OA journal announcements, conversions, and launches spotted in the past week: The Journal of Aesthetics & Culture is a new peer-reviewed OA journal, now accepting submissions. See the announcement and launch editorial. The journal is published by Co-Action Publishing with financial support from the Swedish Research Council and Stockholm University. AoB PLANTS is a new peer-reviewed OA journal, now accepting submissions.

Yesterday Open Access News passed the milestone of 18,000 posts. Thanks for reading what we're writing.

Columbia University will sign the Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity, joining the five initial signatories pledging to underwrite their authors' expenses at OA journals which charge article-processing fees. A new petition to the German parliament calls for an OA mandate for publicly-funded research. The deadline for the revised Google Book settlement, previously today, was extended to November 13.

Philip Davis, Open Access Memberships: Are Libraries Paying Too Much?, The Scholarly Kitchen, November 9, 2009.

Knowledge Exchange publishes brochure on Comparison of various studies on journal business models, press release, November 9, 2009.

Phillip Edwards, Opportunity knocks: Authors' writing and publishing decisions when manuscripts are solicited, presented at the Society for Social Studies of Science annual meeting (Washington, D.C., October 28-31, 2009). Abstract:

Transitions in Scholarly Communications, press release, November 2, 2009.

Sweden's Pirate Party, which supports OA, will gain its second seat in the European Parliament, thanks to reapportionment as part of the recently ratified Lisbon Treaty. Three more BioMed Central journals have been accepted for tracking by Thomson Reuters and will receive impact factors. RePEc added 16 new participating archives in October 2009.

As previously announced, PubMed Central Canada launched during Open Access Week. The manuscript submission system will launch later this year. See also our past posts on PMC Canada.

The Association of Research Libraries has released its strategic plan for 2010-2012. Each of the plan's three strategic directions touches on OA, directly or indirectly.

Liz Allen, Responding to community feedback - DeepDyve and PLoS - Q & A, Public Library of Science, November 4, 2009. See also our past post on DeepDyve.