Jean-Claude Guédon, Between Excellence and Quality : The European Research Area in Search of Itself, a preprint, self-archived February 3, 2009.

The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) is seeking nominations for a group to develop a framework for the "management and dissemination of ‘primary biodiversity data’ following open access principles."  Nominations are due by February 27, 2009.

Raynard Kington, Analysis of Comments and Implementation of the NIH Public Access Policy, Federal Register, February 18, 2009.  Kington is the Acting Director of the NIH.  This document is the official version of a document released by the NIH last September.

Stevan Harnad, John Wiley on RoMEO and John the Baptist on Supererogation, Open Access Archivangelism , February 17, 2009.

Robert Cook-Deegan, Dr. Varmus Goes to Washington, American Scientist, March-April 2009. A review of Harold Varmus' memoir, The Art and Politics of Science. See also our past post on the memoir or all past posts on Varmus.

Last July, Norway's Ministry of Education and Research ( Kunnskapsdepartemente or KD) asked the Norwegian Association of Higher Education Institutions ( Universitets- og høgskolerådet or UHR) for advice on how to provide OA for the nation's research output.  In September the UHR launched an OA working group to develop recommendations, and the working group issued its report January 30, 2009.

Herkko Hietanen, The Pursuit of Efficient Copyright Licensing — How Some Rights Reserved Attempts to Solve the Problems of All Rights Reserved, dissertation at Lappeenranta University of Technology, December 9, 2008.

Frank Stasio and Susan Davis, Meet Paul Jones, The State of Things, February 16, 2009.

Stevan Harnad, UK's HEFCE Squandering Its Credibility and Assets In Assessing Research Assessment, Open Access Archivangelism , February 15, 2009.

Indiana University's new Strategic Plan for Information Technology includes a recommendation to develop a shared cyberinfrastructure for e-publishing. (Thanks to Charles Bailey.) IU recently named David Lewis as assistant vice president for digital scholarly communications, which will be charged with implementing the recommendations. (Thanks to Charles Bailey.) See also our past posts on IU or David Lewis.

Jeff Erickson, New free computational geometry journal?, Ernie's 3D Pancakes, February 15, 2009. Joachim Gudmundsson and Pat Morin are discussing the possibility of establishing a new open access computational geometry journal, which would be completely free, for both readers and authors.