Penn Libraries and Kirtas Technologies team up to make more than 200,000 books available for research and purchase, a press release from Kirtas, February 12, 2009. (Thanks to Charles Bailey.) Excerpt: Comment . I talked to Todd Whiting at Kirtas about this program and have his permission to post what I learned. (Thanks, Todd.)
Show Us the Data is a new campaign by the Center for Democracy & Technology and Open the Government inviting the public to identify the "most wanted government documents, reports or data sets that should be on the Web" but aren't. Nominations and votes are being accepted through March 9, 2009. See the CDT blog post or press release, or the post at the Sunlight Foundation blog.
Federal Player of the Week, Washington Post, February 9, 2009. See also our past posts on Lipman.
The Alliance for Taxpayer Access has issued a call to action to defend the NIH policy against the Conyers bill. Excerpt: From the draft letter: Comments If you're a US citizen, please write to your representative. The NIH policy is the most important OA policy in the US today and affects a larger body of research than any other OA policy in the world.
Many journals combine open access and open review, but some are finding that open review is not working as well as they wanted. Nikolaus Kriegeskorte is thinking about how to make open review work better. See his full-length elaboration of the idea, Open post-publication peer review, his abridged version, and his FAQ.
Roland Reuß, Eine heimliche technokratische Machtergreifung, Frankfurter Allgemeiner Zeitung , February 11, 2009. (Thanks to Eric Steinhauer via Klaus Graf.) A jeremiad against OA, calling it "immoral and reprehensible" ( unsittlich und verwerflich ). Comments on the article are growing fast. For translations, see the article, the comments, and the blog posts by Steinhauer and Graf, in Google's English.
Carolina Rossini, The Need for a "Knowledge Web" for Scholarship, The Publius Project , February 5, 2009.
Stevan Harnad, Napoleon, the Hexagon, and the Question of Where to Mandate Deposit, Open Access Archivangelism, February 9, 2009. Jenny Delasalle, Duplication of deposit requirements, WRAP repository blog, February 10, 2009.
Charles Bailey has released the 2008 Annual Edition of his Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography. See his blog post for information on what's been updated.
Trinity University has formed a working group to consider adopting an OA mandate.
Creative Commons has launched GreenXchange, a project aimed at re-creating the eviscerated (Madey v. Duke) research exemption to patents through voluntary licensing. See also our past posts on Madey v. Duke.