A new knowledge network devoted to the changing role of information in scholarly research, higher education and business practice, announcement posted to SPARC-OAForum, March 7, 2009.

PIRUS — Publisher and Institutional Repository Usage Statistics: Final Report, report, January 2009. (Thanks to Charles Bailey.) From the executive summary: See also our past post on PIRUS or our past posts on COUNTER (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9).

The JISC-funded Digital Curation Centre released on March 3 an overview of Science Commons as part of its Legal Watch Papers series. Papers in the series are OA. (Thanks to ResourceShelf.) See also our past post on the Legal Watch paper on Creative Commons licensing.

Liz Allen, Expanding the outreach of PLoS content in the developing world, Public Library of Science, March 6, 2009. Charlotte Webber, BioMed Central undertakes large fundraising drive for Computer Aid in 2009, BioMed Central Blog, February 24, 2009.

Free Our Books (or Free Our Books and Research Papers) is a new campaign for OA to taxpayer-funded research in the UK, to be launched at the Internet For Activists conference (London, March 14, 2009). (Thanks to infinite thØught.)

Glenn S. McGuigan and Robert D. Russell, The Business of Academic Publishing: A Strategic Analysis of the Academic Journal Publishing Industry and its Impact on the Future of Scholarly Publishing, Electronic Journal of Academic and Special Librarianship, Winter 2008.

Hamid R. Jamali and David Nicholas, E-print depositing behavior of physicists and astronomers: An intradisciplinary study, Journal of Academic Librarianship, forthcoming. Only this abstract is free online, at least so far: Update. See also the OA self-archived version.

Bill Hooker has used Elsevier data to show that there is "no apparent correlation between IF [impact factor] and price."  Excerpt: Comment .  Also see White and Creaser 2007, which showed little correlation between price and impact factor.  Bergstrom and Bergstrom 2004 showed that journal prices are either unrelated to citation impact or inversely related to it: Update (3/10/09).

Krishnan Ramanathan and three co-authors, Document summarization using Wikipedia, a technical report from HP Labs, February 21, 2009.  (Thanks to ResourceShelf.) Comment .  I've written a few times about document summarizing software, and how useful it will be when there is more OA literature to sic it on.

The e-journal database at Nottingham Trent University lists 23,971 "free e-journals".  (Thanks to J.W. Fletcher.) Comments That's more than six times the number (3,914) listed today in the DOAJ.  But the DOAJ is limited to peer-reviewed journals, and it seems unlikely that the Nottingham-Trent list shares that limitation.

Peter Williams, Publishers denounce JISC open access report, Information World Review , March 9, 2009.  Excerpt: PS:  Also see my post on the Houghton report, which includes longer excerpts from its findings.