The University of Oviedo in Asturias, one of Spain’s autonomous communities, is studying ways to increase its use of free and open source software, reports La Nueva España, a newspaper. Using free and open source software will help to avoid the use of unlicensed software, the university management is quoted as saying in December.

The university is also looking into using free software solutions to reduce academic plagiarism.

The newspaper notes how Asturia’s one and only university is at the bottom end of the annual ranking of universities that use free software (Ranking de Universidades en Software Libre, RuSL.

The RuSL ranking, last updated in April 2016, uses 66 criteria to group Spain’s 76 universities according to their use and teaching of free and open source software technology. According to the 2016 RuSL press release, free and open source software is increasingly important to Spain’s universities.

The top-three universities in the RuSL list are the Miguel Hernández University of Elche in the province of Alicante (Valencia), the University of Granada, and the University of La Laguna (Tenerife).

Starting in 2012, RuSL is compiled by PortalProgramas, an online market place for software applications, to help promote the use of free and open source software.

More information:

La Nueva España news item (in Spanish)
Ranking de Universidades en Software Libre (in Spanish)