I'll be out Thursday and Friday for Thanksgiving. (As always, the Open Access Tracking Project continues apace.) Happy holidays!

A new report looks at the economics of social studies and humanities publishing in France. Vic Lyte, et al., describe the Institutional Repository Search project. Matthew Baker discusses OA publishing by libraries in developing countries. "The practice of [closed] academic publishing adds no value to Australian academics wishing to be heard," writes Oliver Marc Hartwich.

Theresa Velden and Carl Lagoz, Communicating chemistry, Nature Chemistry, December 2009. Also see: Theresa Velden and Carl Lagoz, The Value of New Scientific Communication Models for Chemistry, white paper, October 30, 2009. Sarah Callaghan, et al., How to Publish Data Using Overlay Journals: The OJIMS Project, Ariadne, October 2009.

National Book Trust of Uganda, Commercial Publishers experiment with Open Access, press release, November 17, 2009.

SciELO Brazil adopts Creative Commons attribution of access and use, Virtual Health Library Newsletter, November 16, 2009.

Ensuring the Integrity, Accessibility, and Stewardship of Research Data in the Digital Age, National Academies Press, November 2009. A report of the National Academies' Committee on Ensuring the Utility and Integrity of Research Data in a Digital Age, published in book form last week.

Danielle Venton, OpenAIRE: archive access anytime, anywhere, International Science Grid This Week, November 25, 2009.

The OA petition to the German parliament was endorsed by the German Library Association, Wikimedia Germany, and DINI (the Deutsche Initiative für Netzwerkinformation). Three OA publishers (PLoS, BMC, and the Beilstein-Institut) confirmed that their journal policies permit compliance with MIT's OA policy, no addendum necessary. A paper from a recent Spanish workshop discusses the development of a repository for the Alhambra.

Rebecca Trager, Nobel laureates appeal for open access, Chemistry World, November 17, 2009. Hamish Johnston, Nobel laureates call for open access, physicsworld.com, November 19, 2009.

S. A. Rands, Ethical policies on animal experiments are not compromised by whether a journal is freely accessible or charges for publication, animal, June 29, 2009.

Jonathan A. Eisen, For $&%# sake, Bentham Open Journals, leave me alone, The Tree of Life, November 19, 2009. Philip Davis, Giving Open Access a Bad Name, The Scholarly Kitchen, November 23, 2009.