and the lifelong beliefs which have made him such a strong advocate on its behalf.

Harnad to weigh Open Access impact against the RAE

A new proposal to use the UK’s Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) to create and validate powerful new Open Access metrics of research impact will be presented this month by ECS Professor Stevan Harnad.

Open Access Institutional Repositories 'vital to UK economy'

09/06/2007/ Excerpts from a summary of the JISC Conference on Digital Repositories: (Manchester 6 June 2007):
Andy Powell, Eduserv Foundation "Repositories Roadmap"... vision for 2010... is increasingly "not if, but when" newly published scholarly outputs [are] made... open access. [We need to] set a more ambitious target than that of a "high percentage"...
Dr Keith Jeffrey, Science and Technology Facilities Council : The benefits of open access repositories... include faster "research turnaround", improved quality for the originators of research... colleagues able to review the research more easily... improved quality for the community in general... [T]he development of repositories and the wider access to research outputs they enable should not be delayed by commercial interests. Dr Jeffrey then launched Depot, a national repository open to all UK authors to submit their research papers and other outputs into [right now, if their institution does not yet have its own Repository].
Professor Drummond Bone, President, Universities UK: UUK is "firmly behind" JISC's approach to the development of open access repositories, [which are] "vital to universities' economies and to the UK economy as a whole." [T]he benefits of repositories include improved efficiency of research processes, greater cooperation, improved learning and teaching, a commitment both to preservation and to wider access...

London Open Research Conference

09/06/2007/ Open Research: 3rd London Conference on Opening Access to Research Publications Monday 11 June 2007, 13.00 - 16.30 SHERPA-LEAP London Eprints Access Project Brunei Gallery Lecture Theatre, SOAS, University of London
Full programme here. Among the speakers:
Dr Alma Swan, Director, Key Perspectives, UK The present Open Access landscape and what might be over the horizon
Dr David Prosser, Director, SPARC Europe, UK Repositories and research publications: policies and politics
Dr Frank Scholze, Stuttgart University, Germany Metrics in an Open Access environment: an infrastructure for collecting and aggregating usage data

British Classification Society post-RAE Scientometrics

06/06/2007/ British Classification Society Meeting "Analysis Methodologies for Post-RAE Scientometrics" Friday 6 July 2007, International Building room IN244 Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham
   The selection of appropriate and/or best data analysis methodologies is a result of a number of issues: the overriding goals of course, but also the availability of well formatted, and ease of access to such, data. The meeting will focus on the early stages of the analysis pipeline. An aim of this meeting is to discuss data analysis methodologies in the context of what can be considered as open, objective and universal in a metrics context of scholarly and applied research.
  Les Carr and Tim Brody (Intelligence, Agents, Media group, Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton): "Open Access Scientometrics and the UK Research Assessment Exercise"

Brazilian National Green OA Self-Archiving Mandate

01/06/2007/ Hélio Kuramoto of IBICT has helped to formulate a Proposed Law (introduced by Rodrigo Rollemberg, Member of Brazil's House of Representatives) that would require all Brazil's public institutions of higher education and research units to create OA institutional repositories and self-archive all their technical-scientific output therein.
   There is also a petition in support of this Green OA Self-Archiving Mandate. All in favor of OA in Brazil (and worldwide) are urged to sign the petition here. Bravo to HK and RR for this timely and welcome step, setting an inspiring example for all. (Brazil's Auriverde -- Gold and Green -- flag is especially apposite for OA!)

"Academics strike back at spurious rankings"

02/06/2007 In Academics strike back at spurious rankings Nature 447, 514-515 (31 May 2007) D Butler, lists some of the (very valid) objections to the many unvalidated university rankings -- both subjective and objective -- that are in wide use today.
   These problems are all the more reason for extending Open Access (OA) and developing OA scientometrics, which will provide open, validatable and calibratable metrics for research, researchers, and institutions in each field -- a far richer, more sensitive, and more equitable spectrum of metrics than the few, weak and unvalidated measures available today.
   EPrints/Southampton's own OA scientometrics group (Les Carr, Tim Brody, Alma Swan, Stevan Harnad) (and UQaM, Canada), and our collaborators Charles Oppenheim (Loughborough) and Arthur Sale (Tasmania) are among those doing research in this important new area.
   Harnad, S. (2007) Open Access Scientometrics and the UK Research Assessment Exercise. Invited Keynote, 11th Annual Meeting of the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics. Madrid, Spain, 25 June 2007

Russia and Turkey Register Green OA Self-Archiving Mandates in ROARMAP

03/05/2007 Both the Central Economics and Mathematics Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Middle East Technical University of Turkey have adopted Open Access Self-Archiving Mandates and registered them in ROARMAP. Bravo to these institutions. Worldwide, that now makes:
11 institutional mandates, 3 departmental mandates, 12 funder mandates, 5 proposed funder mandates, 1 proposed multi-institutional mandate.

Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) mandates Green OA self-archiving

02/05/2007 From Driver News: "After the good news from Liège, Flanders now also has an OA mandate: the FWO (major Flemish research funding body) obliges its researchers to self-archive all articles coming from research funded by the FWO, in OA repositories... to increase visibility and impact." -- General Agreement for Researchers."

Depot: UK Back-Up Repository Uses EPrints Software

02/05/2007 EDINA, SHERPA and JISC have announced DEPOT, an important and timely central service for the UK, and a model for all countries worldwide that wish to provide Open Access to their research output.
   DEPOT is many things, but chiefly a mediator for UK Institutional Repositories (IRs):
   (a) If your institution already has an IR, Depot will redirect your deposit there, while also registering it and tracking it centrally, to make sure the deposit is picked up by the major search engines.    (b) If your institution does not yet have an IR, you can deposit directly in Depot and Depot will provide access to your deposit until your institution has an IR, at which point it will transfer your deposit to your IR.
   Depot is generated by Eprints software.

Green OA Self-Archiving Needs a Lobbying Organisation

02/05/2007 There exists no recognized theme associated with Green OA self-archiving, no Green OA-specific interest group that is invited to represent Green OA at OA events. Richard Poynder, Napoleon Miradon and others have mooted the idea of a Green OA lobby. Creating such a lobby would be an excellent and timely idea and an appropriate reflection of the European and American petitions demonstrating the growing worldwide support for mandating Green OA.

Alma Swan on Open Access in American Scientist (the journal)

04/04/2007 Alma Swan's article "Open Access and the Progress of Science" has just appeared in American Scientist (the journal) May-June Issue 2007.

You can join the American Scientist Open Access Forum and view the complete Hypermail archive of the ongoing AmSci Forum discussion (1998-2007) on providing open access to the peer-reviewed research literature online.

Five out of Seven UK Research Councils Mandate Green OA Self-Archiving

01/04/2007 Today two UK Research Councils, PPARC and CCLRC merged into a single Council: Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC). PPARC had already mandated Green OA Self-Archiving; CCLRC had "strongly encouraged" it. STFC mandates it. That means that instead of 5 out of 8 UK Research Councils mandating OA, 5 out of 7 now mandate OA. Worldwide, we have reached 23 Green OA Self-Archiving Mandates adopted (9 institutional, 3 departmental, 11 funder mandates, including the European Research Council) plus 6 more proposed (1 multi-institutional, 5 funder mandates), two of them (FRPAA in the US and EC A1 in Europe) big ones. See ROARMAP

Open Access Scientometrics and the UK Research Assessment Exercise

29/03/2007 The UK Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) 2008 -- together with the growing movement toward making research Open Access -- offers a unique opportunity to test and validate a wealth of old and new scientometric predictors, through multiple regression analysis. Publications, journal impact factors, citations, co-citations, citation chronometrics (age, growth, latency to peak, decay rate), hub/authority scores, h-index, prior funding, student counts, co-authorship scores, endogamy/exogamy, textual proximity, download/co-downloads and their chronometrics, etc. can all be tested and validated jointly, discipline by discipline, against their RAE panel rankings in the forthcoming parallel panel-based and metric RAE in 2008. The weights of each predictor can be calibrated to maximize the joint correlation with the rankings. Open Access Scientometrics will provide powerful new means of navigating, evaluating, predicting and analyzing the growing Open Access database, as well as powerful incentives for making it grow faster.

Open Access Scientometrics and the UK Research Assessment Exercise to be presented at 11th Annual Meeting of the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics, Madrid, Spain 25-27 June 2007.

Results of (1) Petition and (2) Poll on EC OA Self-Archiving Mandate

Les Carr, head of University of Southampton's Eprints team announces the results of a poll of EC F6 projects on the EC Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate proposal (A1).
The results are as overwhelmingly positive as those of the parallel petition.
These results are to be announced in Brussels tomorrow (February 15).
On the same time day in the United States, there will be a "National Day of Action" by students in support of the FRPAA Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate Proposal.

On the eve of the Brussels EC meeting, the Budapest Open Access Initiative celebrates its fifth anniversary in Brussels:

Les Carr, EPrints, University of Southampton

"EP3: a significant milestone towards ideal repository software"

09/02/2007

"EP3 looks like a significant improvement over the earlier versions and a significant milestone in the journey towards the ideal repository software. EP3 addresses real issues for repository managers such as controlling quality, encouraging the take-up of self-deposit and embedding the repository in the broader institutional context. The deposit process in particular has been made more usable and user-friendly, thus removing one of the deterrents to self-deposition."

Report by Peter Millington and William J. Nixon Ariadne 50, January 2007

Europe OA Petition exceeds 15,000 signatures in 15 days

EPrints potential raised to 'a new dimension'

A new version of the open access software EPrints, being launched today (24 January) in San Antonio, USA, takes its potential to a ‘new dimension’, according to EPrints Technical Director, Dr Leslie Carr.

Sign Petition to Support EC OA Policy

Please sign OA petition.
The European Commission, the European Research Advisory Board (EURAB) and the European Research Councils have each recently recommended adopting the policy of providing Open Access to research results. (Very similar recommendations are also being made by governmental research organisations in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Asia). There are powerful non-research interests lobbying vigorously against these policy recommendations, so a display of support by the research community is critically important at this time. A consortium of European organisations -- JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee, UK), SURF (Netherlands), SPARC Europe, DFG (Deutsches Forschungsgemeinschaft, Germany), DEFF (Danmarks Elektroniske Fag- og Forskningsbibliotek, Denmark) -- is now sponsoring a petition to the European Commission to demonstrate support for these recommendations on the part of the European and worldwide research community. Signatures may be added by individual researchers or universities and research institutions. Researchers, lab directors, institutute directors, university research VPs and DVCs, are all strongly urged to register your support.
OA petition

2007: Depositar y Prosperar

1/1/2007

For Prosperity and Posterity:
Post Your Publications in 2007!

Full Size Original (600 x 420 mm)
Executed in gouache on black Canson Mi-Teintes pastel paper
using William Mitchell metal nibs, brushes and airbrush.

Artwork: Alma Swan
Text: Stevan Harnad

Another Review of EPrints

18/12/2006 "EPrints made author self-archiving viable on a global scale.... the first OAI-compliant software for creating a repository to become widely available. Now a mature and flexible application, EPrints ... has proven to be a very popular choice for IRs and enjoys wide use throughout the world. Eprints places a particular emphasis on making it easy to archive eprints, as opposed to other digital objects and data sets, but any kind of digital object can be archived. Usage statistics and email alerts are available. Many and varied instances of repositories have been implemented with EPrints, including consortial IRs, discipline-specific IRs, open access journals, and theses and dissertation repositories. EPrints is flexible enough to operate within portals. The EPrints developers also offer service and consulting packages, including assistance with training and policy development."

Parker, Carole A. (2006) Institutional Repositories and the Principle of Open Access: Changing the Way We Think About Legal Scholarship. New Mexico Law Review.

Richard Poynder Interviews Professor Tony Hey

12/12/2006 "Respected Open Access journalist and blogger Richard Poynder interviews Professor Tony Hey of Microsoft and The University of Southampton on his career, his move to Microsoft, his stance on Open Source and Open Access.

"This interview was probably kick-started at least in part because Southampton's world class Institutional Repository package EPrints.org can now be run smoothly (I'm told) on Windows, and Microsoft's apparent interest in funding Open Source development work (but not GNU licenced work, only BSD or similar)."

[Reposted from here]

5th Australian Mandate (8th Funder, 9th Institution, 17th Worldwide)

8/12/2006 On the good authority of Arthur Sale (and Peter Suber), the classification of the Australian Research Council (ARC) self-archiving policy in ROARMAP has been upgraded to a mandate. That makes 17 mandates worldwide, 5 of them in Australia: A departmental and university-wide one at U. Tasmania, a university-wide one at QUT, and a funder mandate at ARC, joined soon after by another funder mandate (NHMRC) and reinforced by the Research Quality Framework (RQF) (the Australian counterpart of the UK Research Assessment Exercise, RAE).

Unbiassed Open Access Metrics for the Research Assessment Exercise

7/12/2006 The UK Research Assessment Exercise's forthcoming transition from time-consuming, cost-ineffective panel review to low-cost metrics is welcome, but there is still a top-heavy emphasis on the Prior-Funding metric. This will generate a Matthew-Effect/Self-Fulfilling Prophecy ("the rich get richer") and it will also collapse the UK Dual Funding System -- (1) competitive proposal-based funding plus (2) RAE performance-based, top-sliced funding -- into just a scaled up version of (1) alone. The RAE should commission rigorous, systematic studies, before and after RAE 2008, testing metric equations discipline by discipline. There are not just three but many potentially powerful and predictive metrics that could be used in these equations (e.g., citations, recursively weighted citations, co-citations, hub/authority indices, latency scores, longevity scores, downloads, download/citation correlations, endogamy/exogamy scores, and many more rich and promising indicators).The objective should be to maximise the depth, breadth, flexibility, predictive power and validity of the battery of metrics by testing, choosing and weighting the right combination for each discipline. More metrics are better than fewer, providing cross-checks, and triangulation will help catch anomalies, if any.

U. Indiana: OA Mandates, OA Metrics, and the Origins of Language

7/12/2006 University of Southampton's Archivangelist, Stevan Harnad, gave three talks at Indiana University on December 4-5:
(1) Maximising the Return on Resource Investment in Research at Indiana University by Mandating Self-Archiving
(2) Open Access Scientometrics
(3) Origins of Language
(Over a hundred thousand years ago, language evolved as a way of providing Open Access to the categories that human beings acquired. Publishing and providing online access to peer-reviewed research findings is just a natural -- indeed optimal and inevitable -- PostGutenberg upgrade of this ancestral adaptation.)

Brunel University: 9th departmental/institutional mandate

6/12/2006 Brunel University's School of Information Systems Computing and Mathematics has just adopted the 9th departmental/institutional self-archiving mandate for its IR, BURA. (Together with the 6 research funder mandates, that now makes 15 mandates worldwide, and the 8th for the UK.) This is an instance of Prof. Artur Sale's recommended "Patchwork Mandate": departments first, then the university as a whole.
If your own university or research institution has a self-archiving policy, please register it in ROARMAP (Registry of Open Access Repository Material Archiving Policies)

U. Southampton at 2nd U. Minho OA Conference

1/12/2006 U. Southampton's Alma Swan, Les Carr and Stevan Harnad gave talks at the 2nd Open Access Conference at U. Minho in Portugal, 27-28 November. The meeting was hosted by Eloy Rodrigues, founder of RepositoriUM, U. Minho's highly successful Institutional Repository, and one of the first to mandate self-archiving.

Two Happy Accidents Demonstrate Power of "Eprint Request" Button

21/11/06 Two recent "accidents," at two different institutions, provide dramatic evidence of the power of the "EMAIL EPRINT" button. U. Southampton's university-wide IR has many deposits for which only the metadata are accessible, deposited via library mediation rather than by the authors themselves. This will soon change to direct author deposit, but meanwhile, "The Button" was implemented, and the result was such a huge flood of eprint requests that the proxy depositors were overwhelmed and the feature quickly had to be turned off! Much the same thing happened at UQaM but this time it was while a new IR was still under construction, and its designers were just testing out its features with dummy demo papers (some of them real!). "The Button" again unleashed an immediate torrent of eprint requests for the bona fide papers, so the feature had to be (tremulously, but temporarily) disabled!

The Button will of course be restored -- with the LDAP feature used to redirect the eprint requests to the authors rather than the library mediators -- but the accident was instructive in revealing the nuclear power of the button! Authors, we expect, will be gratified by the countable measures of interest in their work, and we will make a countable metric out of the number of eprint requests. Authors will be able to opt out of receiving eprint requests -- but we confidently expect that few will choose to do so! (Our confidence is based on many factors, take your pick: (1) Authors' known habit of looking first at the bibliography of any article or book in their field, to see "Do they cite me?" (2) Authors' known habit of googling themselves as well as looking up their own citation-counts in Web of Science and now in Google Scholar. (3) Employers' and funders' growing use of research performance metrics to supplement publication counts in employment, promotion and funding decisions...)

Please Register Your Institutional Repository in ROAR

21/11/2006 In order to give everyone a clear update on progress in the growth of Instititutional Repositories (IRs) and in order to encourage others to create IRs, could you please register your IRs in the Registry of Open Access Repositories ROAR. And if your institution has a self-archiving policy, please register it in ROARMAP. Before registering your IR in ROAR, please check whether it is already registered! This is also a good time to try some of ROAR's powerful new features for monitoring IR growth.

Draft report from Australian government recommends OA mandate

From Peter Suber's Open Access News
      The Australian Government Productivity Commission has released an important study, Public Support for Science and Innovation: Draft Research Report (November 2, 2006).
      "ARC and the NHMRC... could require as a condition of funding that research papers, data and other information produced as a result of their funding are made publicly available such as in an "open access" repository...
       Houghton et al. (2006) [suggested]:
      - developing a national system of institutional or enterprise-based repositories to support new modes of enquiry and research; ...
      - ensuring that the Research Quality Framework supports and encourages the development of new, more open scholarly communication mechanisms, rather than... a reliance by evaluators upon traditional publication metrics (for example, by ensuring dissemination and impact are an integral part of evaluation);
      - encouraging funding agencies (for example, ARC and NHMRC) to mandate that the results of their supported research be made available in open access archives and repositories;
      - encouraging universities and research institutions to support the development of new, more open scholarly communication mechanisms, through, for example, the development of "hard or soft open access" mandates for their supported research...
      You are invited to examine this draft research study and to provide written submissions to the Commission: Science@pc.gov.au. Submissions should reach the Commission by Thursday, 21 December 2006.

The Patchwork Mandate: by Arthur Sale, Archivangelist of the Antipodes

Yet another brilliant and timely stroke from the Archivangelist of the Antipodes (who is rapidly gaining worldwide moral hegemony!):
      Sale, Arthur (2006) The Patchwork Mandate. Working Paper. School of Computing, Australia
Arthur Sale is so right: Where the university's senior management are momentarily immovable, the right strategy is a promising individual department or two: The focussed outcome of a departmental mandate can be even faster and more dramatic than a university-wide one, serving as an irresistible stepping stone toward a university-wide mandate.
And there is supporting evidence: The outcome of the U. Tasmania SC and U. Southampton ECS departmental mandates, there to prove it works (and both of them leading to university-wide mandates thereafter).

The Bangalore Commitment

Wednesday Nov 1, 2006.
There is no need for developing countries to wait for the developed countries to mandate Open Access (OA) self-archiving: They have more to gain because both their research access and their research impact are disproportionately low. At a two day workshop on research publication and OA at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore on November 2-3, the three most research-active developing countries – India, China and Brazil – will frame the “Bangalore Commitment” to mandate OA self-archiving in their own respective countries and thereby set an example for emulation by the rest of the world.

Why is Southampton's G-Factor (web impact metric) so remarkably high?

U. Southampton ranks 3rd in the UK and 25th in the world in the G-factor International University Ranking, a measure of "the importance or relevance of the university from the combined perspectives of all of the leading universities in the world... as a function of the number of links to their websites from the websites of other leading international universities" compiled by University Metrics.
      Why is U. Southampton's rank so remarkably high (second only to Cambridge and Oxford in the UK, and out-ranking the likes of Yale, Columbia and Brown in the US)?
      Long practising what it has been preaching -- about maximising research impact through Open Access Self-Archiving -- is a likely factor. (This is largely a competitive advantage: Southampton invites other universities to come and level the playing field -- by likewise self-archiving their own research output!)

PPARC: 13th Self-Archiving Mandate, 6th from a funder, 7th from UK

Bravo to the Particle Physics & Astronomy Research Council (PPARC): the 5th UK Research Council (and the 6th UK funder) to mandate OA self-archiving. CCLRC "strongly encourages" self-archiving, so that leaves only 2.5 of the 8 UK Research Councils to go. Of the 13 known self-archiving mandates, 7 -- including all the funder mandates -- are from the UK. Stand by for more UK announcements of individual University self-archiving mandates (and if your institution, anywhere, has adopted one, please register it in ROARMAP).

Arthur Sale: Effectiveness andTime-Course of Self-Archiving Mandates

Sale, Arthur (2006)