Liège University awards honorary doctorate to Stevan Harnad | Electronics and Computer Science (ECS)

"For his two decades of contributions to Open Access, Stevan Harnad, Professor of Computer Science in Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, is to be awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Liège in Belgium on Wednesday 25 September. In 1994, the year he came to the University of Southampton, Stevan Harnad launched his 'Subversive Proposal', which helped lead to what eventually became the worldwide Open Access (OA) movement. The proposal was that all scholars and scientists should post their peer-reviewed articles free for all online. The proposal was only heeded by a minority even within his own field of cognitive sciences, and even after he commissioned an ECS graduate student in 1997 to create CogPrints, an OA repository for cognitive science papers from all over the world, hosted by Southampton. So in 1999 Stevan commissioned an ECS postgraduate student to convert CogPrints into free, open source generic software -- EPrints -- with which every university could create its own repository in which it could make its own research output OA. EPrints has since been adopted and emulated worldwide, but the repositories (all registered in the Registry of Open Access Repositories [ROAR] (created and hosted by Southampton) still remained largely empty of their intended OA contents. In 2001, based on the finding of Lawrence reported in Nature, that computer science articles that were made freely accessible online were cited much more than those that were not, Stevan launched a series of studies (as part of the JISC-funded Open Journals and Open Citation Linking projects in ECS) that tested and demonstrated that the same OA citation advantage occurs in all disciplines. But even the prospect of enhanced citation impact was still not enough to induce more than a minority of researchers worldwide to self-archive their articles, so in 2003, the Head of ECS, Wendy Hall, adopted the world's first OA self-archiving mandate, requiring that all ECS article output be self-archived in the ECS OA repository. And it worked: Since then almost 100% of ECS research output is OA (and enjoying the citation advantage). But what about the rest of the world -- or even the rest of the University of Southampton? (The world’s first university-wide OA self-archiving mandate was adopted by Queensland University of Technology in Australia, also in 2003, and Europe’s first was adopted by the University of Minho in Portugal, in 2004). In 2004 the Parliamentary Select Committee on Science and Technology called for evidence on OA. The Committee’s resulting recommendation was that all UK universities and funding councils should mandate OA self-archiving, just as ECS had urged and done. In the ensuing years OA self-archiving mandates were adopted by additional UK universities (including Southampton)as well as all the RCUK funding councils, all registered in the Registry of Open Access Repository Mandatory Archiving Policies (ROARMAP), created and hosted by Southampton ..."