Elie Dolgin, India debates open access, The Scientist , March 24, 2009.  Excerpt: PS:  Also see our past posts on OA initiative from India's CSIR. Update (3/26/09). Also see Amulya Gopalakrishnan's article in Indian Express. Update (3/29/09). Also see Sreelatha Menon's article in the Business Standard.

Nat Ives, Media Giants Want to Top Google Results, Advertising Age , March 23, 2009.  (Thanks to Glyn Moody for the alert and his comments.)  Excerpt: Comments Newspaper publishers seem to be leading this cause.  Academic publishers are not as riled, although Jorge Cauz, President of the Encyclopedia Britannica, voiced a similar complaint back in January.

Jeffrey Young, MIT Professors Approve Campuswide Policy to Publish Scholarly Articles Free Online, Chronicle of Higher Education News Blog , March 23, 2009.

Jennifer Howard, Humanities Journals Confront Identity Crisis, Chronicle of Higher Education , March 27, 2009.  Excerpt: PS:  Note that the CELJ blog endorsed OA in the second principle it articulated for the future of scholarly journals.

John Willinsky, A (Publishing) House Divided: Scholarly Publishers In Support and Opposition to Public Access to Research, Slaw.ca , March 18, 2009.  Excerpt: Comment .  Exactly.  There are even more forms of publisher accommodation with the NIH policy than John mentions.

The April issue of Walt Crawford's Cites & Insights is now online.  This issue contains a special section on Library Access to Scholarship.  It has a bit on OA and a lot on whether journals should evolve into blogs.

Two stories on the University of Michigan Press: (1) Jennifer Howard, U. of Michigan Press Reorganizes as a Unit of the Library, Chronicle of Higher Education , March 23, 2009.  Excerpt: (2) Nevertheless, the Michigan monographs will not be OA.  For details, see Scott Jaschik, Farewell to the Printed Monograph, Inside Higher Ed , March 23, 2009.

Jennifer Howard, Publishers Face Pressure From Libraries to Freeze Prices and Cut Deals, Chronicle of Higher Education , March 27, 2009.  Excerpt: PS:  Also see the the ARL Statement to Scholarly Publishers on the Global Economic Crisis, released last month, and the ICOLC Statement on the Global Economic Crisis and Its Impact on Consortial Licenses, released in January.

Richard J. Roberts, Protect our access to medical research, Boston Globe , March 23, 2009.  An op-ed.  Roberts won the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Notes on International Repositories Workshop (Amsterdam, March 16-17, 2009): Jeremy Frumkin Chris Rusbridge Maurice Vanderfeesten

The presentations from Repository Software Day 2009 (Manchester, March 19, 2009) are now online. See also these notes on the workshop.