The IR at University College Dublin has passed 1,000 items.

Open Database License (ODbL) v1.0 Release Candidate Available, Open Data Commons , April 29, 2009.  Excerpt: PS:  Also see our post on the beta release of this license, in March 2009, and our other past posts on the Open Data Commons.

Christopher Dyer has launched a suite of tools called Sci-Mate (for Scientific Material Transfer Exchange) for sharing research information and physical specimens.

SPARC has released a birthday greeting to the Open Access Directory (OAD).

Heather Morrison, Donald Taylor, Andrew Waller, and Devon Greyson, Open Access in Canada - Overview and Update, four slide presentation at the BC Library Conference 2009 (Burnaby, April 16-18, 2009).

Yassine Gargouri and Stevan Harnad are measuring how OA mandates affect the OA citation advantage.  They've posted two docs with preliminary versions of their findings (1, 2).

India's National Institute of Science Communication and Information Resources (NISCAIR) has converted four more of its 17 journals to OA and plans to convert the rest this summer.

Philip Davis, Paying for Open Access Publication Charges, Scholarly Kitchen , April 30, 2009.  Excerpt: Comment .  Davis is right that universities launching these funds should be designing procedures to deal with appeals and conflicts.  If the demand on the funds is low today, it may grow steadily over time, just as the number of funds continues to grow.

Harvard computer scientist Michael Mitzenmacher reports that the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) does not accept Harvard's author addendum and asks Harvard authors to seek a waiver from the school's OA mandate.  In a clarification sent to Mizenmacher's colleague, Salil Vadhan, the ACM explained that it does allow OA archiving in the Harvard repository but does not allow all the reuse rights required by the Harvard addendum.

Jane Park, CK-12 Foundation’s Neeru Khosla on Open Textbooks, Creative Commons, April 28, 2009. Interview with Neeru Khosla of the CK-12 Foundation. See also our past post on CK-12.

Food Aid Information System is a new OA database from the World Food Programme, containing "the most reliable and comprehensive data on food aid flows". (Thanks to ResourceShelf.)