The Centre for Open Electronic Publishing has released an English version of its annual guide to Revues.org, its platform for OA and delayed OA journals in humanities and social sciences. Update. The guide now also is available in Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, and Italian.

Rick Weiss has been appointed to a position within U.S. President Barack Obama's Office of Science and Technology Policy. (It's not immediately clear which position.) Weiss has written about OA many times in his previous positions at Science Progress and the Washington Post. See also our past posts on Weiss.

OASIS has posted a 2:38 minute clip from a longer video of Leslie Chan interviewing Padmanabhan Balaram on the importance of OA and institutional repositories, especially for science institutes.  Balaram is the Director of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and the Editor of Current Science.  The interview was taped on March 30.

Archana Venkatraman, Open access joins the mainstream, Information World Review , April 3, 2009.

Steven Wiley, Why Don't We Share Data? The Scientist , April 2009.

Co-Action Publishing and two partners have launched Open Access Solutions, a new service to support OA publishers.

Walter de Gruyter has introduced a hybrid OA option.  (Thanks to the Informationsplattform Open Access.)  Excerpt: Also see the April 2 press release, in German or Google's English. Comments This hybrid policy has five strengths that many others lack. It allows authors who select the OA option to retain copyright.  The articles are published under an open license (equivalent to CC-BY-NC).

If you are aware that there's a hot debate about OA in Germany right now, but find it hard to follow, the Informationsplattform Open Access has compiled a list of links to the major contributions.  Read it in German or Google's English. PS:  Also see Christian Hauschke's longer and earlier list from last week (in German or Google's English), and my own (comparatively few) posts on the debate. Update (4/4/09).

A boost to open access, The Hindu , April 2, 2009.  An editorial.  (Thanks to Subbiah Arunachalam.)

The Boston Globe has published two letters to the editor in response to Richard Roberts' March 23 op-ed piece defending the NIH policy and denouncing the Conyers bill (blogged here the same day). From Patricia Schroeder, President of the Association of American Publishers, March 30, 2009: From Mike Rossner, Executive director of Rockefeller University Press, April 3, 2009:

The presentations from the Ural State University seminar, Scientific knowledge in the digital age: Open Access and Open repositories (Yekaterinburg, Russia, December 1-2, 2008), are now online.  They may have been up for a while, but I just noticed them (thanks to Sybski).  Read the program in Russian or Google's English.