Rufus Pollock, The Size of the Public Domain, miscellaneous factZ, June 9, 2009. See also our past posts on Pollock's related work (1, 2).

Naomi Korn, In from the Cold: An assessment of the scope of ‘Orphan Works’ and its impact on the delivery of services to the public, report prepared for the Strategic Content Alliance and the Collections Trust, April 2009. See also this blog post by the Strategic Content Alliance.

Michael Geist, In Search of A Canadian Digital Action Plan, Michael Geist, June 16, 2009. See also Geist's related newspaper column (as published in the Toronto Star and Ottawa Citizen, or Geist's longer draft).

Reclaim The Commons is a manifesto launched at the World Social Forum (Belem, Brazil, January 27-February 1, 2009). (Thanks to Bienes Comunes.)

The June issue of the Journal of Scholarly Publishing is now online.  Here are the OA-related articles (accessible only to subscribers, at least so far): Ji-Hong Park, Motivations for Web-Based Scholarly Publishing: Do Scientists Recognize Open Availability as an Advantage?

Michael Fitzpatrick, Transparency: Access to Information, OSTP Blog, June 10, 2009. Comment. This is the closest yet that the Obama administration's Open Government Initiative has come to addressing public access to government-funded research. See Trosow's argument that Circular A-130 extends to extramural research funded by the federal government. See also our past posts on Circular A-130.

Repke de Vries and Arnold Hirshon, eIFL Case Studies on Low Cost Digitisation Projects, eIFL , undated but recent.  See esp. the chapter on Results of Digitisation Projects and Access.  Table 8 in that chapter ("Means of User Access to the Digitised Content") shows that in 10 of the 12 surveyed countries, users don't have to pay for access to the resulting digital editions.

Nature Publishing Group allows data- and text-mining on self-archived manuscripts, a press release from NPG, June 18, 2009.  Excerpt: Comment. OA supporters have disagreed on whether text-mining is covered by fair use (or fair dealing etc.) or whether it requires fresh permission.  Regardless of where you came down on that, it's good to have explicit permission.

The new issue (vol. 9, no. 1) of GMS Medizin-Bibliothek-Information is devoted to the Green Road to Open Access - Institutionelle und fachliche Repositorien. (Thanks to the Informationsplattform Open Access.)  All 12 articles are relevant.  Two are in English and the rest in German.

The presentations from EThOSnet Web Services Day (London, June 2, 2009) are now online.

In the U.S., the White House launched an Open Government Blog. See e.g. this post by CIO Vivek Kundra, Data Transparency via Data.gov. See more coverage of Data.gov in Information Today and Nextgov. In the UK, Minister for Digital Engagement Tom Watson announced plans for an overhaul of Crown Copyright rules aiming to facilitate re-use of PSI. See also the video of the announcement.