I'll be on the road for the next three days, with few opportunities for blogging or email.

Lawrence Lessig and Michael Eisen, Is John Conyers Shilling for Special Interests? Huffington Post , March 2, 2009.  Excerpt: The MAPLight report on the Conyers bill shows how much money each member of the House Judiciary Committee received from "periodical publishing interests" during the 2008 election cycle (January 2007 - December 2008).

Jennifer Howard, A New Push to Unlock University-Based Research, Chronicle of Higher Education , March 6, 2009 (accessible only to subscribers).  Excerpt: PS:  All good news.  But for the record, nobody's arm is being twisted at Harvard.  Nor is Harvard even trying to ram things down publisher's throats. Update . Here's an OA version of the same article.

Raivo Ruusalepp, A Comparative Study of International Approaches to Enabling the Sharing of Research Data, report for the Digital Curation Centre and JISC, November 30, 2008.

The contents of Freebase and Freebase's Wikipedia extract are now available as public data sets on Amazon Web Services. See also our past post on AWS public data sets.

NOAA Offers New Online Media Library Featuring Ocean-Related Photos and Videos, press release, February 11, 2009. (Thanks to ResearchBuzz.) See also our past posts on NOAA.

The January 2009 issue of Ariadne is now available.

Guidelines for the JISC/NEH Transatlantic Digitization Collaboration Grants were posted on January 12, 2009. The grants provide up to $300,000 for digitization projects involving collaboration between U.S. and English/Welsh institutions.

Paula J. Hane, Open Educational Resources (OER) and Libraries, Information Today , March 2, 2009.

The Canadian Research Knowledge Network has agreed to an "expression of interest" in the CERN SCOAP3 project.  Quoting the report from Research Money , February 27, 2009: (Thanks to Research Money , via CARL-ABRC, via Jim Till.) PS:  Also see our past posts on CRKN.

I just mailed the March issue of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter .  This issue takes a close look at the re-introduction of the Fair Copyright in Research Works Act (a.k.a. the Conyers bill, HR 801), which would repeal the OA policy at the NIH and block similar policies at all other federal agencies.  The round-up section briefly notes 129 OA developments from February.