Summary: Adopted in January 2003, the self-archiving mandate of the University of Southampton Department of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) was the world's first. It has since served as a model for a growing number of such mandates worldwide. (As of October 2007, 32 funder and institutional/departmental Green OAself-archiving mandates have been adopted, and 8 more proposed.) In 2004-5, two large international, interdisciplinary author surveys by Alma Swan had predicted that the willing compliance rate for such self-archiving mandates would be over 80%. In 2005-6, Arthur Sale estimated from data on actual depositing behaviour in Australian repositories that mandates would reach Swan's predicted compliance rate in about two years.
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.
