Christian Zimmermann, RePEc in December 2009, and a look back at 2009, The RePEc Blog, January 7, 2010.

2009: A Year of Strong Growth for Hindawi, press release, January 6, 2010.

PLoS ONE will be added to the Web of Science index. Five journals by OA publisher Molecular Diversity Preservation International will increase their publication frequency from quarterly to monthly. The Canadian Institutes of Health Research has been added as a granting organization in PubMed. openbiomed.info is a new blog about OA in biomedicine by Charles Greenberg.

Peter Gölitz, Twitter, Facebook, and Open Access..., Angewandte Chemie International Edition, editorial, December 9, 2009.

Michael Clarke, Why Hasn’t Scientific Publishing Been Disrupted Already?, The Scholarly Kitchen, January 4, 2010.

OA journal announcements, launches, and conversions spotted in the past few weeks: New OA journals: in education (announcement), successor to Policy and Practice in Education IPSJ Transactions on Computer Vision and Applications (announcement) Converted to delayed OA: Économie rurale (announcement) (2 year delay) New on PubMedCentral: Global Health Action (immediate OA) Psychiatry Investigation (immediate OA) (announcement)

Universities UK response to HEFCE consultation on the Research Excellence Framework (REF), December 13, 2009. Submission to a consultation by the Higher Education Funding Council for England on national research assessment practices under the Research Excellence Framework. Excerpt: Update. Also see Stevan Harnad's comments.

Yassine Gargouri, et al., Self-Selected or Mandated, Open Access Increases Citation Impact for Higher Quality Research, preprint, self-archived January 3, 2010. Abstract: Update. Also see Phil Davis' critique. The authors respond in the comments.

Creative Commons reached its fundraising goal. OA advocate Francis Muguet died in October 2009. ( See also our past posts on Muguet.) "Requirements for open data deposition and integration that do not include mechanisms to agree on, publish and use data standards" will have limited value, argues Nature Genetics. A recent conference paper (in Spanish) discusses repositories as part of the Cuban effort to close the digital divide.

Heather Morrison, Dramatic Growth of Open Access: Dec. 31, 2009 New Year's Eve Edition, The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics, December 31, 2009.

January 1 was Public Domain Day, marking the passage into the public domain of works whose copyright expired in 2009. In countries where copyright lasts for the life of the author plus 70 years (such as the European Union and Australia), works entering the public domain include those of Sigmund Freud, William Butler Yeats, and Zane Grey.