Nature Publishing Group, Nature Communications now accepting submissions, press release, October 13, 2009. See also our past posts on Nature Communications.

SPARC, Student coalition for Open Access solidifies, now represents over 5 million students internationally, press release, October 15, 2009. Also see NAGPS' resources on FRPAA: White paper for legislators Background information on FRPAA and OA See also our past posts on the Right to Research campaign. Disclosure: I have been a paid consultant on the Right to Research campaign.

In August 2008, the U.S. Government Printing Office issued a request for proposals to digitize its legacy collection of 2.2 million documents, back to founding of the country. Last week, GPO announced it would not award a contract, explaining only that it couldn't make an award "in the allocated timeframe". There was at least one bid for the contract.

Bill Hubbard thinks funder mandates should work more closely with institutional repositories. Stuart Lewis, et al. offer new case studies on SWORD. Simon Fraser University has awarded an honorary degree to John Willinsky, citing his work on open access and the Public Knowledge Project. ALPSP has released summary findings on its survey of practices in scholarly book publishing. UNESCO opened an OA digital library of classical Arabic literature.

OAPEN survey ‘Funding of Monographs in the HSS’, OAPEN Newsletter, October 2009.

Cameron Neylon, Open Research: The personal, the social, and the political, Science in the open, October 10, 2009.

University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, NIH funds new virus database at UT Southwestern, press release, October 13, 2009.

BioMed Central, National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) funds Supporter Membership of BioMed Central, press release, October 12, 2009.

Harvard, National Library of China Embark on Digitization Project, Harvard College Library News, October 9, 2009.

University of Michigan, New digital access options for U-M Press titles, press release, October 8, 2009. There are currently about 350 OA titles in the press' HathiTrust collection. At present, only some titles have a link to buy a print copy, but all titles have a link to find a copy in a library. Some titles bear a "Digitized by Google" watermark.

Nancy Sánchez-Tarragó and J. Carlos Fernández-Molina, The open access movement and Cuban health research work: an author survey, Health Information & Libraries Journal, October 11, 2009. Only this abstract is OA, at least so far: See also our past post on the authors' previous study.