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

Mary Beard was recently at a conference at which Carl Djerassi defended the idea that young couples should bank their sperm and eggs while young in order to make babies when they are older, and Harold Varmus defended the idea of OA.

David Landsman, Robert Gentleman, Janet Kelso, and B. F. Francis Ouellette, DATABASE: A new forum for biological databases and curation, Database , 1, 1 (2009) --the inaugural issue of this new OA journal from Oxford University Press.  An editorial.  Excerpt: PS:  Also see our past post on the journal's pre-launch announcement.

Universities UK and the Research Information Network have released a major report, Paying for open access publication charges, March 2009.  (Thanks to Matt Cockerill.)  From the summary in Annex A: Also see RIN's earlier studies and recommendations on publication fees. Comments This is helpful.  To me the three most important recommendations are these (and I support all three):

Eve Gray, Publishing and perishing in Africa – an ethical issue?  Gray Area, March 27, 2009.

Heather Morrison, Directory of Open Access Journals Growth 2005-2008, Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics , March 27, 2009.

Rep. Bill Foster (D-IL) has introduced LOW COST (Learning Opportunities With Creation of Open Source Textbooks, HR 1464), a bill to "require Federal agencies to collaborate in the development of freely-available open source educational materials in college-level physics, chemistry, and math, and for other purposes."  (Thanks to David Wiley.) What kind of help would agencies have to provide?

R.J. Keller describes how an OA edition of her novel has boosted the sales of its priced print and digital editions.  (Thanks to Garrett Eastman.)

Carl Lagoze, The oreChem Project: Integrating Chemistry Scholarship with the Semantic Web, presented at WebSci'09: Society On-Line (Athens, March 18-20, 2009). (Thanks to Peter Murray-Rust.) Abstract:

Ben Bunnell, The Bodleian's treasures, available to all, Inside Google Book Search, March 26, 2009.

Robert Kiley, ACS Open Choice articles - now in PMC and UKPMC, UK PubMed Central Blog, March 24, 2009. See also Peter Murray-Rust's comments. See also Peter Suber's past post.