Maisha Kelly Freeman, et al., Google Scholar Versus PubMed in Locating Primary Literature to Answer Drug-Related Questions, Annals of Pharmacotherapy, March 3, 2009.

Two new reports from MIT on its two day-old OA mandate: (1) MIT faculty open access to their scholarly articles, MIT's official press release on the policy, March 20, 2009.  Excerpt: (2) Natasha Plotkin, MIT Will Publish All Faculty Articles Free In Online Repository, The Tech (from MIT), March 20, 2009.

The Library of Congress is arranging for the metadata of the OA World Digital Library to be translated into seven languages.  The contract went to Lingotek.  For more detail, see the March 10 press release. PS:  Read the press release.  Lingotek isn't just a group of translators.  It's a "collaborative translation platform" harnessing the power of a social network of translators.  Also see our past posts on the WDL.

James Love, Obama trade officials promise thorough review of transparency policies, Knowledge Ecology Notes , March 20, 2009.  Excerpt: Comment .  For some of the background, see our post from last week on the Obama administration's denial of FOIA requests to see the US documents on the ACTA negotiations.

Douglas MacMillan, Sony: Take That, Amazon! Business Week , March 20, 2009.  Excerpt: Comments I was an adult before I could carry one recorded song in my pocket.  Today my daughters carry their favorite 10,000.  I could carry one book in my pocket, barely.

Stevan Harnad, The Need to Cross-Validate and Initialize Multiple Metrics Jointly Against Peer Ratings, Open Access Archivangelism , March 19, 2009.

In early 2008, the European Commission assembled an Expert Group of 13 academics to rethink how the EU funds research and, in particular, "to undertake an evidence-based, ex-post evaluation of FP6."   As group chairman, it appointed Ernst Th. Rietschel, President of the Leibniz Association and Professor Emeritus at the University of Lübeck.

AAU holds seminar to improve access to African scholarly works, Modern Ghana , March 17, 2009.  A report on the Institutional Repository Advocacy Seminar (Accra, March 16-18).

Caleb Fleming, Library to cut nearly $1 million, Collegiate Times , March 19, 2009.

The Alliance for Taxpayer Access has launched a legislative action center to make it easy for US citizens to contact their Congressional delegations about bills affecting OA.  Right now the center hosts a user-modifiable ATA letter supporting the NIH policy and opposing the Conyers bill.  If you haven't already written to your House representative to oppose the bill, please take a moment to do so.

Alison Hall and Philippa Brice, Data sharing: privacy concerns and public attitudes, PHG Foundation, March 16, 2009.