New Zealand's State Services Commission has released a draft framework on OA to public sector information, on which it is soliciting comment. Under the draft, an agency would evaluate a particular work and choose from one of the Creative Commons licenses (with the most permissive, the Attribution license, generally recommended) or a to-be-developed more restrictive license, or a certification that the work/data is not subject to copyright.

The University of Tampere adopted a new OA policy on April 16, 2009. Stevan Harnad calls the policy a mandate, although the university's English-language policy memo uses the term "request" (Google translates the Finnish as "calls on"). From the English memo: Update: Harnad is no longer calling the policy a mandate.

Paula J. Hane, Anti Google Book Settlement Organizations Band Together in Open Book Alliance, Information Today, August 27, 2009. N.B.: ALA, ACRL, and ARL are the members of the Library Copyright Alliance.

Diverse Coalition Unites To Counter Google Book Settlement, Open Book Alliance, press release, August 26, 2009. See also our forthcoming follow-up post for more on the Open Book Alliance.

Phil Malone, An Evaluation of Private Foundation Copyright Licensing: Policies, Practices and Opportunities, report by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, August 2009.

Gerd Stumme, PUMA - Project on Academic Publication Management started on August 1st, BibSonomy Blog, August 26, 2009.

Fossils for All: Science Suffers by Hoarding, editorial, Scientific American Magazine, September 2009.

The Twitter account for the OA tracking project (OATP) is now working. I tried to launch it on August 9, using RSStoTwitter, but never got it to work.  At first I thought the reason was that DDoS attacks had forced Twitter to close parts of its API.  While that may have been the initial cause, RSStoTwitter has since shut down. The new, successful Twitter version of the OATP feed uses TwitterFeed instead.

Japanese e-library project could lose out to Google Book Search without government flex, editorial, The Mainichi Daily News, July 23, 2009. Copyright law and online books, editorial, The Japan Times, August 23, 2009.

Copenhagen Business School has adopted an OA policy. From a June 2009 memo forward by Leif Hansen to the SPARC-OAForum list: See also our past posts on Copenhagen Business School.

Jim Till, Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research adopts an OA mandate, Be openly accessible or be obscure, August 22, 2009.