Heather Morrison, Dramatic Growth of Open Access: March 31, 2009, Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics , March 31, 2009.

Noam Cohen, Microsoft Encarta Dies After Long Battle With Wikipedia, New York Times , March 30, 2009.  Excerpt: More on the last point from Rafe Needleman at Webware (incidentally reporting Jimmy Wales is folding up Wikia search), Comment .  I have no opinion on the quality of Encarta.  I never used it, and clearly I'm not alone.  But I'm still struck by the traffic figures:

Karin Weishaupt, Freier Zugang und Qualität – kein Widerspruch!  Etablierte Strukturen des Wissenschaftssystems behindern die Durchsetzung von Open Access, IAT , April 2009. (Thanks to the Informationsplattform Open Access.) In German without an English-language abstract.

Long-term preservation of Open Access Journals secured, a press release from the DOAJ and the e-Depot of the National Library of the Netherlands (dated today).  Excerpt: Comments Preservation matters.  Because it matters, and because doing it right can be difficult to arrange, new OA projects face a difficult decision:

The Directory of Open Access Journals has passed the milestone of 4,000 peer-reviewed OA journals.  From today's announcement: PS:  There are several larger lists of OA journals, but as far as I can tell they are not limited to peer-reviewed journals.  If there larger lists of peer-reviewed OA journals, I'd like to know about them.

Les Carr reports that the Southampton ECS repository has been tweeting new deposits since June 2008.  He also shows how to set up a Twitter channel in any EPrints repository.  Eloy Rodrigues reports that the Minho IR (running DSpace) has started tweeting new deposits. Comment .  You may not need to know about new repository deposits while doing your laundry.

The Canadian government is providing OA to its UFO files. PS:  France has already made its UFO files OA.  Britain made its UFO files OA for a short time and then began charging for access.

Benjamin J. Weiner and 15 co-authors, Astronomical Software Wants To Be Free: A Manifesto, a preprint, self-archived, March 25, 2009. Comment. You don't see this very often:  an argument for free and open source software by analogy to open access, rather than the other way around.

Switzerland's Molecular Diversity Preservation Initiative (MDPI) has launched two new peer-reviewed OA journals: Sustainability , an "international and cross-disciplinary scholarly Open Access journal of environmental, cultural, economic and social sustainability of human beings, which provides an advanced forum for studies related to sustainability and sustainable development. Published online quarterly."

Kerry Anderson, What is a Legal Information Institute? VoxPopuLII , March 1, 2009.  (Thanks to Simon Chester.)

The UKSG LiveSerials blog is covering the annual UKSG Conference (Torquay, March 30 - April 1, 2009).  Some highlights: Kirsty Meddings on Ahmed Hindawi:  Ginny Hendricks on Derk Haank: PS:  See our past post on last week's rumors that Springer was for sale.