Stevan Harnad, Why we're doing well, The Independent, April 27, 2006. A letter to the editor. It's not online at the newspaper site, but a version is online at Stevan's blog:
The reasons for the University of Southampton’s extremely high overall web-metric rating are four:
(2) U. Southampton's Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) Department's involvement in many high-profile web projects and activities (among them the semantic web work of the web's inventor, ECS Prof. Tim Berners-Lee, the Advanced Knowledge Technologies (AKT) work of Prof. Nigel Shadbolt, and the pioneering web science contributions of Prof. Wendy Hall)
(3) The fact that since 2001 U. Southampton's ECS has had a mandate requiring that all of its research output be made Open Access on the web by depositing it in the ECS EPrints Repository, and that Southampton has a university-wide self-archiving policy (soon to become a mandate) too
(4) The fact that maximising access to research (by self-archiving it free for all on the web) maximises research usage and impact (and hence web impact). This all makes for an extremely strong Southampton web presence, as reflected in such metrics as the "G factor", which places Southampton 3rd in the UK and 25th among the world's top 300 universities or Webometrics,which places Southampton 6th in UK, 9th in Europe, and 80th among the top 3000 universities it indexes.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 4/28/2006 10:36:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
