Dawn Lim, Cornell Librarians Protest Bill Closing Access to NIH Research, Cornell Daily Sun , March 30, 2009.  Excerpt: Comment. Kudos to the Cornell librarians.  It's terribly important that research institutions speak up, not just individual researchers.  The bill could move to the floor at any time, or equivalent language could be attached to another bill moving to the floor.

D.K. Sahu, Eight facts and myths about open access journals: an experience of eight years and eighty journals . In: Open Access to Science Publications: Policy perspective, Opportunities and Challenges , March 24 2009.  A slide presentation.  Abstract:

Gavin Baker, Why haven’t more research funders and institutions adopted self-archiving mandates? (Or: “Build it first, open it later”), A Journal of Insignificant Inquiry, March 27, 2009.

Abdel-rahman Farrag has written a bibliography of Arabic literature on OA.  Read it in Arabic or Google's English. Thanks to Sulieman Alshuhri, who translates the title as Open Access in Light of Arabic Literature: a Bibliography .

The UK Repositories Support Project has presented the results of its survey of repository software packages in a table comparing 11 software packages across dozens of features.

The US Federal Aviation Administration wants to stop providing OA to bird strike data.  The idea is that airports fearing bad publicity and loss of business would more readily report bird strikes if the information were not made public.  (Thanks to AirSafe.com and USA Today.) More coverage. Comment .

Subbiah Arunachalam, Successful conference - now the challenge! EPT , March 28, 2009.  A report on the Conference on Open Access to Science Publications: Policy perspective, Opportunities and Challenges (New Delhi, March 24, 2009), Sponsored by India's Council of Scientific & Industrial Research.  Excerpt:  PS:  Also see our past post on other reports from this conference.

Robert Peckham is collecting a large number of links to digital online (and apparently OA) copies of digitized medieval manuscripts, to supplement the Andy Holt Virtual Library page on Web Access for Manuscript-based Textual Scholarship and the UCLA Catalogue of Digitized Medieval Manuscripts.

The House Judiciary Committee has released all the testimony submitted to its September 11, 2008 hearing on the Conyers bill.  This includes the oral and written testimony of the four witnesses and all the written comments submitted by the public.  Unfortunately, the public comments are image scans and not searchable.

Gavin Baker is at a conference where Kei Koizumi is speaking (not yet clear which conference).  Here are three short micro-blog bursts from Gavin in the past hour: In case there are more coming, don't wait for me to mediate. Update .  The event is the Science and Technology in Society Conference (Washington DC, March 28-29, 2009).

Jeffrey Young, YouTube Creates New Section to Highlight College Content, Wired Campus , March 27, 2009.