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Stirling and Southampton Universities announce open access mandates |
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14 April 2008 |
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The Universities of Stirling and Southampton have become the first academic institutions in the UK to require staff to make all their published research available online.
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Stirling |
| The University's Academic Council have issued an institutional mandate which requires self-archiving of all theses and journal articles. The four-year project to create STORRE (Stirling Online Research Repository) has been brought to fruition by information technology specialists Clare Allan and Michael White.
"The University now requires all published journal articles to be deposited by authors, as soon as possible after they are accepted for publication, and in compliance with the publishers' copyright agreements," explained Clare Allan. "It is an important landmark in our archival development and marks the conclusion of a process that started in 2004 when Stirling was one of 20 academic institutions which signed up to the OATS (Open Access Team for Scotland) declaration. The repository project initially focused on electronic theses and in session 2006/07 we became one of the first universities to require these to be submitted electronically. The next stage was a pilot scheme for self-archiving of journal articles by some researchers, and this has now become mandatory. We are also building up a retrospective archive."
Michael White added, "We are hopeful of a very positive response from researchers to the requirement to self-archive, as they will benefit from greater visibility of their work - such as increased citations from their published work, which in turn can lead to improved funding. To quantify this, they can track how often each article is viewed. Being a secure central and searchable database, STORRE acts as a record of each individual's research career and can help with research reporting exercises. The repository also conforms to open standards for metadata harvesting, enabling articles to be included in national, international and subject-based cross-repository searches. Even general internet search engines, such as google, rank results from repositories far higher than personal pages, which makes it easier for others to find their work. The figures are impressive."
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Southampton |
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The University of Southampton announced a university-wide open access mandate at the Open Repositories conference, requiring all academic staff to make all their published research available online. The University's School of Electronics and Computer Science became the first in the world to adopt a self-archiving mandate in 2001.
Professor Stevan Harnad, a founding figure of the open access movement, holds a Chair in ECS. He has welcomed the Southampton and Stirling mandates.
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