If you recall, last week the University of Maryland University Senate voted down a mixed green/gold OA policy. Here's an editorial from the UMaryland student paper in response: Free at last, free at last, Diamondback Online , April 27, 2009. Excerpt: Comment. The editorial is right to criticize the Senate vote and point out that OA articles are cited more often than non-OA articles.
MERLOT-Africa is a new discussion forum on OA and OERs in Africa.
JISC has posted a response (undated) to publisher criticism (1, 2) of John Houghton's January report on the economic impact of OA. The publisher criticism was organized by the Publishers Association, the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers, and the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers.
Ángel Díaz, La edición científica tradicional frena la difusión del saber, El Mundo, April 22, 2009. (Thanks to María Elena Bonora.) On the state of OA in Spain.
Common Institutional Repositories for Collaborative Learning Environments: Final report, report to JISC, April 2009.
New release of computer science portal io-port.net, press release, April 20, 2009.
Integrative Biology is a new peer-reviewed gratis OA journal from RSC Publishing. (Thanks to Garrett Eastman.) Gratis access requires registration. The inaugural issue appeared in 2009. Integrative Biology is published by the Royal Society of Chemistry. Note this editorial from the fourth issue: Richard Kidd, Changing the face of scientific publishing, Integrative Biology , 1, 4 (2009) pp. 293-295.
Jeffrey Tucker, What To Do About Tethered Texts, New Liturgical Movement , April 19, 2009. (Thanks to Gino D'Oca.) Excerpt: PS: See our past posts on this issue.
Melanie Newman, Humble v-c welcomes University of the Air's open-access destiny, Times Higher Education Supplement , April 23, 2009.
Gideon Burton, Scholar or Public Intellectual? Academic Evolution , April 23, 2009.
Peter Murray-Rust, CLARION - our chemical data repository project, A Scientist and the Web, April 24, 2009. Update. See also the project blog.