Les Carr

Professor Les Carr is a web scientist and open access advocate. He studies the impact of the web on society — the way in which the global communications infrastructure changes our personal, social and economic landscape. How does the Web threaten our privacy, the quality of our relationships, our intellectual property, our creative industries and even our high streets? At the same time, what new opportunities does it open up for new kinds of industries and new kinds of sociability?

With his colleagues and students in the Web Science Institute at the University of Southampton and with partners from industry and government, Les seeks to understand how to identify the future opportunities of the digital economy whilst trying to navigate its current challenges, to maximise the social and economic benefit that the online world offers.

Les is the Director of the Web Science Doctoral Training Centre, which trains a cohort of 80 web science PhDs to become leaders in the UK digital economy. He is a Member of Computing At Schools (CAS) Network of Excellence and runs the regional CAS Hub in Southampton and hosts the CAS Wessex conference. Les is also Director of the EPrints Repository Team which has pioneered the concept of the institutional repository with the EPrints open source platform, the ROAR international registry of Open Access repositories and the ROARMAP registry of Open Access policies.

ORCID: 0000-0002-2113-9680

Fields of expertise: digital economy, digital communications, web science, open access, repositories.