A key proponent of the open access movement has been Stevan Harnad, a professor in the School of Electronic and Computer Science at the University of Southampton (Harnad, 1995) whose publications on this topic are all accessible in an open manner (http://users. ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/#openaccess). Southampton University itself has been innovative
in developing repositories of open access materials (Simpson, 2006). In a briefing document on open access for the UK higher education community, the Joint Information Systems Committee defined the open access research literature as “composed of free, online copies of peer-reviewed journal articles and conference papers as well as technical reports, theses and working papers. In most cases there are no licensing restrictions on their use by readers. They can therefore be used freely for research, teaching and other purposes” (www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/publications/pub_openaccess_v2.aspx).