American Library Association, Opening the "Window to a Larger World": Libraries' Role in Changing America, report to the Obama transition team, December 17, 2008.

The presentations from the SPARC Digital Repositories Meeting (Baltimore, November 17-18, 2008) are now online. See also our past posts on the meeting: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.

The Journal of Nuclear Medicine, which previously provided OA to its content after a 12 month delay, has shortened the moving wall to 6 months. See the September press release from the Society of Nuclear Medicine.

DRIVER has released its comment on the EU green paper, Copyright in the Knowledge Economy.  (Thanks to Birgit Schmidt.)

The MacArthur Foundation adopted a research access policy, which took effect on September 18, 2008.  (Thanks to Donna Okubo.)  Excerpt: Comment .  Kudos to all involved.  While the Foundation uses the language of encouragement, the policy operates more like a mandate with case-by-case exceptions.  I like the enforcement mechanism:

The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation adopted an open data policy on September 18, 2008.  (Thanks to Donna Okubo.)  Excerpt: Comment .  Kudos for this strong policy.  Note that it only applies to data, not to peer-reviewed articles (except for the offer to pay publication fees).  But I hope the Foundation will consider extending it to cover peer-reviewed articles as well.

The EU's Information and Communication Technologies Policy Support Programme (ICT PSP) has released its Draft Work Programme 2009.  If the EC approves the draft in January, then it should open a call for proposals from January 29 to June 2, 2009.  According to the draft, one thread of the new funding program is devoted to OA.

Fedora Commons has posted two year-end summaries on the progress of the free and open repository software project: Dan Davis, Growing Fedora Commons’ 100+ Project Team Sandy Payette, 2008: A Very Good Year for Partnerships, Community, and Software

A German court has ruled that journal editors may acquire a copyright in the collections they assemble, even if they don't hold copyrights on the individual articles.  Hence, if an OA repository contains copies of many or all of the same articles, arranged in the same systematic or methodical way that the journal arranged them, then it could violate the editor's right.

The Chronicle of Higher Education 's blog post on the Harvard OA mandate (February 12, 2008) was Number 3 of its Top 10 posts of 2008, based on reader traffic.

Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database is a new OA database sponsored by Emory University, the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities, and the W.E.B. DuBois Institute at Harvard University. See the December 5 press release from Emory or coverage by the Associated Press.