Welcome to the SPARC Open Access Newsletter, issue #127
November 2, 2008
by Peter SuberRead this issue online
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/11-02-08.htm
Contents
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SOAN is published and sponsored by the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC).
http://www.arl.org/sparc/Additional support is provided by Data Conversion Laboratory (DCL), experts in converting research documents to XML.
http://www.dclab.com/public_access.aspAn open letter to the next President of the United States
Dear Senators McCain and Obama,
You both have plans and policies to solve the grave problems facing the nation. I'm writing to add one tool to your toolkit: "open access" (OA) to publicly-funded research. A national commitment to make the non-classified results of federally-funded research freely available online would be good for research, good for the economy, good for taxpayers, and good for your own high-priority plans and policies.
Both of you have taken positions close to open access. In June 2006, Senator McCain called for federal policies "to encourage open exchange of data and results of research conducted by agency scientists" (more to prevent Bush-style censorship of government scientists than provide free online access), and in December 2007 he called for OA to the publicly-funded reports from the Congressional Research Service.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2006/06/nsb-letter-and-mccain-amendment-call.html
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007/12/bill-to-mandate-oa-for-crs-reports.html
In May 2007, Senator Obama and several other Democratic candidates called for OA to the televised debates of the Democratic primary election, and in November 2007 he called for greater public access to environmental data.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007/05/oa-to-presidential-debate-videos.html
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007/11/obama-wants-greater-access-to.html
More recently, both of you supported OA to the televised footage of the presidential debates. Senator McCain called for fair-use scrutiny before executing takedown requests for YouTube videos. Senator Obama appointed Harold Varmus his chief science advisor. Varmus is a 1989 Nobel laureate, previous director of the NIH, co-founder of the Public Library of Science, and major figure in the worldwide OA movement.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/us-presidential-candidates-support-oa.html
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2008/10/mccain-campaign-feels-dmca-sting
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/09/harold-varmus-advises-barack-obama-on.html
Both of you lean in the direction of OA, but neither of you has discussed existing or expanded federal policies to require OA for publicly-funded research. My concern is not that you will oppose those policies but that you may overlook opportunities for integrating OA with your own policy priorities. I'm writing to show how OA would complement the plans and policies you already have in mind, and to show the need to protect it from special interests lobbying to block it.
* Both of you recognize the menacing problems of global warming, our dependence on foreign oil, and our deepening recession. When crises occur together, they sometimes carry the added complication that steps to mitigate one would only aggravate another. But both of you recognize that our climate crisis, oil crisis, and economic crisis have the opposite property, and that at least one common strategy would make progress against all of them at once (even if it turns out to be just a small part of the overall solution). Both of you recognize that clean energy, energy independence, and economic recovery would all benefit from an aggressive national commitment to green research, green technology, and green jobs. In different ways, you have both described a national green energy program to create clean energy options to reduce our carbon footprint, domestic energy options to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, and jobs and exports in an expanding new economic sector to restore our financial health and stability.
To make headway on green energy we will have to pursue a bold program of green research. For example, we'll have to research clean and renewable sources of power, including battery power, biofuels, flex fuels, geothermal power, hydroelectric power, hydrogen fuel cells, natural gas, nuclear power, solar power, tidal power, wave power, and wind power. We'll have to research green solutions beyond new sources of power, such as anaerobic digestion, carbon capture, conservation, geoengineering, greenhouse gases, mass transit, recycling, and reforestation. We'll have to research low-impact technologies of all kinds, from light bulbs and microprocessors to automobiles and assembly lines, new increments of efficiency for all forms of energy production and use, and the economic and environmental impacts of all the above.
Whatever the details, significant advances in green energy will require significant research, and a significant part of that research, like all scientific research, will have to be funded by the federal government.
Here's where OA comes in: OA will accelerate that research, make it more useful, and bring it within reach of everyone who can apply it or build on it. As the primary funder of green research, the federal government will be in a unique position to amplify its impact by making it OA. OA is the fourth step in a coordinated strategy of identifying research priorities, funding the research, undertaking the research, and disseminating the results.
* A common assumption of previous administrations has been that publicly-funded research, once completed, automatically enters an effective dissemination system and quickly finds its way to all those who can make use of it. The assumption is false. In the age of print, the system was very ineffective, but at least publicly-funded research was disseminated about as effectively as the system allowed. Not every library could subscribe to every journal, and access gaps were widespread. But the system failures were excusable: print publishing was expensive, prices were reasonable (until the mid-1970s when they started to rise faster than inflation), and gaps were unavoidable.
In the age of the internet, however, the assumption is still false, and the system failures are no longer excusable. The assumption is not false because publishers haven't moved online or because researchers don't have connectivity. It's false because most online journals still use the business models of print journals and because they still raise their prices several times faster than inflation. Print journals left access gaps when libraries couldn't afford them, and most online journals leave access gaps for the same reason. In fact, because the volume of published literature is growing so fast, and because the prices of scholarly journals are growing so much faster than library budgets, the percentage of new research literature accessible to the average researcher or library declines every year.
We can't afford to continue acting on this false assumption. More than ever the nation depends on the results of new research, and more than ever it depends on fixing our dysfunctional research dissemination system.
Non-OA publishers have their reasons for not changing business models. But the government has its reasons for providing public access to publicly-funded research, and it can act on its own without waiting for publishers to change their business models and without compelling them to change.
OA is a low-cost, high-yield supplement to the current system, and your administration can implement it without violating copyrights, amending copyright law, bypassing peer review, or regulating publishers. Policies to guarantee it have been around long enough to refine and debug. One of the most successful examples anywhere is at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH).
* In December 2007 an appropriations bill passed by both houses of Congress and signed by the President instructed the NIH to require OA for NIH-funded research, strengthening a weaker version of the same policy in effect since May 2005. When NIH grantees publish the results of their research, the new policy requires them to deposit copies of their peer-reviewed manuscripts in PubMed Central, an OA repository run by the agency. The policy requires deposit at the time the articles are accepted for publication, but allows an embargo period of up to 12 months after publication before PMC releases its OA copy.
Some publishers strongly oppose the NIH policy and lobby hard against it. Many more publishers have gracefully accommodated the policy, but there's no doubt that the resistance of the publishers behind the anti-OA lobbying campaign is more visible than the adaptation of the rest. There's also no doubt that the anti-OA lobbying has been marked by distortion and misinformation. The publishing lobby has argued that OA is a form of censorship. It has argued that risks for conventional, non-OA publishers are risks for peer review itself --although there are now more than 3,700 peer-reviewed OA journals, with more every week, and the money to support OA at every peer-reviewed journal is tied up in subscriptions to non-OA journals. It has claimed that the NIH policy forces publishers to "surrender" their articles --although the policy is about archiving copies, not manipulating originals, it doesn't apply to the published editions of articles, it doesn't violate, seize, or nullify any of their rights, and publishers have their eyes open when they agree to publish works by authors bound by an NIH funding contract.
Above all, the publishing lobby has argued that the NIH policy violates copyright. The policy is entirely lawful, but the publishing lobby keeps playing the copyright card because it knows it would be a legal trump. When it got a hearing before the House Judiciary Committee in September, it couldn't point to any instances of actual infringement and wisely refrained even from claiming infringement.
Longer response to the censorship argument
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/02-02-07.htm#frpaa
Longer response to the peer review argument
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/09-02-07.htm#peerreview
Longer response to the "surrender" and copyright arguments
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/10-02-08.htm#nih
Let me digress for moment on the copyright objection. It will shed light on the publishing lobby's tactics and show the sense in which the NIH policy is not only lawful, but battle-tested and ready to extend to other federal funding agencies.
All sides understand that if publishers held full copyright in these research articles, then the NIH would need publisher permission before providing OA to its own copies. To get around this problem, the NIH policy requires grantees not to transfer full copyright to publishers. NIH-funded researchers retain the right to authorize OA. They may transfer all their other rights to a publisher, and typically do. OA through the NIH is authorized by the copyright holders, and publishers only acquire a package of rights subject to that prior authorization. When NIH-funded authors approach publishers, they don't merely ask "will you publish my article?" but "will you publish it under these terms?" It's a business proposition which publishers may take or leave, and publishers are virtually unanimous in taking it.
When publishers say that the NIH policy violates their rights, they are being careless with truth. Authors have the right to transfer all, some, or none of their rights to publishers. Publishers may have gotten used to the custom in which authors transferred all their rights, and may prefer it, but they can't pretend that it's an entitlement or a requirement of copyright law. Their real complaint is that authors are lawfully exercising their own rights under copyright law, and that publishers now acquire fewer rights than they want to acquire and fewer than they used to acquire. Their real complaint is that their chief supplier is offering a critical resource on less attractive terms than in the past, though still free of charge.
It does not violate publisher rights for authors to drive a harder bargain and transfer less than the full bundle of copyright. Nor does it violate publisher rights for authors to use the right they retain to authorize OA. Publishers have an undiminished right to refuse to publish work by NIH-funded authors, and an undiminished ability to hold and exercise the rights they do acquire from authors.
If the NIH policy triggered actual infringement, publishers would say so. They would go to court, where they have a remedy under existing law. But instead they have gone to Congress to change the law, creating at once a threat to a valuable policy and proof that the NIH policy is consistent with current copyright law.
* You will be under immense pressure to tilt our unbalanced copyright law further toward the content industry, especially as the trend continues for US exports to depend less on manufactured goods and more on intellectual property. The trend is real and you may even want to work with the content industry to promote or maximize those exports. But you can support copyright exports without giving up on balance in copyright law or favoring publishers at the expense of authors and readers.
You can support the legitimate interests of this legitimate industry without harming science and innovation. But to do so, you must see how scientific research differs from music, movies, and novels. Science thrives when we lift restrictions on access and use, and suffers when we tighten them, the opposite of royalty-driven intellectual property. Scholarly journals don't pay authors, who can therefore consent to OA without losing revenue. Universities pay scholars in part to free them from the market and free them to publish what they find to be true and important, even if only handful of people in the whole world care to read it or are in a position to understand it. Universities reward scholars for their research publications, creating incentives to publish entirely unrelated to the market value of their publications.
Research articles differ sharply from other categories of copyrighted content, where authors are paid by publishers, where author rewards are proportional to sales, where the temporary monopoly of copyright is an essential incentive for author creativity, and where the publisher's interest in limiting circulation to paying customers also serves the author's interest.
To advance the interests of the larger copyright industry as if academic publishing were just like music, movies, and novels would have the perverse effect of locking up knowledge, reducing its impact, and slowing research. OA, by contrast, accelerates research and amplifies its impact, not only for researchers but for the entire economy.
As John Houghton and Peter Sheehan argued in 2006: "With the United State's GERD [Gross Expenditure on Research and Development] at USD 312.5 billion and assuming social returns to R&D of 50%, a 5% increase in access and efficiency [their conservative estimate] would have been worth USD 16 billion."
http://www.cfses.com/documents/wp23.pdf
OA is an investment in the national economy, not just a straight path to research productivity. It lowers the barriers to new technologies, new manufacturing processes, new goods and services, and informed decision-making in every area from healthcare to environmental protection, economic regulation, and public safety. To date publishers have produced no evidence that OA reduces their revenues. But even if they produce such evidence in years to come, the losses must be measured against the gains to health, manufacturing, commerce, and GDP. Even if Coolidge was right that the nation's business is business, it doesn't follow that we should subordinate the public interest in science and research to the narrow interests of academic journal publishers, who wish to be the sole outlet for publicly-funded research and limit its circulation with skyrocketing prices.
The next president will inherit a miserable, failing economy and a magnificent, succeeding public access policy. It would be tragic to let preoccupation with the former hide the ways in which the latter could help the cause.
* One priority for the new administration should be to protect the NIH policy from the special interests trying to overturn it. Part of that protection is simply to be aware of the policy and its value, and to be aware of the misrepresentations and special pleading used by the publishing lobby to oppose it.
A more concrete part of that protection is to appoint a worthy successor to Dr. Elias Zerhouni, who stepped down in October as the Director of the NIH. Zerhouni was a strong friend of OA, and saw the agency through the turbulent transition period in which the OA policy was drafted, vetted, adopted, refined, and defended. The next director will be critical for the future of OA at the NIH. It will be one of your most important early appointments.
We need the NIH policy both for its direct impact on medical research and healthcare, and for its indirect impact on access policies at other federal agencies. If the publishing lobby succeeds in killing the policy, the hope of extending it to the Department of Energy, National Science Foundation, Environmental Protection Agency, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and other agencies central to the national green energy program, would die with it. A bill now before Congress to kill the policy would expressly block similar policies at every federal agency.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/10-02-08.htm#nih
* After securing the NIH policy, the next priority for OA should be to generalize the policy across the federal government. Without this, our dysfunctional research dissemination system will thwart even a fine-tuned and well-funded green research program.
If the country reaffirms the NIH policy in the face of the publishing lobby, then it will reaffirm the principle of public access to publicly-funded research which it endorsed in January 2004 when it joined 33 other nations in signing the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Declaration on Access to Research Data From Public Funding.
http://www.oecd.org/document/0,2340,en_2649_34487_25998799_1_1_1_1,00.html
Apart from adopting the NIH policy, however, the US has not lived up to the principle it has endorsed.
We need to extend NIH-like policies first to the agencies participating in the green energy program and then to all agencies funding non-classified research. One model for this is the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA, S.2695), introduced in the Senate by John Cornyn (R-TX) in May 2006. The FRPAA approach was to require OA at all federal agencies spending more than $100 million/year in extramural research or research conducted by non-employees. At the time, 11 agencies fell into that category: the Environmental Protection Agency, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, National Science Foundation, and the cabinet-level Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, and Transportation. FRPAA not only generalized the NIH policy, but improved upon it by capping the permissible embargo at six months.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/05-02-06.htm#frpaa
FRPAA allowed different agencies to adopt different policies, provided they conform to common guidelines laid down in the bill. But even if other agencies choose to diverge in small ways from the NIH policy, they will have much to learn from the failings of the weak and ineffectual NIH policy before Congress stepped in to strengthen it last year. Other agencies should understand what the NIH policy now requires, how and why it differs from the earlier, weaker version of the policy, how it's implemented, why it's lawful, and what tactics to expect from the publishing lobby. They could even, if they wished, adopt the NIH's repository software, which is now portable and ready for use elsewhere.
* In short, it's not enough to fund the right research in the right amounts. We must make sure it reaches everyone who could apply it, build on it, or use it to create useful technologies or new jobs and businesses. A national interest in green research is inseparable from a national interest in access to that research.
We can't afford to waste even part of our investment in new knowledge by locking that knowledge behind a price wall, any more than we can afford to ship food to a disaster zone and lock it in a warehouse near the tarmac.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/07-02-08.htm#lastmile
The financial crisis and $700 billion bailout will make it very difficult to *increase* our investment in research, despite the compelling case to do so. But whether we increase research budgets, hold steady, or even cut them back, it will be more important than ever to maximize at least the *return* on our large national investment in research. That is the special job of OA. By making research available to everyone who can use it, OA maximizes the usefulness of research. By making research available to everyone with an internet connection, OA maximizes the reach and distribution of research. OA maximizes the chances that promising research will be noticed, confirmed, connected, extended, and translated into practical applications.
We could evaluate the policy of OA for publicly-funded research on its own, apart from temporary national needs and interests. OA does very well under that sort of scrutiny, satisfying important criteria such as fairness to taxpayers, open government, fiscal responsibility, and preventing private interests from creating artificial scarcity to a public good. But at the same it needlessly truncates the supporting argument. Even if OA is a taxpayer's right, it's also a prudent means to make research more rapid and effective. It makes useful research more useful, and its value and urgency depend on the value and urgency of research itself. The more knowledge matters, the more it matters to make that knowledge OA. For that reason, we must also evaluate OA as an impact amplifier for the research projects we have identified as national priorities. OA isn't just a good idea on its own, regardless of temporary needs and interests. It's a good idea entailed by the good reasons to undertake a national program of green research in pursuit of green energy, green technology, and green jobs.
* Here are some related articles, studies, and resources.
John McCain's campaign home page
http://www.johnmccain.com/
Barack Obama's campaign home page
http://www.barackobama.com/
Google "In Quotes". A five-year compendium of quotations from major US political figures, allowing users to compare what two any two of them, such as McCain and Obama, have said on a given topic.
http://labs.google.com/inquotes/
These terms bring up quotations from both candidates: climate change, conservation, energy, energy independence, global warming, greenhouse gases, greenhouse gas emissions, infrastructure, nuclear, research, solar, wind. These terms bring up quotations from one candidate but not both: clean energy, fuel-efficient, fuel efficiency, green jobs, green technology, National Institutes of Health, NIH, renewable energy, research budgets. These terms bring up quotations from neither candidate: federally funded, geothermal, open access, public access, publicly funded, research funds, research funding, research grants, taxpayer funded.
American Civil Liberties Union, Actions for Restoring America: How to Begin Repairing the Damage to Freedom in America After Bush, October 20, 2008. Includes a section on Freedom of Information (Priority 3 for the First 100 Days) and a section on Scientific Freedom (Priority 16 for the First Year).
http://www.aclu.org/transition/
Annenberg Research Network on International communication, Campaign 2008: USC Annenberg Technology And Media Policy Watch, October 15, 2008. A report criticizing "both campaigns for a lack of leadership in addressing controversial issues of intellectual property." The authors "found surprising silence from both political parties on what the report called an 'era-defining' set of issues, including application of the fair use doctrine and the role of the public domain in the creation of digital culture."
http://arnic.info/policywatch.php
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-10/uosc-ure101408.php
Rebecca Blakeley, CRS Reports to the People! Free Government Information, October 27, 2008. Calls on the next administration to provide OA to CRS Reports.
http://freegovinfo.info/node/2086
Matt Haughey, How to get my nerd vote, A Whole Lotta Nothing, October 21, 2008. Calls for "Public Domain dumps of every photograph, recording, film, and publication commissioned by the government in an easy to retrieve place."
http://a.wholelottanothing.org/2008/10/how-to-get-my-nerd-vote.html
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/oa-to-win-nerd-vote.html
Lawrence Lessig, Copyright and Politics Don't Mix, New York Times, October 20, 2008. An op-ed on how copyright law is interfering with the presidential campaign. Among other things, Lessig calls for "the law [to] be revised, bringing focus to the contexts in which its important economic incentives are needed, and removing it from contexts where it isn't."
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/21/opinion/21lessig.html
Let's Save Science! Inside the Innovation 2008 Science Policy Conference, Discover, October 29, 2008.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/realitybase/2008/10/29/inside-the-innovation-2008-science-policy-conference/
Letter from 76 American Nobel laureates in support of Barack Obama, based on his positions on science and research. (It doesn't mention OA.) Undated but sometime in October 2008.
http://sefora.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/nobel_letter_v6.pdf
OMB Watch, Draft recommendations on government transparency for the next President, October 21, 2008. A section (pp. 50-53) is devoted to "Scientific Openness and the Media" but it's less concerned with OA than preventing Bushite censorship of government scientists.
http://www.ombwatch.org/article/articleview/4393/1/1?TopicID=1
http://www.ombwatch.org/info/21stRightToKnowDraft-Revised.pdf
Project on Government Oversight, Recommended Good Government Reforms for Presidential Transition Teams, October 20, 2008. Recommends OA for all "new government-generated or government-collected information that is not exempt" from the Freedom of Information Act.
http://www.pogo.org/p/government/ga-081020-transition.html
ScienceDebate 2008. McCain and Obama's written answers to 14 questions on science policy. I submitted a question on OA to publicly-funded research, but it was one of 3,400+ questions which didn't make the cut.
http://www.sciencedebate2008.com/www/index.php?id=42
Heather West, Next President Has “Open” Opportunity, Center for Democracy and Technology, October 29, 2008. Calls for libre OA to government information, but doesn't mention publicly-funded research.
http://blog.cdt.org/2008/10/29/next-president-has-open-opportunity/
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Round-up
Here's what happened, or what I noticed, since the last issue of the newsletter, emphasizing action and policy over scholarship and opinion. I put the most important items first, with double asterisks, and otherwise cluster them loosely by topic. Most of the time I link to blog posts at Open Access News (where I am now assisted by Gavin Baker), not to the sources themselves, because I only want to use one link per item and the blog posts usually bring many relevant links together.
** Springer bought BioMed Central and became the world's largest OA publisher. Springer CEO Derk Haank described OA as "a sustainable part of STM publishing, and not an ideological crusade."
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/springer-buys-biomed-central.html
** Switzerland's ETH Zürich (Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich) adopted an OA mandate.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/eth-zrich-adopts-oa-mandate.html
** The University of Glasgow adopted an OA mandate
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/u-of-glasgow-adopts-oa-mandate.html
** Spain's Ministry for Innovation and Science is drafting a new "law on science" which includes language, currently vague, on OA for publicly-funded research. Comments and suggestions will be welcome until late December.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/11/oa-in-new-spanish-science-law.html
** Six scholars from four research universities in Hong Kong proposed a strong OA policy for publicly-funded research in Hong Kong. The proposal is addressed to Hong Kong's chief funding agency (the Research Grants Council / University Grants Committee) but has already been endorsed by the University Research Committee of Hong Kong University.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/proposed-oa-policy-for-hong-kong.html
** The participants in the Open Access and Research Conference 2008 (Brisbane, September 24-25, 2008) issued the Brisbane Declaration, calling for OA to publicly-funded research, an IR and policy to fill it at every university, use of the IR for research assessment, and deposit at the time of acceptance for publication.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/brisbane-declaration-on-oa.html
** Participants in the Students for Free Culture conference (Berkeley, October 10-13, 2008) released the draft Wheeler Declaration, laying out five criteria for an open university.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/wheeler-declaration-for-open-university.html
** The Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) officially launched on Open Access Day.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/launch-of-open-access-scholarly.html
** Australia's National Academies Forum endorsed OA and promised to "act strongly" to promote it.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/australia-naf-endorses-oa.html
** Janez Potocnik, European Commissioner for Science and Research, told Wim Liebrand, Director of SURF, that the EC "will encourage all recipients of EU subsidies to make published scientific/scholarly articles available to the public."
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/eu-strengthens-its-support-for-oa.html
** Google and the book publishers who sued to stop the Google library project have reached a settlement. Google will continue to scan copyrighted OP books, pay publishers for past scans, share revenue with publishers in the future, sell subscription access to its scanned copyrighted books, offer free access through special terminals in libraries, facilitate the buying and borrowing of scanned books, and create an ASCAP-like system to pay authors for online usage of their work. The underlying fair use question remains unresolved.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/google-and-publishers-settle.html
* After announcing its settlement with publishers and authors, Google launched a page on The Future of Google Book Search. (For now, Google Book Search will only change for US users.)
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/how-google-book-search-will-change.html
* Harvard became the first university to refuse to allow Google to scan copyrighted OA books from its library, even though the new settlement now permits such scans. Harvard explained that the settlement puts too many access restrictions on the scanned copyrighted books. Harvard will continue to limit Google scans to public-domain books.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/harvard-will-not-participate-in-google.html
* I posted two collections of press and blog comments on the Google-Publisher settlement.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/more-on-google-publisher-settlement.html
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/more-comments-on-google-publisher.html
* The US Project on Government Oversight recommended that the federal government automatically provide OA to all "new government-generated or government-collected information that is not exempt" from the Freedom of Information Act.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/recommendations-on-openness-for-next-us.html
* Participants in the meeting, Staatliche Verantwortung und Öffentliche Daseinsvorsorge in der Informationsgesellschaft (Berlin, September 4-5, 2008), issued the Berlin Manifesto for Public Services 2.0.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/berlin-manifesto-for-public-services-20.html
* Two editors at Open Medicine called on Canadian medical schools to adopt green OA mandates and encourage faculty to publish in OA journals.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/appeal-to-canadian-medical-schools-and.html
* The student union at the University of Uppsala drafted a statement calling for OA to publicly-funded research and OA to the university's research.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/student-support-for-oa-at-uppsala.html
* The University of New Hampshire joined the Open Content Alliance, launched an IR, and is considering an OA mandate.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/u-of-new-hampshire-joins-oca-launches.html
* The Canadian Library Association approved plans to launch an Open Access Interest Group.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/cla-to-launch-oa-interest-group.html
* Educause launched an Openness Constituent Group, which will focus on how open technologies and policies can support education, and released a statement on openness, which included an endorsement of OA.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/educause-launches-interest-group-on.html
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/11/educause-statement-on-openness.html
* The NIH released its Analysis of Comments and Implementation of the NIH Public Access Policy
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/nih-responses-to-public-comments-on-its.html
* The American Physiological Society released a supplement to Martin Frank's written and oral testimony at the September 11 hearing, opposing the NIH policy and supporting the Conyers bill.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/how-conservative-is-nih-policy.html
* Epigenetics & Chromatin is a new peer-reviewed OA journal from BioMed Central.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/new-oa-journal-of-epigenetics.html
* Fibrogenesis & Tissue Repair is a new peer-reviewed OA journal from BioMed Central.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/new-oa-journal-of-tissue-repair.html
* The Journal of Ovarian Research is a new peer-reviewed OA journal from BioMed Central.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/new-oa-journal-of-ovarian-research.html
* The Oman Journal of Ophthalmology is a new peer-reviewed OA journal from the Oman Ophthalmic Society and published by Medknow.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/another-learned-society-launches-oa.html
* Medknow launched two new OA journals on Open Access Day: PVRI Review (from the Pulmonary Vasculature Research Institute) and the Journal of Dental Implants (from the Indian Society of Oral Implantologists). It also launched OA editions of two existing journals: the Indian Journal of Nuclear Medicine (from the Society of Nuclear Medicine) and the Indian Journal of Psychological Medicine (from the Indian Psychiatric Society).
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/4-new-oa-journals-from-medknow.html
* The Journal of Artificial General Intelligence is a new, no-fee, peer-reviewed OA journal. JAGI gives authors a choice between traditional and open peer review.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/new-oa-journal-of-artificial-general.html
* Interface is a new peer-reviewed OA journal on social movements.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/new-oa-journal-on-social-movements.html
* Appositions is a new peer-reviewed OA journal of Renaissance and early modern literature and culture.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/new-oa-journal-of-early-modern.html
* American Libraries, the flagship magazine of the American Library Association, converted to OA.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/flagship-ala-journal-converts-to-oa.html
* BMJ converted to OA on Open Access Day. The new OA policy applies to all its research articles, which are published under CC-BY licenses. Non-research articles become OA only after a one-year moving wall.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/bmj-converts-to-gratis-oa.html
* The three journals of the Institution of Electronics and Telecommunications Engineers converted to OA: IETE Journal of Research, IETE Technical Review, and IETE Journal of Education.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/three-engineering-journals-convert-to.html
* LIBER Quarterly converted to OA. It will also offer a priced, POD edition of each annual volume.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/liber-quarterly-converts-to-oa.html
* Journal of Biomedical Science is converting to no-fee OA and moving to BioMed Central.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/biomed-journal-converts-to-oa-with-bmc.html
* Metallomics is a forthcoming journal of biometals from RSC [Royal Society of Chemistry] Publishing. It hasn't committed to long-term OA, but it will be free online to registered users for all of 2009 and 2010.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/new-rsc-journal-will-try-free-online.html
* The Journal of Cheminformatics is a forthcoming peer-reviewed OA journal published by Chemistry Central.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/forthcoming-oa-journal-of-informatics.html
* The Centre for E-Government at the Danube University Krems is planning to launch an OA journal on e-democracy and e-government. It's now calling for partners and editors.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/call-for-partners-and-editors-for-oa.html
* The Nature Publishing Group launched an OA supplement on neuropsychiatric disease.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/another-free-nature-supplement.html
* In the Library with the Lead Pipe is a new peer-reviewed, OA publication blurring the line between a journal and a blog.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/launch-of-peer-reviewed-blog.html
* Three OA journals moved to the Open Humanities Press: Fast Capitalism, Image and Narrative, and Postcolonial Text.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/three-oa-journals-move-to-ohp.html
* After one year as a no-fee OA journal (and anticipating SCOAP3), the European Physical Journal decided to continue with the no-fee OA model.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/anticipating-scoap3-physics-journal.html
* The American Anthropological Association adopted 35 year embargo on the OA backfiles of its two leading journals.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/aaa-adopts-35-year-embargo-on-oa.html
* The American Anthropological Association and eight other society publishers in the social sciences and humanities received Mellon grants to explore OA options for their journals.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/mellon-funds-nine-society-publishers-to.html
* The Wellcome Trust increased its budget, to more than £1 million for 2008-2009, to pay publication fees for grantees who choose to publish at fee-based OA journals.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/wellcome-trust-increases-funding-for.html
* The Wellcome Trust gave Imperial College London its third grant to help faculty pay publication fees at fee-based OA journals.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/wellcome-renews-imperial-college.html
* The University of Patras launched Dexameni, a collection of Greek OA journals.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/portal-of-greek-oa-journals.html
* Brazil's Centro de Estudos em "Design de Sistemas Virtuais Centrado no Usuário" (CEDUS) launched Univerciencia.org, a portal of OA journals in the field of communications.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/brazilian-portal-of-oa-journals-of.html
* The British Columbia Electronic Library Network (ELN) and Public Library Services Branch (PLSB), officially launched a gateway for OA journals.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/oa-journals-gateway-for-bc-libraries.html
* Gavin Baker calculated that the number of titles in the DOAJ grew significantly faster in 2008 than in any year from 2003-2007.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/growth-of-doaj-spikes-in-2008.html
* The Optical Society of America launched an OA repository to host datasets associated with articles published in its OA journals, and an Interactive Science Publishing service for viewing and analyzing the data.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/oa-journal-launches-repository-for.html
* Harvard University launched the institutional repository, and two accompanying FAQs, to support its OA mandate.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/harvard-repository-and-faqs.html
* Southern Illinois University at Carbondale launched Open SIUC, an institutional repository.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/southern-illinois-u-launches-ir.html
* India's National Institute of Science Communication and Information Resources (NISCAIR) launched an institutional repository.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/niscair-providing-oa-to-its-journals.html
* The University of Kashmir announced plans to launch an institutional repository.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/ir-plans-at-u-of-kashmir.html
* Cambridge's Learning Landscape Project is launching an OA repository for the project outputs.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/11/social-and-technical-aspects-of.html
* Users of the JISCmail academic discussion lists now have direct access to the Depot from each list's home page.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/connecting-jisc-discussion-lists-and.html
* Jason Kucsma outlined plans for the Digital Preservation Resource Repository (DiPPR), an OA repository for literature on digital preservation.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/another-oa-repository-for-research-on.html
* Klaus Graf proposed that institutional repositories accept deposits not only from current faculty but also from alumni.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/opening-irs-to-alumni-publications.html
* UKPMC announced that it will host more than peer-reviewed manuscripts, including "clinical guidelines, clinical trials data, images, patents and PhD theses."
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/more-than-peer-reviewed-manuscripts-in.html
* Pakisan's Higher Education Commission (HEC) formally launched the OA Pakistan Digital Library.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/formal-launch-of-pakistans-digital.html
* The Japanese National Institute of Informatics launched the beta version of JAIRO (Japanese Institutional Repositories Online). JAIRO is a portal for federated searching of Japanese IRs, currently covering more than 80 repositories.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/portal-of-japanese-irs.html
* The Francophone Network of National Digital Libraries (Réseau francophone des bibliothèques nationales numériques) launched its portal with a promise to provide OA for its public-domain documents.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/11/portal-of-francophone-national-digital.html
* GoVirtual is a new OA portal and community site for virtualization researchers, sponsored by VMware.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/new-oa-portal-of-virtualization.html
* Vladimir Orlov launched ChemSynthesis, an OA database of chemicals and their physical properties. On the day of its launch, the Royal Society of Chemistry recognized it as the Free chemical information resource of the month.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/new-oa-database-of-chemicals-and-their.html
* Animal Drugs @ FDA is a new OA database of approved animal drugs, from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration Center for Veterinary Medicine.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/new-database-of-animal-drugs-approved.html
* Collaborative Drug Discovery "now hosts the largest open-access chemical sub-structure and similarity searchable G-Protein Coupled Receptor (GPCR) Ki database."
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/new-oa-database-for-drug-discovery-data.html
* The International Council for Science (ICSU) announced plans to build an OA, interoperable World Data System.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/toward-world-data-system.html
* The Open Access Directory opened five new lists for community editing: Events celebrating Open Access Day (the first "sponsored list" at OAD); Audio about OA; Journals that converted from TA to OA; Declarations in support of OA, and Author addenda.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/events-celebrating-open-access-day.html
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/audio-about-oa.html
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/journals-that-converted-from-ta-to-oa.html
http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/Declarations_in_support_of_OA
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/11/oad-list-of-author-addenda.html
* The Yale Law School Information Society project published a dual edition (OA/TA) book on Access to Knowledge in Brazil. (The OA edition was released last month; the TA edition was released on OA Day.)
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/book-on-a2k-in-brazil-released.html
* The University of Michigan Library Scholarly Publishing Office published a dual edition (OA/TA) book on digital libraries.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/new-oa-book-on-digital-libraries.html
* Educause published a dual edition (OA/TA) book, The Tower and The Cloud, edited by Richard Katz. Many of the essays are on open education and OERs.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/new-book-with-chapters-on-e-research.html
* Penguin published Lawrence Lessig's new book, Remix. An OA, CC-licensed edition will soon be released from Bloomsbury Academic.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/oa-edition-of-new-lessig-book.html
* Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag published an OA encyclopedia of computational economics, Enzyklopädie der Wirtschaftsinformatik.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/oa-encyclopedia-of-computational.html
* OAPEN (Open Access Publishing in European Networks) received a major grant from the EC.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/oapen-receives-major-grant-from-ec.html
* Flat World, the OA textbook publisher, doubled its start-up funding to $1.4 million.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/flat-world-announces-new-financing.html
* A group of major players --the Consortium of Glycobiology Editors, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, and the US National Center for Biotechnology Information-- created a second, OA edition of their popular textbook, Essentials of Glycobiology.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/new-oa-edition-of-glycobiology-textbook.html
* Musopen called for volunteers to help write an OA textbook of music theory.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/call-for-contributors-to-oa-music.html
* PALINET launched a Mass Digitization Collaborative and OA digitization project to scan 20+ million pages of public-domain books from member libraries.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/palinet-launches-digitization.html
* Google doubled the number of publishers participating in the (opt-in) Google Publisher program since last year. There are now more than 20,000. One of Google's latest partners is Random House, the largest English-language publisher in the world, which formerly had its own book-scanning project and formerly supported the lawsuit against the Google Library program.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/google-doubles-number-of-book-search.html
* A group of major research universities launched the HathiTrust, a consortial repository for their Google-scanned books.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/more-on-consortial-repository-of-google.html
* Google began digitizing public-domain books from the Columbia University library.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/11/google-begins-scanning-at-columbia.html
* Columbia University became the first American university to join Nereus, the mostly-OA repository of economic research harvesting from the IRs of major research universities.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/columbia-joins-nereus-consortium.html
* The Warsaw School of Economics became the first Polish member of Nereus.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/warsaw-school-of-economics-becomes.html
* The University of Michigan decided to use CC-BY-NC licenses for all works created by the library on which the university owns the copyright.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/u-michigan-library-to-cc-license-all.html
* California created a program to help community colleges incorporate OERs into their courses.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/california-to-launch-oer-pilot-program.html
* ALPSP released its third Scholarly Publishing Practice Survey. Among the results: "The proportion of publishers offering optional open access to authors has grown from 9% in 2005 to 30% in 2008."
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/alpsp-third-scholarly-publishing-survey.html
* RAND Europe released a study of the "drivers for and barriers to" institutional repositories at London-area universities.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/rand-europe-study-of-irs-in-uk.html
* A group of stakeholders officially launched Publishing and the Ecology of European Research (PEER), a three-year study of the effects of OA archiving on journal subscriptions. The project partners include some traditional friends and foes of OA.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/eu-study-of-effects-of-oa-archiving.html
* JISC released two surveys on OA journal publication fees, one focused on authors and the other on institutions.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/survey-of-uk-authors-and-institutions.html
* JISC will fund some "discipline-based advocacy work within UK Higher Education Institutions to assist researchers, teachers and learners in benefiting from changes in the scholarly communications process."
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/funding-for-advocacy-within-uk.html
* JISC will fund a "study investigating the current and recommended future state of open innovation practice".
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/funding-for-research-on-open-innovation.html
* The Research Information Network is funding research on the effect of Web 2.0 tools on scientific practice.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/call-for-participation-on-science-and.html
* Les Carr is collecting success stories showing how institutional repositories have benefited researchers.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/11/collecting-stories-of-researchers-and.html
* NORA (Norwegian Open Research Archive) passed the milestone of 20,000 documents on deposit.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/milestone-for-nora.html
* The IR at University College Dublin deposited its 500th item on Open Access Day.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/500-items-in-ucd-ir.html
* RePEc passed the milestone of a quarter million working papers.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/repec-september-update.html
* arXiv passed the milestone of 500,000 deposits.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/milestone-for-arxiv.html
* The Institut français de recherche pour l'exploitation de la mer (Ifremer, French Research Institute for Exploitation of the Sea) announced that 80% of its publications are now on deposit in its OA repository.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/80-of-french-research-institutes-recent.html
* Open Journal Systems has been adopted by 2000 journals.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/2000-journals-using-ojs.html
* Two courses from the MIT OpenCourseWare project have surpassed 1 million visits each.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/2-mit-ocw-courses-reach-1m-visits.html
* CERN's Large Hadron Collider papers at the OA Journal of Instrumentation were downloaded 55,000 times in their first two months online.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/cern-lhc-papers-are-popular-downloads.html
* Two of this year's three Nobel laureates in physics --Françoise Barré-Sinouss and Harald zur Hausen-- published articles in PLoS journals
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/new-nobel-laureates-published-in-plos.html
* The American Physical Society provided retroactive OA to three articles by Yoichiro Nambu, one of this year's three Nobel laureates in physics. (It did something very similar last year.)
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/retroactive-oa-for-three-papers-by-new.html
* The Sonny Bono Act turned 10 years old.
http://www.publicknowledge.org/node/1830
* MedlinePlus turned 10 years old.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/medlineplus-is-10-years-old.html
* PLoS Biology turned five years old.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/happy-birthday-plos-biology.html
* The Open Access Directory turned six months old.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/oad-is-six-months-old.html
* A collection of OA videos to help teachers incorporate technology into their teaching was named "Outstanding ICT initiative of the year" by JISC and Times Higher Education.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/oer-project-wins-jiscthe-award.html
* The Savage Minds blog is running a contest for the best OA content in anthropology. It's collecting nominations for the best OA article, the best OA teaching materials, and the best OA journal.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/nominations-for-best-oa-content-in.html
* SPARC announced the sponsor and judges of the 2008 Sparky Awards, which recognize outstanding videos on the value of sharing information.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/update-on-sparky-awards.html
* The Open Archives Initiative released the production version of the Object Reuse and Exchange specifications (OAI-ORE).
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/release-of-oai-ore-v-1-specification.html
* Eric Lease Morgan reported that Notre Dame uses OAI harvesting through MyLibrary to create Reading Lists from the DOAJ. The method can add "specific subjects or specific journals" to a user's reading list.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/harvesting-doaj-for-customized-reading.html
* Microsoft Research released Beta 1 of its Research-Output Repository Platform.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/microsoft-repository-platform-now-in.html
* Savas Parastatidis released OfficeSWORD, a SWORD (Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit) plug-in for Microsoft Word.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/officesword-plug-in-for-word.html
* The University of Utah released the University Scholarly Knowledge Inventory System (U-SKIS), software to track faculty publications and journal self-archiving policies, and manage deposits into a CONTENTdm repository.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/software-for-managing-ir-ingest.html
* Fedora Commons released version 3.1 of the Fedora repository software.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/new-release-of-fedora.html
* The University of Prince Edward Island released Islandora, an open-source module to create a Drupal front end to a Fedora repository.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/upei-releases-drupal-front-end-for.html
* Chris Keene upgraded IRcount, renamed it Repository Records Statistics (RRS), and expanded its scope from the UK to the whole world. RRS shows weekly deposit totals for all the repositories in a given country.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/another-way-to-monitor-growth-of-green.html
* The JISC repositories and preservation program is developing a set of new repository user interfaces.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/eprints-front-ends-in-development.html
* The OA Stanford Microarray Database was enhanced to accept plug-in tools.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/enhancement-of-oa-microarray-database.html
* JISC released its repository widgets for use on platforms such as Netvibes and iGoogle.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/repository-widgets-released.html
* Infovell, a non-OA search engine, added some OA journals and repositories to its index.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/non-oa-search-engine-adds-oa-sources-to.html
* The Open Knowledge Foundation created a wiki and mailing list for its project on public domain calculators (algorithms for determining when a work is in the public domain in a given jurisdiction).
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/update-on-public-domain-calculator.html
* Creative Commons launched CC Network, a copyright registry and social network with a premium level of service for CC users.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/cc-network-copyright-registry-and.html
* China joined the WorldWideScience Alliance, the international partnership behind WorldWideScience.org.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/china-joins-worldwidescience.html
* Bangalore's Centre for Internet and Society is a new home for OA activism in India.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/india-centre-for-internet-and-society.html
* The Canadian Public Domain Registry is looking for librarian beta testers.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/beta-testers-needed-for-canadian-public.html
* The Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) announced £5.7 million funding program for OERs.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/57-million-for-oers.html
* WIPO added a Development Agenda Coordination Division. The Development Agenda pushes OA, including an Access to Knowledge Treaty with a provision mandating OA for publicly-funded research.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/update-on-wipo-development-agenda.html
* CENDI, the US Federal STI Managers Group, released another update to its Frequently Asked Questions About Copyright. All of Section 4 is devoted to Works Created under a Federal Contract or Grant.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/more-on-copyrights-of-federal-research.html
* The Library of Congress and a dozen federal agencies are developing guidelines for government digitization projects.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/us-agencies-collaborate-on-guidelines.html
* The Sunlight Foundation launched the Open Senate Project to follow up its earlier Open House Project.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/sulight-foundation-launches-open-senate.html
* Barack Obama and John McCain supported the proposal by Lawrence Lessig and others that the video footage of presidential debates should be in the public domain.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/us-presidential-candidates-support-oa.html
* The Walters Art Museum released an OA copy of the Archimedes Palimpsest under a CC-BY license.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/digital-archimedes-manuscript-released.html
* The Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, which has signed the Berlin Declaration, is selling digital copies of its public-domain art.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/more-on-digital-copies-of-public-domain.html
* Most European collecting societies don't demand exclusive rights from authors, and can therefore allow authors to release their works under open licenses. But the French collecting society, SACEM (Société des auteurs, compositeurs et éditeurs de musique) still demands exclusive rights which cannot be reconciled with open licenses.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/on-cc-and-collecting-societies.html
* U.S. Labor Department has been posting public comments on a proposed regulation, but refused to post an excerpt from a libre OA journal on the ground that it is "subject to copyright protections" and "cannot be reproduced".
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/us-labor-dept-wont-post-attachments-to.html
* Some member governments of the World Customs Organization are protesting its practice of copyrighting every document it produces, and preventing members from accessing them without passwords or sharing them without permission.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/on-intergovernmental-organizations.html
* October 14 was the first Open Access Day.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/open-access-day.html
* Graham Steel started a FriendFeed room for Open Access Day.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/open-access-day-room-on-friendfeed.html
* At OAN, Gavin Baker posted 14 collections of blog comments on Open Access Day.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/roundup-of-blog-posts-on-oa-day-part-1.html
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/roundup-of-blog-posts-on-oa-day-part-2.html
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/roundup-of-blog-posts-on-oa-day-part-3.html
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/roundup-of-blog-posts-on-oa-day-part-4.html
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/roundup-of-blog-posts-on-oa-day-part-5.html
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/roundup-of-blog-posts-on-oa-day-part-6.html
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/roundup-of-blog-posts-on-oa-day-part-7.html
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/roundup-of-blog-posts-on-oa-day-part-8.html
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/roundup-of-blog-posts-on-oa-day-part-9.html
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/roundup-of-blog-posts-on-oa-day-part-10.html
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/roundup-of-blog-posts-on-oa-day-part-11.html
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/roundup-of-blog-posts-on-oa-day-part-12.html
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/roundup-of-blog-posts-on-oa-day-part-13.html
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/roundup-of-blog-posts-on-oa-day-part-14.html
----------
Coming this month
Here are some important OA-related events coming up in November.
* November 30, 2008. Deadline for comments on the latest (July 16, 2008) green paper from the EC, on copyright and scientific publishing.
http://ec.europa.eu/internal_market/copyright/docs/copyright-infso/greenpaper_en.pdf
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/07/ec-green-paper-on-l.html
* OA-related conferences in November 2008
http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/2008#November
* Other OA-related conferences
http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/Events
==========
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Peter Suber
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters
peter.suber@earlham.edu
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