Today I step back from systematic daily blogging in order to free up time for my new position at Harvard's Berkman Center and Office for Scholarly Communication. The blog itself will continue and Gavin will continue at something like his current pace. I will continue my daily crawl for OA-related news. I'll continue to tag what I find for the OA tracking project (OATP).
Michael Nielsen, Is scientific publishing about to be disrupted? Michael Nielsen , June 29, 2009.
Shawn Averkamp and Joanna Lee, Repurposing ProQuest Metadata for Batch Ingesting ETDs into an Institutional Repository, code{4}lib , June 26, 2009. (Thanks to Charles Bailey.)
Open Access Publications (OAP) is a new OA journal publisher. (Thanks to Jim Till.) OAP will allow authors to retain copyright. Though it doesn't indicate what license it will use, it will offer libre OA, allowing "any third party the right to download, print out, extract, archive, and distribute the article as long as its integrity is maintained and its original authors, citation details and publisher are identified."
A Web version of the text of the University of Kansas' new OA policy confirms what I'd suspected in my last post: that the policy as passed doesn't contain an OA mandate.
What's new with the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) since our last post: The text of the bill is now online.
Siu-Ming Tam, Informing The Nation – Open Access To Statistical Information In Australia, March 18, 2009. A presentation at the UNECE Work Session on the Communication and Dissemination of Statistics (Warsaw, May 13-15, 2009). (Thanks to Anne Fitzgerald.) Excerpt: Also see Marc Debusschere, Dissemination Policies in the ESS, from the proceedings of the same conference.
PAGEPress is an apparently new publisher of OA journals in biomedicine. It's based in Italy, a brand of MeditGroup. The PP journals charge a publication fee, which for 2009 is 500 Euros/article. However, PP explains that "the ability of authors to pay publication charges will never be a consideration in the decision as to whether to publish." PP says its uses CC-BY licenses.
V.C. Lansingh and M.J. Carter, Does Open Access in Ophthalmology Affect How Articles are Subsequently Cited in Research? Ophthalmology , June 20, 2009. The article doesn't yet appear at the journal site, so I've linked to the abstract in PubMed.
Viruses is a new peer-reviewed OA journal published by MDPI. The inaugural issue (June 2009) is now online.
The Canadian Breast Cancer Research Alliance has strengthened its OA policy from a request to a requirement. (Thanks to Jim Till.) From the old policy (adopted April 2007): From the new policy (revised April 2009): Comments In addition to the new language mandating deposit in the OA repository, the new policy encourages grantees to retain the right to authorize OA through the repository. Kudos to all involved.