You know the main arguments for President Obama to reverse the Bush restrictions on federally-funded stem cell research. Here's a good one you may not have heard, from Deirdre Madden of the University College Cork Law Department: Update .
Michael Geist, Fire Up the Digital Jobs Machine, The Tyee , January 20, 2009. Excerpt: PS: Hear, hear. Also see the similar proposals from Prue Adler and Charles Lowry and from me.
Gavin Baker, What are the factors inhibiting OA? A Journal of Insignificant Inquiry , January 19, 2009. Excerpt: Update (1/26/09). Also see Gavin's further reflections, Incentives and disincentives to OA.
Paula Hane, Elsevier Launches SciTopics—Now a Fully Developed Research 2.0 Resource, Information Today , January 19, 2009. Excerpt: PS: See our past posts (1, 2) on SciTopics, under its old name, Scirus Topic Pages. Also see a sample topic page, Does Open Access Increase Citations?
Stevan Harnad, Learned Society Survey On Open Access Self-Archiving, Open Access Archivangelism , January 20, 2009. Excerpt: Comment . While the full study is still forthcoming, Sally Morris reminds us that the ALPSP and the Biosciences Federation released a summary report last June. See my comments on the June summary.
The Dutch publisher, Essentials, has announced plans to launch a new journal of digital libraries, which will cover OA and copyright issues, among others. The inaugural issue of Digital Library should appear in March 2009. Read the December 2008 press release in Dutch or Google's English. It appears that the journal will not itself be OA.
Sophie L. Rovner, ACS Speeds Web Publication: Society tests free online access to peer-reviewed, accepted manuscripts, Chemical and Engineering News , January 15, 2009. Excerpt: Comments If I understand it, the "just accepted" manuscripts are peer-reviewed but not copy-edited or formatted for publication.
Elie Dolgin, New impact metric, The Scientist , January 19, 2009. Excerpt: Comment. Kudos to PLoS ONE . This is an important decision and I hope that other journals (OA and TA) will follow suit.
Presentations, audio, and video from the Creative Commons Technology Summit (Cambridge, Mass., December 12, 2008) are now available. See especially: David Torpie, Government Information Licensing Framework: A multidisciplinary project improving access to Public Sector Information Jonathan Rees, Open Source Knowledge Management: What Comes After Access?
Norois has gone online with Revues.org. The journal will have a delayed OA policy with a 2-year embargo. The journal has been in publication since 1954; backfiles to 2004 are currently available.
The Journal of the Short Story in English has gone online with Revues.org. The journal will have a delayed OA policy with a 2-year embargo. The journal has been in publication since 1983; backfiles to 1997 are currently available.