April 8, 2008
2 books by Prof. Boyer now online in Institutional Repository
University of Delaware, February 19, 2008

April 8, 2008
A new OSI-supported OA source book
EPT, February 29, 2008

April 8, 2008
SCOAP3: A New Model for Scholarly Communication

ARL Releases Preprint Essay

April 7, 2008
Health Institute Begins Open-Access Grant Policy

April 7, 2008
The University of Oregon joins SCOAP3

April 7, 2008
Ted Bergstrom, Maxim Massenkoff, and Martin Osborne have launched Prices and Ratings of Economic Textbooks (POET).

February 28, 2008
The state of OA policy in Australia
Open Access News, February 27, 2008

February 28, 2008
Rockefeller UP: No delay on implementing NIH policy
Open Access News, February 27, 2008

February 20, 2008
"Other schools should follow Harvard's lead"
Open Access News, February 19, 2008

February 19, 2008
Harvard passes OA mandate
Library Journal, February 14, 2008

February 13, 2008
The Case for Open Access
The Harvard Crimson, February 12, 2008

February 13, 2008
Will Harvard Become First American University To Mandate Open Access?
Library Journal, February 12, 2008

February 11, 2008
Profile of the IR at U. of British Columbia
UBC Reports, February 7, 2008

February 6, 2008
OA mandate at CIHR takes effect
See Peter Suber's comments from last September on the CIHR policy.

February 4, 2008
US physics advisory panel supports SCOAP3

January 25, 2008
PRC publishes new study of Peer Review
A new international study of over 3,000 senior authors, reviewers and editors shows that Researchers want to improve, not change, the system of Peer Review for journal articles. They believe that it helps to improve scientific communications and increases the overall quality of published papers. Alternatives such as 'open peer review' were not popular; however, some were interested in post-publication review.

January 25, 2008
First DRIVER Summit demonstrates the advancement of the European repository network and lays out further actions
On 16 and 17 January 2008, DRIVER II successfully carried out its first Summit in Goettingen, Germany. Approximately 100 invited representatives from the European Community, including representatives of the European Commission, over 20 spokespersons of European repository initiatives as well as experts in different repository related fields from Europe, the U.S., Canada and South Africa came together to discuss their experiences and concrete actions with respect to the further building of cross-country repository infrastructures.

January 23, 2008
Scientists 'obliged' to share wisdom

(from Peter Suber’s Open Access News Blog)

Brendan O'Keefe and Bernard Lane, Scientists 'obliged' to share wisdom, The Australian Higher Education, January 23, 2008. (Thanks to Colin Steele.) Excerpt:

Senator Carr [said]..."I'd like to encourage debate about the most efficient ways to make public research more available."

One aspect could be more effective use of research repositories. The minister said universities would get money promised to them under the defunct research quality framework, "but I'll be talking (to them) about how we can enhance access (to research) through the repositories".

The sector welcomed Senator Carr's initiative.

The Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies said the minister's emphasis on the obligation of researchers might point towards a call for research results to be published free on the internet.

FASTS [Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies] president Ken Baldwin...said Senator Carr's comments came at a time of "quite interesting global shift". In the US last month, President George W. Bush made it law that all research results funded by the National Institutes of Health should be published free on the internet.

"That will have major implications throughout the world of research," Professor Baldwin said. "It's a real challenge to the scientific publishing industry."

Toss Gascoigne, the executive director of the Council for the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, said it was incumbent on scientists to "have a conversation with the people who fund them".

"The public would have a new appreciation of the value of some of this work, quite a lot of which is hidden under a bushel," Mr Gascoigne said....

PS: Senator Kim Carr is also Australia's Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research. For background, see his public comments last week on the open dissemination of science

January 23, 2008
OA journal fund at Berkeley

Berkeley Research Impact Initiative:
Advancing the Impact of UC Berkeley Research

The Berkeley Research Impact Initiative (BRII) supports faculty members who want to make their journal articles free to all readers immediately upon publication.

January 22, 2008
International Call for Open Resources
Today, some of the same groups that created the Budapest movement are unveiling a new manifesto — the Cape Town Open Education Declaration — in which they call on universities and others to make more of their course and other educational materials online and free, and to encourage faculty members to work with these materials.

January 22, 2008
Blog Comments and Peer Review Go Head to Head to See Which Makes a Book Better

What if scholarly books were peer reviewed by anonymous blog comments rather than by traditional, selected peer reviewers?

That's the question being posed by an unusual experiment that begins today. It involves a scholar studying video games, a popular academic blog with the playful name Grand Text Auto, a nonprofit group designing blog tools for scholars, and MIT Press.

January 20, 2008
Health Care Reform: CED Releases Harnessing Openness to Transform American Health Care
The report looks at the production chain for healthcare from biomedical research through clinical trials to patient records and patient/caregiver interactions. It looks at publishing of research results, access to the underlying data from clinical trials, the approval of medical devices, and public health—all through the lens of how they might be improved by providing more people with more access to more information and allowing them to contribute their own insights and expertise. The public policy agenda it articulates seeks to improve healthcare through greater openness and would not require great expense of money or political capital or fundamental restructuring.

January 10, 2008
The Scientific Council of the European Research Council has released its Guidelines for Open Access.
(from Peter Suber’s Open Access News Blog)
This is an exemplary policy --kudos to all involved. First and above all, it makes OA mandatory. The embargo is reasonably short and ERC clearly hopes to make it even shorter. The policy supports central and distributed (disciplinary and institutional) repositories equally. For peer-reviewed articles, it requires deposit upon publication, before the embargo runs, supporting what I call the dual deposit/release strategy or what Stevan Harnad calls immediate deposit / optional access. It makes no exception for resisting publishers and even seems to apply to the published editions of articles, not just the authors' peer-reviewed manuscripts. And it unambiguously extends the OA policy from articles to data.

January 9, 2008
Open Choice
... In response to the trend to freer access, The Journal of Neuroscience will now offer an Open Choice option for articles submitted on or after January 1, 2008. By paying a fee, authors can have their articles freely available on the Journal's website as soon as they are published. The fee is currently $1,250 for a Brief Communications article and $2,500 for a regular article. ...

December 17, 2007
Show me the data
The integrity of data, and transparency about their acquisition, are vital to science. The impact factor data that are gathered and sold by Thomson Scientific (formerly the Institute of Scientific Information, or ISI) have a strong influence on the scientific community, affecting decisions on where to publish, whom to promote or hire, the success of grant applications, and even salary bonuses. Yet, members of the community seem to have little understanding of how impact factors are determined, and, to our knowledge, no one has independently audited the underlying data to validate their reliability.