David Bollier, Not Just Peak Oil, But “Peak Hierarchy,” Too?, OnTheCommons.org, December 4, 2008.

Scroll: Essays on the Design of Electronic Text is a class project of students at the University of Toronto, published with Open Journal Systems. See, e.g., Klara Maidenberg, The Race to Create a Digital Library: Google Books vs. the Open Content Alliance.

Stuart Lewis, SWORD PHP library, Stuart Lewis’ Blog, November 30, 2008.

Yesterday I reported that the proposal to require OA for publicly-funded research broke into the top 25 on Obama CTO, which put it on the front page where it would receive more attention and votes.  That new attention, plus some helpful plugs from SPARC and the ATA, more than doubled the number of votes for the proposal overnight (from 300+ to 700+).  It now ranks 16th and is no danger of being bumped off the front page.

Dick Kaser, BioMedCentral — The Case in Point for Open Access, Infotoday Blog, December 4, 2008.

SCOAP3: Funding status report for ICOLC Munich October 2008, a press release from the International Coalition of Library Consortia (ICOLC), November 2008.

Wendy Warr, STM on the advance, Information World Review , December 5, 2008.  Excerpt: Comment .  I understand the claim that OA threatens TA publishers.  But if it's not carefully elaborated, it overlooks the sense in which OA and TA coexist now and might coexist for a long time.  I like Warr's point that threatened industries respond with cost-cutting or innovation.

SchopenhauerSource is a new OA collection of digitized manuscripts by philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer.

A survey released in October 2008 by Swets, Serials Price Increases 2009, shows an average 6% price increase over 2008 prices for the 70,000+ serials surveyed.

The Institut français du Proche-Orient has launched Collections électroniques de l'Ifpo to provide OA to some books published by the institute. The site was developed with the support of the Centre pour l’édition électronique ouverte. (Thanks to CLEO.) Three books are currently available on the site, with a fourth forthcoming: Youssef Courbage and Manfred Kropp, eds., Penser l’Orient.

Jean-Gabriel Bankier, Perceptions of Developing Trends in Repositories, report, undated but recent. See also the December 4 announcement.