100th Open Access mandate reached!

The worldwide tally of Open Access mandatory policies reached the milestone of 100 when on Friday 16 October the University of Salford announced its policy, which will be implemented from January 2010.

The announcement from Salford says, "The University has announced its intention to implement plans that will make free, easily accessible research knowledge available to a world wide audience via the University of Salford Institutional Repository (USIR) portal.

In a recent keynote speech, Vice-Chancellor Professor Martin Hall said: "Openly disseminated knowledge is good knowledge."

For the last two years the University has been implementing systems to enable the University's research active staff to deposit their findings and research into the repository.

The University of Salford is pleased to now declare that from the 1st January 2010, it will be implementing a mandatory policy for all research active staff to deposit research information into the repository. This means that as of January 2010, the University of Salford will officially be an Open Access University. "

Shortly after this announcement of a new mandatory policy came another, this time from a US research laboratory, the National Center for Atmospheric Research. NCAR is the first NSF-sponsored laboratory to introduce an Open Access policy.