John Willinsky, The Publisher's Pushback against NIH's Public Access and Scholarly Publishing Sustainability, PLoS Biology , January 27, 2009.  Excerpt: PS:  Hear, hear.  See my article from October 2008, analyzing the Conyers bill in detail and showing the false assumptions in the rhetoric of the publishing lobby in support of it.  Also see my point by point rebuttal to the STM briefing document.

Annette M. Nahin, Free Article Indicators on PubMed Summary Display, NLM Technical Bulletin , January 26, 2009.  Excerpt: Comments Here's a sample search with some examples of the flags.  Look for the green text which says "Free article at journal site", "Free article in PMC", or "Free article in PMC | at journal site". Here's my translation of the second paragraph above:

Wayne Clough, the current secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, is already leagues ahead of his predecessor, Lawrence Small, on access issues as well as ethics issues.  See Brett Zongker's story today from the Associate Press: Comments In this passage, "open" is a verb, and Clough may simply mean making access wider and easier, not providing free online access.

The January 2009 edition of the Ranking Web of World Repositories is now online.  See today's announcement in plain text or Stevan Harnad's edition enhanced with links.

Jeffrey Young, Physicists Set Plan in Motion to Change Publishing System, Chronicle of Higher Education , January 30, 2009.

John Houghton and eight co-authors, Economic implications of alternative scholarly publishing models:  Exploring the costs and benefits, January 2009.  A major (256 pp.) report to JISC.  From the press release: From the summary on the landing page: From the section on comparing costs and benefits (pp. 211f) in the body of the report: From the conclusions and recommendations (pp. 231f): PS:

Richard Poynder's Basement Interviews "with leaders and thinkers from the growing number of free and open initiatives" should now have a higher profile and reach more readers.  A new page collecting links to the interviews, and a preface introducing them, has been posted at the site of Bloomsbury Academic, the OA imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing.  (Disclosure:  I'm the subject of one of the interviews.)

Open SA! is a recently-launched project by SA Rocks and the African Commons Project.

Library of Congress Announces Study of Bibliographic Record Publication, press release, January 23, 2009.

Richard Wallis, Interview with Josh Ferraro of biblios.net, Talking with Talis, January 23, 2009. A podcast. See also our past post on biblios.net.

L. T. Handoko, A New Approach for Scientific Data Dissemination in Developing Countries: A Case of Indonesia, Earth, Moon, and Planets , January 14, 2009.  Only an abstract and short preview are free online, at least so far. PS:  Does anyone know what "ARSIP" stands for in this context?