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.

Thomas Walker, an entomologist at the U of Florida, discovered that his (unnamed) professional society took a position against the NIH policy without consulting the members.  In a recent letter it asked members to sign a petition in support of DC Principles Coalition, an organization which lobbies against the NIH policy and in favor of the Conyers bill. Walker would like to know whether other societies taking similar steps. PS:

Kate M. Manuel, The Google Library Project: Is Digitization for Purposes of Online Indexing Fair Use Under Copyright Law?  A CRS Report from the Congressional Research Service, February 5, 2009.  From the summary: PS:  I haven't had time to read the whole report, but it appears that Manuel summarizes the issues raised by the question, and some criteria from the Copyright Act and case law, without offering an opinion.

Andre Vellino, Open Access for Canadian Scientific Publishing at Risk, Ethical Dilemmas , March 7, 2009.  Excerpt: PS:  NRC Research Press publishes 17 journals.  Also see our past posts on the press. Update (3/17/09).  Tracey Lauriault at Datalibre.ca has some new details: Update (4/7/09). Also see Norman Oder's article in Library Journal.

In his February 15 column, George Will asserted the widely-circulating claim that climate scientists in the 1970s were predicting global cooling.  Climate scientists quickly jumped in to correct him and the blogosphere lit up with the debate.  Many of their corrections cited a peer-reviewed article definitively demolishing Will's canard:

ASN NEURO is a new peer-reviewed OA journal published by Portland Press and the American Society of Neurochemistry. The article-processing charge is $960, with discounts for institutional members. Articles are published under the Creative Commons BY-NC license.

Barry A. Kosmin of Trinity College is getting good press for the scope and findings of his comprehensive new American Religious Identification Survey 2008.  However, I'd like to give him some good press, or at least two cheers, for providing OA to the data from his earlier surveys in 2001 and 1990.  I'd add the third cheer but I can't find OA data for the newest survey.

CARL-SPARC toolkit encourages authors to maximize research through digital repositories, a press release from CARL and SPARC.

Gavin Baker, On jurisdiction; or, letting copyright trump science, A Journal of Insignificant Inquiry, March 8, 2009.

Lawrence Lessig, A Reply to Congressman Conyers, Lessig , March 9, 2009.

UK PubMed Central launched a blog on March 2.  Already it's posted several developments which I haven't seen elsewhere: March 2:  The Company of Biologists (COB) has adopted a hybrid OA option.  More, when COB publishes articles subject to funder policies requiring deposit in PMC or UKPMC, COB will make the deposits itself. March 4:  The European Journal of Human Genetics has adopted a hybrid OA option. March 4: