OGC and OSGeo Sign Memorandum of Understanding, a press release from the Open Geospatial Consortium and the Open Source Geospatial Foundation, January 7, 2009.

Rebecca Trager, Web chemistry progresses InChI by InChI, Chemistry World , January 6, 2009.  Excerpt: PS:  See our past posts (1, 2) on the use of proprietary CAS Registry numbers for OA chemical research.

The Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) has launched a funding program on OA repositories and is now soliciting applications.  The program description is a PDF, so I can't link to a machine translation.  But you can read the summary from Informationsplattform Open Access in German or Google's English.

William Calvin, Climate Will Change Everything, Edge , January 7, 2009.  (Thanks to Glyn Moody.)  Excerpt: Comment .  We can wait until climate change forces us to change the way we do science, and then make more work OA and remove obstacles to new research.

K.T.L. Vaughan, Bradley Hemminger, and Meredith Pulley, Scientists Comment on Their Libraries: Successes, Shortcomings, and Dreams for the Future, apparently a preprint.  Self-archived January 7, 2009.

Björn Brembs, Closed access is when you can't read your own article, bjoern.brembs.blog, January 7, 2009.

eQuipu is a portal of OA journals from Chile published with Open Journal Systems, launched last year. All of the 13 current journals were previously OA, but it looks like they're moving to OJS as their publishing platform. See also the project's blog.

Victoria Stodden, The Legal Framework for Reproducible Scientific Research: Licensing and Copyright, Computing in Science & Engineering , January 2009.  (Thanks to Garrett Eastman.)  The journal version of this article is not OA, but I'll soon be able post a link to an OA postprint.  PS:

Duncan Hull, et al., Defrosting the Digital Library: Bibliographic Tools for the Next Generation Web, PLoS Computational Biology, October 31, 2008.

This afternoon Open Access News passed the milestone of 16,000 posts.

Allan Adler for the Association of American Publishers and Martin Frank for the DC Principles Coalition have released their December 22 letter to the Obama transition team, asking it to oppose the NIH policy and support the Conyers bill.  Excerpt: The letter is also signed by 36 publishers and accompanied by a petition from 400 scientists.  Excerpt from the petition: Comments Here we go again.