John Wilbanks, Data, Copyrights, And Slogans, Part II, Common Knowledge , January 26, 2009.  Excerpt: PS:  See John's first post in this series (1/24/09) or the excerpt blogged here.

Stephanie Taylor, Repositories - The Future, a five-slide presentation at Repository Services Day (Bath, January 15, 2009).

Peter Brantley, A fire on the plain, Peter Brantley's thoughts and speculations , January 26, 2009.

James Love, Knowledge as a Public Good: Two Mechanisms, a presentation at the Fórum Mundial Ciência E Democracia (Belém, Parã, Brazil, January 26, 2009).  The two mechanisms are medical innovation prizes and WTO agreements.

Kunstgeschichte is a new peer-reviewed OA journal from DiPP.  For more detail, see the announcement (January 2009). The journal posts submissions first as discussion papers, and after six months of peer review accepts some of them as journal articles.  The first wave of 10 discussion papers is now online.

Elsevier has launched CiteAlert, a free service notifying authors when one of their papers is cited by an Elsevier journal.  (Thanks to ResourceShelf.)  The service only covers citations to articles published since 2005 in journals indexed by Scopus. Comments This is useful as far as it goes, and I can see why Elsevier can't take it much further on its own.

Brianna Laugher, Free as in Freedom miniconf recap + slides, All The Modern Things, January 26, 2009. Notes on Free as in Freedom (Hobart, January 20, 2009).

Richard Poynder, The Open Access Interviews: Libertas Academica, Open and Shut? January 28, 2009.

Eduardo Martínez, The world’s first free, open access astronomical observatory officially opened, Innovations Report , January 27, 2009.  Excerpt: PS:  If I understand it, the Montegancedo observatory provides open access to the equipment as well as --or because-- it provides open access to its data.

Leslie Carr, Repositories vs Learning Object Repositories, RepositoryMan, January 27, 2009.

The UN Office of Legal Affairs launched new OA research tools on January 23, 2009.