Online Computer Library Center, OCLC releases software suite to help museums exchange data, press release, May 22, 2009.

National Research Council Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information, NRC-CISTI launches gateway to scientific data, press release, May 14, 2009.

The presentations from Il peso della ricerca. Valutare una materia umanistica: architettura per esempio (Bologna, May 22, 2009) are now online. (Thanks to Fabrizio Tinti.) See especially: Antonella De Robbio, Nuove frontiere della scientometria: l’Open Access come strumento per la valutazione della ricerca Maria Laura Vignocchi and Elena Giglia, Più citazioni in Open Access?

Tom Sinclair, ‘Open source’ technology is his passion, The Nelson Institute Blog, May 27, 2009.

Melissa Gregg, Damn the publishers, The Australian Higher Education , May 27, 2009.  (Thanks to Colin Steele.)  Excerpt: Comment .  Note that the January 2009 draft guidelines for the ERA research assessment program expect that most research articles will be deposited in OA repositories.  (I don't know whether this expectation made it into the final version of the guidelines.)

Barbara Fister, Notes from a Catastrophe: Easing the Pain of Budget Cuts, Library Journal , May 28, 2009. Nine suggestions for librarians on how to cancel journal subscriptions when rising prices and shrinking budgets make it necessary.

OAPEN (Open Access Publishing in European Networks) is running a survey on OA for scholars in the humanities and social sciences.  Don't be deterred by the German introduction.  The survey itself is in English.  (Here's the introduction in Google's English.) PS:  In my first draft of this post, I mistakenly said that the whole survey was in German.  Thanks to Klaus Graf for the correction.

This morning at the Google I/O Developer Conference (San Francisco, May 27-28, 2009), Google launched a developer preview of a new communications platform called Wave  Wave will be open source, rest on open standards (particularly HTML 5), and offer open APIs.  It's an ambitious, versatile tool that will implicate OA primarily in the ways in which it supports document sharing and collaborative document writing.

Socrata is a new platform for publishing and interacting with government data. Most of the data currently on the site is OA, but the platform "enables [publishers] to set specific dataset pricing levels".

Library and Archives Canada, Launch of Book History Databases, press release, April 24, 2009.

Mark Tovey, Change Camp Ottawa: Open Data and Open Access, WorldChanging Canada, May 23, 2009. Notes on a session on public sector information at ChangeCamp Ottawa (Ottawa, May 16, 2009).