Open Access at the University of Southampton. Pushing the boundaries and the art of the possible.
Case study :
« At the University of Southampton researchers, academics, service providers and senior management have been working together for ten years in a partnership to underpin an “open” approach to research and learning resources based on the repository model.
Innovative research at the School of Electronics and Computer Science set out the technical building blocks for making research available on open access. As a next step, the JISC- funded TARDis project (Targeting Academic Research for Dissemination and Disclosure) successfully brought together internal departments – the Library, the University Computing Service and the Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia Research Group within Electronics and Computer Science. Together, they committed to support an institutional strategy for making scholarly communication both more visible and more accessible. This partnership approach remains key and has allowed Southampton to extend open access into other areas including the learning repository.
At institutional level the value of the research repository has been strongly identified with the University’s strategies for the RAE/REF, and with the institutional response to meeting funder mandates. The University of Southampton became the first university in the UK to adopt a formal requirement that all academic staff make access to their published research available online through the institutional repository. Senior management support has been crucial as has been the promotion of the benefits to the author. Institutional strategy often means less to individual academics and researchers than how the services provide benefits to them. It is therefore important to link open access to the research and learning process, and to the benefits of increasing visibility. A pragmatic approach combined with a strongly visible support service has underpinned the way in which open access has been developed institutionally at Southampton.
The University’s main priorities going forward are to increase the amount of open content by encouraging the direct deposit of postprints in the research repository and increasing the range of material across disciplines in the learning repository. In parallel Southampton will experiment with scoping options to link access to research data initially at metadata level. »
URL : http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/topics/opentechnologies/openaccess/institutionsandoa/southampton.aspx
Harnad is discussing. 
OPENING THE OPEN DOOR: ADOPT THE LEAST DEMANDING OPEN ACCESS MANDATE FIRST
Frankel & Nestor’s helpful advice to authors about rights retention is very well-informed and valuable, except for this:
« Finally, we must be careful to distinguish between a license mandate and a deposit mandate. Whereas a licensewhether exclusive or nonexclusivetransfers some amount of rights in the article, a deposit mandate merely allows for (or requires) a physical copy of the article to be given to the institution. Simply handing over a physical copy of an article, or draft of that article, is not sufficient under copyright law to constitute a grant of any rights, as physical possession of an article does not give the owner of that copy any copyright rights in work embodied in the copy.
« Deposit mandates certainly are useful for institutions to retain the knowledge and scholarship of its faculty members. Indeed, some journals already permit institutional depositories. But such permissions do not address the increasing loss of knowledge in the academic community caused by the ever- increasing costs of journal subscriptions and the inability for academic institutions to keep up with shouldering the burden of those costs. The open access policy goes beyond a simple university depositorylimited in size, scope, and, most universal scope and accessibility. By combining the nonexclusive license discussed in this paper with a deposit policy, an institution can create open access. »
Simon J. Frankel and Shannon M. Nestor (2010) Opening the Door: How Faculty Authors Can Implement an Open Access Policy at Their Institutions. http://sciencecommons.org/wp-content/uploads/Opening-the-Door.pdf
(1) Most authors are not providing Open Access (OA) to their refereed research output at all today. (Only 20% are providing it.)
(2) OA Mandates are coming, but still extremely slowly.
(3) It is much harder to mandate more than less.
(4) A license mandate is much more than a deposit mandate.
(5) The majority of journals (60%+) already endorse immediate Open Access self-archiving of the author’s refereed final draft.
(6) A deposit mandate will immediately provide OA to 60%+ instead of just 20% of refereed research.
(7) The repository’s eprint-request button can provide almost-OA to all the rest for the time being.
(8) So what is urgently needed is at least a deposit mandate, today.
(9) Re-use rights are not urgent, and will be much easier to get once we already have universally mandated OA.
The Gratis Green OA self-archiving door is open already: All institutions and funders need do is mandate entry. Rights retention and Libre OA can come later.
Harnad, S. (2008) Waking OA’s “Slumbering Giant”: The University’s Mandate To Mandate Open Access. New Review of Information Networking 14(1): 51 – 68
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/17298/3/giantpaper1.pdf
Harnad, S. (2008) Which Green OA Mandate Is Optimal? Open Access Archivangelism December 7 2008. http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/494-guid.html
Harnad, S. (2010) The Immediate Practical Implication of the Houghton Report: Provide Green Open Access Now. Prometheus, 28 (1). pp. 55-59. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/18514/
Sale, A., Couture, M., Rodrigues, E., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2010) Open Access Mandates and the « Fair Dealing » Button. In: Dynamic Fair Dealing: Creating Canadian Culture Online (Rosemary J. Coombe & Darren Wershler, Eds.) http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/18511/
Suber, Peter (2008) Green/gold OA and gratis/libre OA. Open Access News August 2, 2008 http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/08/greengold-oa-and-gratislibre-oa.html