Repository ranking underlines Southampton’s global influence

The University of Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) EPrints repository of research publications is now one of the top ten in the world, according to the official world ranking of institutional repositories (published this week). Not only was ECS the first academic institution in the world to adopt a self-archiving mandate (2001), it also created the first repository-creating software (EPrints), now used by institutions worldwide. The School’s digital library researchers have also demonstrated the citation-impact advantage of self-archiving, and continue to maintain the Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR), tracking the number, size and growth of institutional repositories worldwide, as well as ROARMAP, tracking the global growth of self-archiving mandates by institutions and funders.