Scholarly and Research Communication, a new OA journal published by the Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing at Simon Fraser University, released its first issue.

Several of BioMed Central's OA journals perform well in the just-released ScImago Journal Rank. Fedora released version 3.3 of its repository software. freetable.org is a new project to build a "public commons for shared data". Stuart Shieber thinks that paying fees for hybrid journals from OA funds is a risky proposition. Jordan S. Hatcher explains licenses for databases.

Sciyo Becomes the First Academic Publisher to Introduce Usage-based Author Royalties, press release, December 18, 2009. Comments. Sciyo was formerly known as In-Tech (see our past post) and, before that, I-Tech (see our past post). If my math is right, an author would need 23,500 downloads to offset the publishing fee.

Philip M. Davis, Studies on access: a review, preprint, self-archived December 20, 2009.

Kuan-Teh Jeang, The Retrovirology Open Access experience, Retrovirology, December 15, 2009.

Rick Weiss, Public Access Policy Phase One Wrap-Up: Implementation, OSTP Blog, December 19, 2009. Rick Weiss, Policy Forum on Public Access to Federally Funded Research: Features and Technology, OSTP Blog, December 21, 2009.

I'll be out on Monday; OATP remains active, as always. Happy holidays!

The White House consultation on public access is a "confirmation that this is an issue that is of national importance," says SPARC's Heather Joseph. The Association for Computing Machinery is attracting criticism (e.g. 1, 2) for its opposition to public access. Google lost a French copyright suit over its book digitization program, but plans to appeal.

Roger Clarke, Dancing with Wolves: How to Negotiate for a Fair Deal for Academic Authors, Roger Clarke's Web-Site, December 18, 2009.

Fred Pearce, Climategate: Anatomy of a Public Relations Disaster, Yale Environment 360, December 10, 2009. Gary Richmond, Open Science and climategate: The IPCC/CRU needs to take a leaf out of CERN's Book, Free Software Magazine, December 16, 2009. George Monbiot, Pretending the climate email leak isn't a crisis won't make it go away, The Guardian, November 25, 2009. George Monbiot, The climate denial industry is out to dupe the public.

Five more U.S. libraries signed on to SCOAP3: Carnegie Mellon University, Creighton University, Macalester College, Northeastern University, and the University of Kentucky. Columbia University joined the HathiTrust. The University of Rochester released version 1.0 of its repository software, IR+. The software that runs PLoS journals got an update.