UCL adopts UK's 22nd Green OA Self-Archiving Mandate; Planet's 84th

From: Stevan Harnad <amsciforum_at_GMAIL.COM>
Date: Wed, 3 Jun 2009 08:28:30 -0400

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The United Kingdom continues to lead the world in Open Access:

University College London (UCL) has just adopted the UK's 22nd (and
the world's 84th) mandate to make all of its research output Open
Access (by depositing it in UCL's Institutional Repository, UCL
Eprints). 

With its 13 funder mandates and 9 institutional/departmental
mandates so far, the UK still has the planet's highest proportion of
Open Access Mandates. 

But the world is catching up (see Figure)!

Dr. Alma Swan of Key Perspectives and University of Southampton, has
just documented how mandates to provide Open Access to research
output have almost doubled globally in the year that has elapsed
since Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences adopted
the world?s 44th Open Access mandate in May 2008.

The world's first Open Access mandate was adopted in 2002 by the
University of Southampton's School of Electronics and Computer
Science (ECS). Southampton had previously designed, in 2000, the
first free, Open Source software for creating Open Access
Institutional Repositories, Eprints, now used the world over.

In 2004 the UK Parliamentary Select Committee on Science and
Technology (as urged by evidence provided by Southampton University
and Loughborough University) recommended ?that all UK higher
education institutions establish institutional repositories on which
their published output can be stored and from which it can be read,
free of charge, online [and] that Research Councils and other
Government funders mandate their funded researchers to deposit a copy
of all of their articles in this way.? Research Councils UK went on
in 2006-2008  to make a clean sweep, with all seven councils
mandating Open Access in 2006-2008.

But Alma Swan's analysis shows that the UK is at last going to lose
its lead, as the global growth spurt of mandates we had all been
awaiting appears to have begun.

The globalization of Open Access mandates is of course something that
all UK universities heartily welcome as a win/win outcome, optimal
and inevitable for research and researchers worldwide. Open access is
essentially reciprocal. The only way every university on the planet
can gain open access to the research output of every other university
on the planet is by each providing open access to its own research
output: "Self-archive unto others as you would have them self-archive
unto you.?
Received on Wed Jun 03 2009 - 13:30:07 BST