Sarah Rouse, Library of Congress Puts Thousands of Historic Books Online, America.gov, December 24, 2009. See also our past posts on the program.

Dublin Institute of Technology has adopted an OA mandate:

The University of Abertay Dundee has adopted an OA mandate:

Steven Shavell, Should Copyright of Academic Works Be Abolished?, working paper, December 18, 2009.

I'll be out tomorrow. Merry Christmas!

The Open Knowledge Commons received $1.5 million to digitize 30,000 volumes of public domain medical literature. SURFshare is accepting nominations for its Open Access Award, with a prize each for outstanding strategic and practical contributions to OA in the Netherlands. NITLE launched a prediction market to estimate when the DOAJ will hit 4,700 journals. EP2DC is a new service to deposit datasets in a separate repository from inside EPrints.

Medical Education Online (MEO) to be published by Co-Action Publishing, press release, December 11, 2009. Until 2008, MEO was a no-fee OA journal. In May 2008 (note: the link contains a typo), it implemented a $100 publication fee for articles and no fee for letters. The fee was increased $250 in June 2009. After the change in publishers, MEO now charges a $600 fee for articles and $375 for letters.

Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, led by president (and OA advocate) Harold Varmus, signed the Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity.

PRISM (Partnership for Research Integrity in Science & Medicine), the aggressive, deceptive, anti-OA lobbying arm of the AAP/PSP launched in August 2007, has allowed its domain name (prismcoalition.org) to lapse. See our past posts on PRISM.

The Public Knowledge Project released version 2.3.1 of its Open Journal Systems publishing software. A collection of OA German-language texts will be added to Wikimedia. PLoS released the results of its author surveys, which asked authors who submitted to a PLoS journal for their views about the service. PKP posted a new case study of how the University of the Basque Country uses its open journal and conference software.

Scholarly and Research Communication, a new OA journal published by the Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing at Simon Fraser University, released its first issue.