I was determined not to miss the transit of Venus today. Life’s too short. But this week I have relocated to St Raphael in the south of France for a conference on picornaviruses and had to leave my telescope behind. Despite this lack of equipment I roused myself from bed at 5:20 and went in search of the sunrise, hoping to be able to catch the tail end of the transit.

One of these days — I promise — I will get back to writing about science. But a conjunction of tweets today brought to me three articles on open access that were interesting in different ways but curiously all seemed to point in a similar direction. First, a post on the Scholarly Kitchen blog (h/t Alicia Wise) from Rick Anderson, who is the Associate Dean for Scholarly Resources &

It has been quite a year so far for open access. And the momentum is still building. First came the Elsevier Boycott, triggered by an angry reaction to the publisher’s support for the US Research Works Act, which would have undermined the open access policy of the National Institutes of Health. The Act has been withdrawn but the debate stirred up by the boycott continues to play out in the blogosphere and the press.

The libel reform campaign has yielded a spring crop: a bill to amend the law of defamation was introduced to parliament in the Queen’s Speech on May 10th. This means that legislation to amend the lax libel laws of England and Wales, which have caused a plethora of problems for scientists and science writers in recent years (not to mention many other worthy individuals and groups), will be debated in the Commons and the Lords.

I reported before on the notes from earlier meetings of the Finch Committee, which was set up by Science Minister David WIlletts to formulate proposals for making publicly-funded research more accessible. The notes of their latest meeting, held on 27th April, are now available so I wanted to add an update. I’ve uploaded a highlighted PDF for anyone who wants to read all four pages.

Mark Henderson’s The Geek Manifesto is a remarkable book. Though many of its themes are not new, it is difficult to imagine such a book being published as recently as five years ago. The Geek Manifesto provides a timely analysis of the power that different groups of geeks have levered from the growing sophistication of the of the internet.

The Finch Committee, set up last year by David Willetts to examine how UK-funded research findings can be made more accessible — and mentioned by the minister in his speech on the subject earlier this week — has been meeting regularly and is due to report within weeks. If you would like to find out more about the committee’s deliberations, you can.

David Willetts, Britain’s minister for science and universities, trailed the announcements made in his speech on open access to the UK Publishers’ Association yesterday as a ‘seismic shift’. One learns to be wary of the more hyperbolic statements of government ministers but I was at least left wondering whether the earth had moved for the publishers in the room.

The open access buzz around the internet last week was all due to the announcement by senior faculty at Harvard that journal subscription prices were rising at an unsustainable rate and the call to colleagues to devote their publishing energies to open access titles.

This is astonishing. Harvard is one of the best and one of the wealthiest universities in the world but last week its Faculty Advisory Council* announced that it can no longer afford to maintain its subscriptions to academic journals. The announcement was made online by the Council as a message to the academic staff at the university. I have taken the liberty of quoting it in full below.

Scientists’ quest for publication in journals with high impact factors is widely perceived as one of the more refractory barriers to the fuller adoption of open access, which I believe to be in the best interests of science. But the barrier problem is complicated.