Joseph Thomas is conducting a survey of library responses to the NIH policy.

Peter Murray-Rust, Closed Data at Chemical Abstracts leads to Bad Science, A Scientist and the Web, March 17, 2009. Comments on Alan H. Lipkus, et al., Structural Diversity of Organic Chemistry. A Scaffold Analysis of the CAS Registry, Journal of Organic Chemistry, May 28, 2008.

It's time to send SPARC Europe your nominations for its 2009 Award for Outstanding Achievements in Scholarly Communications.

Patrick Peccatte, Flickr et PhotosNormandie: une entreprise collective de redocumentarisation, Documentaliste - Sciences de l'information, 2009; self-archived March 12, 2009. English abstract: See also the collection.

Claudio Marconi, Open Access e archivi aperti: nuove modalità di diffusione della letteratura scientifica, BA thesis, Università degli Studi di Roma “La Sapienza”, Facoltà di Scienze della Comunicazione, 2008; self-archived March 16, 2009.

Representatives of the parliaments of 27 African countries and 4 intergovernmental organizations signed the Kigali Declaration on the Development of an Equitable Information Society in Africa at a recent conference in Kigali, Rwanda.

Päivi Kanerva, Open access -julkaiseminen Turun Kauppakorkeakoulussa, a Master's thesis approved by the University of Tampere on December 17, 2008.  (Thanks to Jyrki Ilva.)  Read it in Finnish or Google's English.  The title in Google's English = Open Access Publication of the Turku School of Economics .  The Turku School of Economics is in Turku, Finland.

Roger Lancefield, Free Culture versus Freetard, Ralpress , March 16, 2009.  (Thanks to Glyn Moody.)

Steven M. Bachrach, Chemistry publication - making the revolution, Journal of Cheminformatics , March 17, 2009.  (The DOI-based URL doesn't work at the moment.)  From the body of the paper: Comments I won't comment on Bachrach's two-tier proposal.  But I will comment on one of his main premises.  It's not true that " Most OA journals operate on an author-pays model.... ."

The University of Chicago has stopped accepting paper copies of theses and dissertations and now requires electronic submission.  (Thanks to Charles Bailey.) Comment. But does Chicago require or even provide OA for these electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs)?  After studying many university ETD policies in 2006, I concluded: I believe that's still true.

Erik Wilde, Eric C. Kansa, and Raymond Yee, Proposed Guideline Clarifications for American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, University of California School of Information, working paper, March 16, 2009. From the body of the report: For more perspective, see the blog posts by the report co-authors Erik Wilde and Eric Kansa.