Jean-Claude Guédon, Digitizing and the Meaning of Knowledge, Academic Matters , October/November 2008.

The UK Medical Research Council adopted an OA mandate in June 2006.  At the time you could find it here.  But four months later the link was dead and the policy moved here.  Now the new link has died too and I can't find the policy's current location.  If anyone can point me to it, I'd be grateful. Meantime, here's the FAQ on the MRC OA mandate.

A new but undated report on national research and higher education policies in France (Rapport sur les politiques nationales de recherche et de formations supérieures), an annex to the 2009 finance bill, picks up some OA recommendations from the May 2008 Salençon Report on scientific and technical information (Rapport du comite 1st information scientifique et technique).

DUMAS (Dépôt Universitaire de Mémoires Après Soutenance) is a new OA repository for Master's theses launched by the humanities division of the Université Pierre-Mendès-France and hosted by HAL.

Kaitlin Mara, Ministers, Stakeholders Meet In Mali To Strategise On Health Research Systems, Intellectual Property Watch, November 20, 2008.

The U.S. National Library of Medicine has released an updated license for its databases, including MEDLINE and PubMed.

A new version of the National Library of Medicine Drug Information Portal was released in October 2008. See this announcement. The portal is an OA resource of information on over 16,000 drugs.

Hans-Ulrich Rüegger, Martina Arioli, and Heini Murer (eds.), Universitäres Wissen teilen : Forschende im Dialog ( Universities share knowledge:  Researchers in dialog ), a new OA book on OA, based on a symposium at the University of Zurich in March 2008.  A print edition is for sale from v/d/f.

The Israeli Science Foundation and the Israeli Committee for High Energy Physics have joined the CERN SCOAP3 project.

The UK Economic & Social Research Council has updated its Introduction to Open Access. The new version is undated.  But the link to it appeared on the ESRC's OA page yesterday, and the link to the previous version is now dead. I believe this is the doc's first update since December 2007. The ESRC adopted an OA mandate in June 2006.

Stuart Lewis announces the SWORDAPP Facebook Repository Deposit Tool, an application to perform repository deposits from within Facebook via the SWORD protocol. See also our past posts on SWORD. Update. See also Pete Johnston's comments.