The benefits available to universities which provide Open Access (OA) to their research were highlighted at a two-day workshop on institutional self-archiving held this week at the University of Southampton. Institutions which self-archive could experience increased ease with Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) compliance, double the amount of research exposure and impact, and gain access to advanced technologies which will revolutionise the information industry, said conference speakers. The need to perform the actions necessary to make all of the UK’s institutional research Open Access by depositing it in institutional repositories was highlighted by Professor Stevan Harnad, one of the founders of the OA worldwide movement. He told the workshop that although the UK is second in the world in terms of creating institutional repositories, many of them still lie near empty. He said that issues such as negotiating publishers’ embargoes and a means of deciding on the definitive version of research work should be shelved until the UK’s archives are filled with self-archived research. He commented: ‘We should refrain from speculating about what will be the changes in journals in 10-15 years time; right now the definitive version is in the journal. What we need first is Open Access to the author’s version, and then we can worry about developments and improvements later.’ The case for mandatory action was presented by Alma Swan from Key Perspectives. She reported that 79 per cent of UK researchers in surveys funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) on Open Access archiving said that if self-archiving were required by employers or research funders, they would comply willingly. She also revealed that institutions which self-archive gain twice as much impact for their research work than those which do not. The main reasons why they fail to do so are time constraints, lack of awareness of open access possibilities and inability to mount the data. The fact that systems are in place for self-archiving to go ahead was reinforced by the other speakers. Robert Terry of the Wellcome Trust reported new directions in research funders’ approaches to self-archiving of funded research in institutional and central OA repositories; Bill Hubbard of Nottingham University described the SHERPA Directory of Publisher policies on author self-archiving and presented the case for institutional repositories rather than central subject-based systems, and Derek Law from the Scottish Confederation of University & Research Libraries highlighted the role of the RAE in the creation of institutional repositories in Scotland. The link between Open Access and the RAE was highlighted again in the closing research colloquium -- Research Repositories: The Next 10 Years – when Professor Harnad and Professor Nigel Shadbolt, a leading expert in knowledge technology, illustrated how cite rank algorithms and semantic web technologies can be applied to Open Access systems so that performance and impact indicators can be developed.

Sir Tim was one of seven Britons who received awards in the ceremony, including author Philip Pullman, designer Sir Paul Smith, architect Lord Norman Foster, journalist Lord Bill Deedes, and fundraiser Jane Tomlinson. 'There is a real calibre of people who make our country great and proud to be British', said the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, who made the opening speech. Sir Tim said: 'I have won awards for computers, but I have never won an award for being British.'

Nanoscale Systems Integration (NSI) is the new title for one of the School of Electronics and Computer Science's eight world-leading research groups. According to Head of Group, Professor Greg Parker, NSI (previously known as Microelectronics) has undergone considerable change over the years. From initial research into Silicon microelectronic devices only, the Group’s interests now encompass MEMs/NEMs, photonic crystal circuits and devices, solar cells, new materials, atom chips, 'Lab-on-a-chip' particle manipulators, nanomagnetic materials and devices, nanophotonics, and continuing work on advanced bipolar and MOS devices.

'The theme that more exactly defines our work today is fabrication and engineering at the nanometre length scale, in order to produce small integrated systems on chips,' said Professor Parker. 'The creation and characterisation of new metamaterials will form part of the overall nanoscale system engineering. We will also draw on Biomimetics--studying living systems in order to borrow evolutionary solutions to optical and mechanical problems honed by Nature for over 50 million years.'

The NSI group will work and collaborate closely with Innos, the recently created University spin-out company that now runs and maintains the Clean-Room facility.

Nanotechnologies which can artificially change the optical properties of materials to allow light to be trapped in solar cells could greatly reduce the cost of solar energy.

Research being carried out by the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton is focusing on nanopatterning as the way to design effective solar panels.

‘By drawing features that are much smaller than the wavelength of light, photons can be confused into doing things they normally wouldn’t do,’ says Dr Darren Bagnall, of the School of Electronics and Computer Science. ‘By creating diffractive nanostructured arrays on the surface of solar cells we ensure that optical asymmetries are created that prevent light from escaping the solar cells.’

According to Dr Bagnall the light-trapping technologies could reduce the thickness of semiconductor materials needed in solar panels, and this would directly reduce the cost. The first challenge is to prove that the technology works in practice, the second key challenge will be to develop cost effective ways to produce nanopatterned layers.

The ECS approach is being applied to the £4.5M ‘Photovoltaic Materials for the 21st Century’ project which is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). Other university partners in this project are Durham, Bangor, Northumbria, Bath and Loughborough. They have teamed up with industrial partners to develop solar cells which will make it possible for manufacturers to slash the cost of solar energy by half.

Dr Bagnall comments: ‘We have already shown that we can use arrays of chiral nanostructures, such as swastikas, to change the polarisation of light, now we want to apply the same technology to photovoltaics.’

The brewing of tea formed a crucial component of a project which successfully took traditional paper laboratory books and moved them to digital formats. Now that knowledge and experience is being put to use in a subsequent project by University of Southampton computing researchers who are aiming to apply similar techniques to Bioinformatics.

The eScience project, which could revolutionize the way in which scientists share information, is appropriately called myTea. It has received funding of over £200,000 from the EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council).

The researchers, from the School of Electronics and Computer Science at Southampton, and the University of Manchester, will draw on best practice design methods learned from other eScience projects, specifically, their own SmartTea project, which explored how paper-based information from a chemistry environment could be captured in digital forms. They will also refer to the University of Manchester’s myGrid project in order to design an integrated experiment annotation capture system for bioinformaticians.

The initial exploration of the SmartTea project involved finding common ground which would enable the practices of the scientists, as recorded in their paper lab books, to be understood by the computer researchers.

‘This was crucial for us,’ said dr monica schraefel of the School of Electronics and Computer Science at Southampton. ‘In order to help the scientists record their information digitally, we needed to be able to understand exactly how they described what they were doing in their paper lab books, and what aspects of it they recorded.’

After observing a team of chemists at work in the University labs, the researchers hit on the idea of watching the chemists make tea and record it as if it were an experiment, so that the researchers could understand exactly what was happening in the process on the bench as the scientists recorded it.

Because they knew what was happening during the tea-making, they could understand how the scientists chose to record and classify important aspects of the process, or to ignore things that were not important for the “experimentâ€?.’

‘So now, instead of writing into a lab book, scientists will write into some other type of hardware, like a tablet PC,’ said monica schraefel. ‘That data is immediately written to a server so it is stored not only locally on the computer, but on the server, and therefore immediately accessible outside the lab and to other scientific communities. ’

Armed with this experience, the researchers are now moving on to the field of Bioinformatics. Although the outcome of providing more effectively organized and accessible information is the same, the problems and processes are different.

‘In the Chemistry lab we took the “bookâ€? out of the lab to capture lab processes into digital form,’ said monica schraefel. ‘The issue here is the reverse: bioinformaticians are already all digital, and ironically, that’s the problem: they create hundreds of files spread across their hard drive for an ongoing experiment, but have no easy way to associate files with an experiment. So, this time, we need to put some of the book back into the process, to help automatically generate a lab book-like view of their work to date, which they can annotate, plug into services like myGrid, or share with colleagues.

‘This work addresses one of the central planks of the eScience project,’ she added ‘—to get data from one scientific community out to another, right away, as soon as it happens.’

A meeting of international institutions which have signed up to Open Access (OA) could result in a united policy creating a huge growth in free access to research findings. The Berlin 3 Open Access Meeting: Progress in Implementing the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities will be hosted by the University of Southampton on Monday 28 February and Tuesday 1 March. The purpose of this meeting, which will include representatives from Europe, the US, India and Pakistan, is to implement the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities, which has now been signed by 55 major international research institutes since its launch in Berlin in October 2003, an initiative widely hailed at the time as world-leading. University of Southampton Professor Stevan Harnad, one of the founders of the OA worldwide movement, comments: 'The Berlin Declaration itself was only an abstract expression of the principle that scholarly and scientific research should be free online to all potential users worldwide. We now need to implement the Declaration so as to make it a practical policy which institutions that have signed can commit to adopting.' During the two-day event, representatives from some of the world's most prestigious research institutions, including France's CNRS and Germany's Max-Planck Institute, will present their experience of implementing the Berlin Declaration in their organizations. The University of Southampton will be proposing a Unified Open Access Provision Policy, as a practical way to implement the Berlin OA Declaration based on the successful approach it has recently adopted and announced. It will suggest that universities and research institutions worldwide should adopt a policy that all of their published research journal articles (whether in OA or non-OA journals) are deposited - immediately and permanently - in their own institutional OA Archives, freely accessible to all potential users worldwide (rather than just to those whose institutions can afford the access-tolls of the non-OA journals). The meeting will conclude with a discussion on implementation of the latest Berlin roadmap and a call to new organizations to sign the Declaration.

A new student branch of the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) has been established in the School of Electronics and Computer Science. The new student branch will be launched by a seminar given by Professor Lajos Hanzo, himself a Fellow of the IEEE, on Wireless Media Communications. The seminar takes place on Tuesday 1 March at 5.30 pm in Zepler Building, Seminar Room 1. The new IEEE Student Branch at ECS is one of more than 1000 branches worldwide, and 15 in the UK. The Student Branch is planning to organize a full range of activities to benefit ECS students, including regular seminars and social events, and to provide news of the latest recruitment opportunities. Professor Hanzo is Head of the Communications group in ECS, which is recognized as world-leading in its research into mobile communications. Professor Hanzo's talk, 'Wireless Multimedia Communications: A tele-presence paradism for anyone, anywhere, anytime, or the dawn of the world wide wait?' will be given on Tuesday 1 March, at 5.30 pm in Seminar Room 1, Zepler Building, and refreshments will be available. All students in ECS are welcome.

The need for the UK military to develop e-defence so that it can compete with the rest of the world will be highlighted by Professor Nigel Shadbolt next week.

His call will be made when he delivers the British Computer Society (BCS)/Royal Signals Institution (RSI) annual lecture 2005 on Web Intelligence at the National Army Museum, London on Wednesday 9 March. Professor Shadbolt, who is Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton, will focus on how Artificial Intelligence is being woven into the World Wide Web and he will review how these developments are likely to shape future military capabilities.

He will claim that the UK military is lagging behind what many of the rest of us routinely experience in terms of software and IT capabilities. Lengthy procurement processes means that from an IT perspective the equipment and software being used is often out-of-date. This is particularly acute in the area of web services.

He commented: ‘The military will have few options but to take advantage of the huge investment that the commercial and research sectors have made in web service solutions and architectures.’

Professor Shadbolt will demonstrate how the developing Semantic Web could provide web services for the military which might change how it operates.

For example, through developing information sets about locations, military units could access instant information about the geology, geography, customs and cultural and religious structures of a location before entering. Much of this content exists in various web accessible sources. Deployed military personnel often face problems when dealing with foreign languages. Web services are under development to support high quality speech and text translation. Increasingly services for diagnosis, image recognition, planning and scheduling can be delivered on the web.

Professor Shadbolt commented: ‘The UK military is starting to use this technology and indeed the concept of network enabled capability is accepted, but it lags well behind the US. The adage that information is power has always applied in military as well as business contexts. At the moment, it is hard for the military to change fast, but it needs to if it is to attain a position of information superiority.’

Southampton, Hampshire, UK – March 9th, 2005 – The latest of Microsoft’s Gen ’05 student technology roadshows comes to town at the University of Southampton on Wednesday March 9th. With hundreds of students expected to attend from colleges and universities across Hampshire, the roadshow gives students interested in technology the opportunity to see a multitude of new products and technologies in action and to find out how their interest can contribute to an exciting career, whatever their professional ambitions.

Open between 1000hrs and 1730hrs at the University of Southampton’s West Refectory, West Building, this interactive event will include hands on demonstrations of different technologies and devices including Microsoft® mobile, gaming and developer tools and technologies, a series of presentations and the chance to speak with Microsoft staff about their experiences of working for different areas of the company. Students attending will also have the chance to win prizes including a limited edition Crystal Xbox® and a Windows® Media Center.

Caroline Phillips of Microsoft’s Academia team said “The Gen ’05 tour is a key component of the Microsoft Academic Initiative and gives students a chance to see what Microsoft and technology are all about, as well as see how technology is going to be a big part of their personal lives and careers, whatever they do. Technology has a huge role to play in helping people realise their full potential, and this is even more important during their education.â€?

Eric Cooke, School Senior Tutor in the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, said, “I would like to say to all students – your career will be greatly affected by the technologies presented and discussed at Gen '05. It is an exciting event at which you will get to see the latest business and gaming technologies and discuss them with people from Microsoft and the University of Southampton. This is a fun opportunity for you to think about how technology will get into every aspect of your life: professional, personal and creative. Turn up and join in!â€?

Sarah Deane, a Microsoft Student Partner and student at the University of Southampton, added "Gen '05 gives students from all academic backgrounds the chance to see cutting edge technology and talk with Microsoft and University representatives about why it is important to their career. It's a fun and interesting day, with lots of chances to play with the latest and best technology, as well as opportunities to ask the Microsoft team questions.�

Professor Wendy Hall visited China last month to conclude an agreement with the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications (BUPT), which will now be sending up to 20 students each year on the new MSc in Software Engineering in the School of Electronics and Computer Science.

The President of BUPT is Professor Jintong Lin, who is himself a graduate of ECS, having undertaken his doctoral research in the School in electronic engineering. Professor Lin was recently voted China’s leading University President, and in honour of this and his leadership of BUPT, Professor Hall presented him with a certificate naming him as a Distinguished Alumnus of ECS.

‘It was a great pleasure to visit Professor Lin at BUPT’, said Wendy Hall. ‘He is an extremely loyal alumni of the School and very proud of the time he spent at Southampton. We now look forward to welcoming BUPT students to our MSc programme and increasing our links with this very prestigious Chinese university.’

Professor Hall visited Beijing as part of the University delegation led by the Vice-Chancellor, Professor Bill Wakeham, who signed the formal agreement with BUPT on behalf of the University of Southampton.