Zoë Corbyn, Journal subscriptions at risk as weak pound hits library budgets, Times Higher Education Supplement , January 1, 2009. Excerpt: Comment .

The Australian Newspapers Digitisation Program is a project by the National Library of Australia to digitize out-of-copyright newspapers. The Australian Newspapers beta was launched in July 2008. Digitization is still underway. The digitized archives of the Journal de Genève, in print 1826-1998, recently went OA online.

Sangeeta Shashikant, North-South fight on IP, Benefit Sharing issues in influenza talks, SUNS, December 19, 2008. (Thanks to Glyn Moody.) Report on the World Health Organization's Intergovernmental Meeting on Pandemic Influenza Preparedness. Comment. From what I've read, it's not clear to me whether there are any proposals for OA to the regulatory data, or just that the data be shared among regulators.

Niva Elkin-Koren, Governing Access to Users-Generated-Content: The Changing Nature of Private Ordering in Digital Networks, forthcoming in Governance, Regulations and Powers on the Internet; self-archived December 29, 2008.

Gene D. Sprouse, APS now leaves copyright with authors for derivative works, Reviews of Modern Physics , October 1, 2008.  An editorial.  Excerpt: Comment .  For detail on the APS author requests for additional rights, and their desire to repost chunks of their APS articles on wikis, see my post from March 2008.  The author requests were very reasonable and I commend APS for acceding to them.

Michael Carroll, The Digital Public Domain, Carrollogos , December 30, 2008.

Wendy Hall has been appointed a Dame Commander of the British Empire (DBE) for her work in computer science, which includes important work on OA.  Stevan Harnad, her colleague in the University of Southampton School of Electronics and Computer Science, summarizes the OA connection: PS:  Congratulations to Dame Wendy.  Also see our past posts on her OA work.

Gideon Burton, The Coming Change in Humanities Publishing (6): Open Access, Gideon Burton's Blog , December 12, 2008.  Excerpt: Also see Stevan Harnad's comments: PS:  Also see my own discussion of the gratis/libre distinction and the differences between the gratis/libre and green/gold distinctions.

Kim Leeder, Social networking with a brain: a critical review of academic sites, In the Library with the Lead Pipe, December 10, 2008.

The Fall 2008 issue of Access, the National Biological Information Infrastructure newsletter, is now online. See these articles: "NBII Helps DoD Keep the Environment Healthy" (p. 1), on the U.S. Department of Defense Threatened and Endangered Species Document Repository "NBII Moving Toward Web 2.0 Technologies to Improve Access to Biological Content" (p. 3) "Tricolored Blackbird Portal Provides Data Entry, Access, and Sharing Capabilities" (p.

Globalizing quake information, Nature Geoscience , December 2008.  The journal has made this editorial TA at its own site, but authorized an OA copy at the site of the Global Earthquake Model.  Excerpt from the latter: Comment .  GEM seems to depend on the openness of data, not just the accuracy and comprehensiveness of data.