Université de Liège has adopted an OA mandate. (Thanks to Stevan Harnad.) Bernard Rentier, the Rector at Liège, has posted an English translation of his November memo to the Liège faculty on the AmSci OA Forum. Excerpt: Comments This is an excellent policy.
Jeffrey Mervis, NSF Rethinks Its Digital Library, Science Magazine , January 2, 2009. (Thanks to Garrett Eastman.) Accessible only to subscribers.
Spain's Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas, a public opinion pollster and division of the executive branch, on January 1 made available the datasets from its 2007-8 surveys. Earlier datasets will be made available later. See the announcement.
Christian Zimmermann, RePEc in December 2008, and what we have done over the year 2008, The RePEc Blog, January 2, 2009.
I just mailed the January issue of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter . This issue reviews the notable OA developments from 2008. The round-up section briefly notes 143 OA developments from December.
Ryan Singel, With Flickr Layoffs, Whither 'The Commons'?, Epicenter, December 30, 2008. In a round of layoffs at Flickr parent company Yahoo, one of the project leaders for the OA Flickr Commons project has been laid off, prompting fears about the future of the project.
January 1 is the date when works of the appropriate age pass out of copyright and into the public domain. See this post at the Creative Commons blog for more information and links. Update. See also this post about Public Domain Day in Poland.
If you recall (1, 2, 3), Germany's new copyright law took effect one year ago today. Under its terms, electronic rights to works published in Germany before 1995 would vest in publishers unless authors expressly told their publishers during 2008 that they wished to hold those rights themselves. Of course, if authors regained the electronic rights to these works, they could use them to authorize OA.
Chris Castle, Is Google's culture grab unstoppable? The Register , December 31, 2008.
Heather Morrison, 2008 December 31 Dramatic Growth of Open Access, Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics , December 31, 2008.
Zoë Corbyn, Journal subscriptions at risk as weak pound hits library budgets, Times Higher Education Supplement , January 1, 2009. Excerpt: Comment .