Arnaud Dhermy, Les revues savantes dans Gallica, Gallica, June 5, 2009. Read it in the original French or Google's translation. Includes a table of journals digitized (or to be digitized) by region of France.
Open Access Growing Steadily, But Powerful Gatekeepers Remain, CAUT Bulletin, June 2009.
The University of Bergen has adopted an OA policy. (Thanks to Stevan Harnad.) From the ROARMAP version of the policy: Comments Congratulations to all involved. The word "should" (rather than "must") needn't reduce compliance. But unfortunately the loophole for dissenting publishers will reduce compliance. And it's not necessary.
The IRDB Contents Analysis System, a database of Japanese IRs, was updated on June 2, 2009.
Elections for European Parliament were held on June 4-7. One result is that Sweden's Pirate Party -- a supporter of OA -- gained its first seat. In Germany, the Pirate Party earned 0.9% of the vote: not enough for a seat in Parliament, but enough to qualify for public funding for future campaigns. For a broad overview of the election, see coverage in the New York Times.
Digital Defoe is a new peer-reviewed OA journal of scholarship on Daniel Defoe.
Andreas Hübner and Christoph Bruch, Die Aktivitäten der Arbeitsgruppe „Open Access“ in der Schwerpunktinitiative Digitale Information der Allianz der deutschen Wissenschaftsorganisationen, a slide presentation at Deutscher Bibliothekartag (Erfurt, June 2-5, 2009). The abstract in Google's English:
Stuart Shieber, Are the Harvard open-access policies unfair to publishers? The Occasional Pamphlet , June 9, 2009.
Leo Waaijers, Publish and Cherish with Non-proprietary Peer Review Systems, Ariadne , April 2009. Excerpt: Comments I support the call for what Waaijers terms "non-proprietary review systems" (and which I have called free-floating editorial boards). I'm also glad to see the detailed calculations in the body of the article on how a conversion to OA would save money at two Dutch universities.
The latest issue of The Serials Librarian (vol. 56, nos. 1-4, 2009) is devoted to the presentations at NASIG 2008. Here are the OA-related items: Sean O'Doherty and Bob Boissy, Is There a Future for the Traditional Subscription-Based Journal?
The Mellon Seminar in Digital Humanities at UCLA released the Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0. (Thanks to Charles Bailey.) Version 2.0 is just as vague on OA as version 1.0.