An invaluable friend to Open Access, University of Southampton’s Professor Wendy Hall, as Head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science from 2002 to 2007, not only presided over the adoption and implementation of the world’s first Green OA Self-Archiving Mandate, but she quietly went on to help get Green (ID/OA) Mandates adopted at the European level, as a founding member of the Scientific Council of the European Research Council as well as President of the British Computer Society (BCS) and member of the Prime Minister?s Council for Science and Technology. It is no small thanks to Wendy’s support that the UK in particular and Europe in general are leading the world in its inexorable progress toward the optimal and inevitable outcome for scientific and scholarly research, at long last.

And this is but one part of what Wendy has done for computer science, and science in general. (Dame Wendy was, among other things, the inventor of Microcosm, a harbinger of the Semantic Web, whose inventor — an obscure courtly figure by the name of Sir Tim Berners-Lee — has since likewise become one of Wendy’s Southampton departmental colleagues.)

Let us all celebrate her latest honour.