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.

Andrew Albanese, Institutional Repositories: Thinking Beyond the Box, Library Journal , March 1, 2009.

Fredrik Åström, Citation patterns in open access journals, OpenAccess.se and the National Library of Sweden, undated but apparently February 25, 2009.  (Thanks to Jan Hagerlid.)  Abstract:

The OA Perseus Digital Library is developing the Scaife Digital Library as a special, OA library distributed among institutional repositories.  From the Perseus description: For more details, see Christopher Blackwell and Gregory Crane, Cyberinfrastructure, the Scaife Digital Library and Classics in a Digital age, Digital Humanities Quarterly , Winter 2009.

The Association of American Universities (AAU) and the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges (NASULGC) have released their February 19 letter to the House Judiciary Committee, supporting the NIH policy and opposing the Conyers bill.  The online letter is an image scan and I only have time to rekey a short excerpt: Comment. This is important.

How is RePEc surviving the economic crisis?

The Winter 2009 issue of the Journal of Electronic Publishing is now online.

President Obama has nominated Kathleen Sebelius to be the next Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS).  Sebelius is the Democratic governor of Kansas. Comment .  What's the OA connection?  As far as I can tell, Sebelius has no public track record for or against OA to research, although she does have a good record on open government and OA to PSI.

NECOBELAC (NEtwork of COllaboration Between Europe and Latin American Caribbean) is a new project for collaboration between Europe and Latin American and Caribbean countries to develop capacity in health-care information, including promoting OA. The project is now conducting a questionnaire to identify "terms and concepts related to those issues to determine their weight within different audience[s]".

Writing Space: Readings on Writing is a new OA, Creative Commons-licensed book series of educational essays on writing.

Kevin Donovan, Notes from Georgetown Symposium on Google Book Search Settlement, Blurring Borders, February 27, 2009. Notes on Google and the Future of Higher Education (Washington, D.C., February 27, 2009). Update. See also Timothy Vollmer's notes.