Christian Zimmermann, Institutional repositories and RePEc, The RePEc Blog, January 10, 2009.

The Swiss University of Fribourg has signed the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge.

Caroline Bayley, Buy none, get one free, BBC News , January 8, 2009.  (Thanks to Matt Cockerill.)  Excerpt: Comments Anderson is generalizing the business model used by OA journals, whether or not they charge publication fees.  Here's how I generalized it in an April 2002 article: Unfortunately the link to the podcast interview with Chris Anderson and James Boyle is broken at the moment.

Tove Faber Frandsen, The integration of open access journals in the scholarly communication system: Three science fields, Information Processing & Management , January 2009. Only this abstract is free online at the journal site, but also see the self-archived preprint.

Tove Faber Frandsen, Attracted to open access journals: a bibliometric author analysis in the field of biology, Journal of Documentation , January 2009.  (The DOI-based URL doesn't work for me at the  moment.)  Only this abstract is free online from the journal site, but also see the self-archived preprint. Update (1/14/09).

In his first year of office, George Bush issued an executive order allowing former presidents to block the public release of their papers.  See our past posts on that order and the opposition it generated. The first act passed by the House of Representatives in the first post-Bush session of Congress is the repeal of Bush's executive order.  (Thanks to FGI.)

The students in Basic Biotechnology at Michigan State University publish their papers in an OA course journal. In fact, Open Journal Systems is used for the entire course site, including syllabus, links to readings, etc. The course received a university award for its use of OJS.

Gavin Baker, How to improve OJS: a reader’s perspective, A Journal of Insignificant Inquiry, December 31, 2008.

SwePub is a forthcoming OA harvester of "metadata for all Swedish scientific publications from the publication databases of all Higher Education institutions". One of the strategic aims is to "increase the share of Swedish scientific publications that is Open Access". (Thanks to Fabrizio Tinti.)

Fernanda Peset, et al., Indicadores de rendimiento para acciones de acceso abierto, presented at La proyección de los repositorios institucionales (December 10-12, 2008, Madrid); self-archived January 9, 2009.

Josh Hadro, Newsmaker Interview: Brad Wheeler on the HathiTrust, Library Journal, January 9, 2009. Mostly on the technology and organization behind HathiTrust. John Wilkin, HathiTrust and the Google Deal, Library Journal, December 23, 2008. On the relationship between Google Books and HathiTrust.