John Murphy, Acquisition raises profile of open-access publishing, Research Information , February/March 2009.

The March issue of Walt Crawford's Cites & Insights is now online.  The whole issue is devoted to the Google book settlement.  PS:  Walt does an excellent job collecting comments from many quarters.  (Disclosure:  some, but not the best, are mine.)

Reed Elsevier, parent company of TA publisher Elsevier and TA legal information service LexisNexis, has released its preliminary financial numbers for 2008. (Thanks to Heather Morrison.) Some excerpts: Elsevier reported operating profits of £538 million (approx. $814 million USD), an 11% increase over the previous year. LexisNexis reported operating profits of £513 million (approx. $735 million USD), an 18% increase over the previous year.

The New York State Higher Education Initiative (NYSHEI) has come out against the Conyers bill.  From its February 13 statement: Comments Kudos to NYSHEI.  It's important for other statewide organizations devoted to research, education, libraries, or health care to take a similar stand and communicate with their Congressional delegations.

Association of Research Libraries, Ad Hoc Task Force to Review the Proposed OCLC Policy for Use and Transfer of WorldCat Records, Final Report to the ARL Board, January 30, 2009. See also the February 20 press release.

La Quadrature du Net, Copyright dogmatism temporarily kicked out of European Parliament, press release, February 19, 2009. See also our past post on the Medina report.

In January, I blogged James Love's Knowledge as a Public Good: Two Mechanisms, a presentation at the Fórum Mundial Ciência E Democracia (Belém, Parã, Brazil, January 26, 2009).  But at the time I didn't appreciate the subtle suggestion he made there.  Thanks to David Bollier for pointing it out.

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.

Michael Carroll, Copyright in Databases, Carrollogos , February 20, 2009.

Law library directors meeting at Duke Law School in Durham, North Carolina, last November have released the Durham Statement on Open Access to Legal Scholarship (February 11, 2009).

While the OA proposal at Obama CTO continues to do well, there's another way to tell urge the Obama administration to require OA for publicly-funded research.  I just added the same proposal to the Open Our Government List (OOGL) from the Sunlight Foundation.  But this time, I added a sentence about the Conyers bill.