The November-December issue of Science Editor is now online.

USAID has launched GlobalDevelopmentCommons.  (Thanks to ResourceShelf.)

The Data Seal of Approval is an initiative of Data Archiving and Networked Services launched earlier this year. It sets out guidelines for research data, with these principles: See also the summary and comments by Stéphane Goldstein.

The November/December issue of the eIFL newsletter has a section on OA/IR news.

Maxine Clarke, Positive skew of clinical-trial publication, Peer-to-Peer, November 27, 2008.

Rich Jones, The Future of Free Culture, The New Freedom, November 27, 2008.

Leeds Metropolitan University is hosting a launch event for its IR today. See also our past posts on Leeds Met U's IR: 1, 2. Update. See these further notes on the IR.

The U.S. National Institutes of Health has posted two videos on complying with its Public Access Policy: one on depositing the final peer-reviewed manuscript in PubMedCentral and one on approving submission of a publisher-deposited manuscript.

Peter Frishauf, The End of Peer Review and Traditional Publishing as We Know It, video commentary, Medscape Journal of Medicine, November 24, 2008. Frishauf is the founder of the journal.

Economic Analysis and Policy, a journal published by the Economic Society of Australia, Queensland Branch, converted to OA in March 2008. See the journal's editorial on the change.

Philip Johnson, University libraries, budgets, and open access, Biocurious , November 26, 2008.  Excerpt: Comments Johnson is right that universities would save money.  But they'd save even more than he calculates.  His calculation assumes (1) that all OA journals charge publication fees and (2) that universities would pay all of them.  Both assumptions are untrue.