The sixth Q&A in a series exploring the current state of Open Access has been published. On this occasion the questions are answered by Eloy Rodrigues, Portuguese librarian and Director of the University of Minho’s Documentation Services.

Who better to describe what Rodrigues has contributed to the cause than de facto leader of the Open Access movement, Peter Suber? “Eloy Rodrigues led the effort to adopt an OA mandate at the University of Minho in December 2004,” he explains. “The Minho policy was one of the first two OA mandates anywhere, which makes Eloy one of the first among the effective OA advocates anywhere.”

Suber adds, “His influence has continued to grow over the years, for example, as a leader in the Portugal Open Access Science Repository (Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal or RCAAP) project, a member of the European University Association Working Group on Open Access, Chairman of the COAR Working Group on the Interoperability of Open Access Repositories, and a participant in the 10th anniversary meeting of the Budapest Open Access Initiative.”

Above all, Rodrigues’ work has shown that, when implemented correctly, Green OA is the quickest and surest way for a university to make its research freely available. This November the University of Minho’s institutional repository (RepositóriUM) will be ten years old. During its lifetime the number of items deposited in the repository (articles, conference papers, working papers, theses and dissertations, etc.) has grown from a couple of hundred to more than 23,000. Compliance with the University of Minho’s OA mandate is currently approaching 70 percent.

But how does Rodrigues view the current state of OA, and what does he feel still needs to be done? To find out, read the Q&A here:

http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/eloy-rodrigues-on-state-of-open-access.html