January 1 was Public Domain Day, marking the passage into the public domain of works whose copyright expired in 2009. In countries where copyright lasts for the life of the author plus 70 years (such as the European Union and Australia), works entering the public domain include those of Sigmund Freud, William Butler Yeats, and Zane Grey.
Diane DiEuliis, Policy Forum on Public Access to Federally Funded Research: Phase Two Wrap-Up, OSTP Blog, December 31, 2009. Diane DiEuliis, Policy Forum on Public Access to Federally Funded Research: Management, OSTP Blog, December 31, 2009.
I just mailed the January 2010 issue of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter . This issue takes a close look at the progress of OA in 2009. The roundup section briefly notes 118 OA developments from December.
I'll be out tomorrow. Happy New Year!
Bloomsbury Publishing is collaborating with the Qatar Foundation and Qatar National Research Fund to launch a new scholarly publishing house in Qatar, which "will largely adopt the Open Access Publishing model". The German Wikipedia passed the 1 million article milestone. The OA International Journal of Internet Science will expand to two issues per year, thanks to strong growth in submissions.
Flip Tanedo, Who will pay for the arXiv?, US LHC Blog, December 29, 2009.
Carl Malamud, A National Scan Center: A Public Works Project, O'Reilly Radar, December 30, 2009.
I'll be out tomorrow; OATP remains active, as always. Happy holidays!
The German OA petition failed to reach the 50,000 signatures (Google translation) which would entitle it to public discussion in the Bundestag Petition Committee. The committee could choose to discuss it anyway. A letter to Nature describes the state of data sharing in natural history. (The letter is not OA, at least so far.) The Public Knowledge Project posted another case study of a use of its Open Journal Systems publishing software.
Patterns of information use and exchange: case studies of researchers in the life sciences, report by the Research Information Network and the British Library, November 2009.
Sarah Rouse, Library of Congress Puts Thousands of Historic Books Online, America.gov, December 24, 2009. See also our past posts on the program.