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.
Heather West, Senator Wants to Scratch a Seven Year Itch, PolicyBeta, February 27, 2009. See also our past pasts on: PACER Joe Lieberman Show Us the Data Update. See also this story from the National Law Journal.
Danny Ash, Experts Seek Intellectual Property Reform, Columbia Spectator, February 25, 2009. See especially this quote: See also our past posts on PLoS or Harold Varmus.
The University of Salamanca has decided to sign the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities.
Open Access: Just Publish is a new 4-minute video from SURF on Open Access Year, in Dutch with English subtitles. See also our past posts on SURF's author rights video or Dutch Open Access Year. Update. See also the video description here.
Ker Than, "Eco Hubble" to Bring Nature Data to the Public, National Geographic News, February 26, 2009. Update. The project's name is actually "National Ecological Observatory Network"; the typo is in the source quoted.
Switzerland's University of St. Gallen has adopted an OA policy. See yesterday's announcement in German or Google's English. (Thanks to the Open Access Informationsplattform.) I can't yet find the text of the policy and the announcement does not provide details. But the goal of the new policy is "to ensure" ( gewährleisten ) OA for as many articles as possible through Alexandria, the St. Gallen repository.
John Wilbanks, Sage - Open Access Data from Merck, Common Knowledge , February 27, 2009. Excerpt: Comments Kudos to Merck for this unusually beneficial change of policy. Kudos too for the good judgment to put Wilbanks on the Board. Less than two weeks ago, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) also took a large step toward sharing its knowledge and intellectual property.
Here are some more comments from the press and blogosphere on the re-introduction of the Conyers bill (a.k.a. Fair Copyright in Research Works Act, HR 801), which would overturn the OA policy at the NIH.
Jonas Nordin, Historisk tidskrift i nutid och framtid: Några reflektioner över läsarsynpunkter, bibliometri och Open Access, Historisk tidskrift , 128, 4 (2008).
Elisabetta Poltronieri, Controllo Semantico all'Istituto Superiore della Sanita, video of a presentation (in Italian) at Pervasive IA (Forli, February 20-21, 2009) on the OA repository at Italy's Istituto Superiore di Sanità.