Last week, having quickly digested the executive summary of the Finch Report on open access (OA), I told you it was complicated. I’ve now read the report in its entirety, along with a large swathes of blogospheric commentary. I’m still decidedly of the view that it’s complicated but I wanted to think through some of the initial responses. In particular, I’d like to try to address the vexed issue of costs.

This is a big deal for me: my first ever article in New Scientist – a magazine that I read in the library in Ballymena as a teenager. Pardon me for preening a little. What’s it about? You guessed it: open access. My thanks to Simon Singh for suggesting that I pitch it to them.

A committee set up by government was never going to foment a revolution. And so it has proved to be. The recommendations of the Finch Report released today mark a cautious, measured step in the right direction, but it is nevertheless a significant one.

For me, one of the more appealing aspects of open access publishing is that by making costs transparent it could stimulate competition between publishers and generate innovative solutions to drive down prices. Today sees the launch of one such innovation: a new open access platform for life and medical sciences called PeerJ. It is a fascinating gamble that may well pay off.

I was determined not to miss the transit of Venus today. Life’s too short. But this week I have relocated to St Raphael in the south of France for a conference on picornaviruses and had to leave my telescope behind. Despite this lack of equipment I roused myself from bed at 5:20 and went in search of the sunrise, hoping to be able to catch the tail end of the transit.

One of these days — I promise — I will get back to writing about science. But a conjunction of tweets today brought to me three articles on open access that were interesting in different ways but curiously all seemed to point in a similar direction. First, a post on the Scholarly Kitchen blog (h/t Alicia Wise) from Rick Anderson, who is the Associate Dean for Scholarly Resources &

It has been quite a year so far for open access. And the momentum is still building. First came the Elsevier Boycott, triggered by an angry reaction to the publisher’s support for the US Research Works Act, which would have undermined the open access policy of the National Institutes of Health. The Act has been withdrawn but the debate stirred up by the boycott continues to play out in the blogosphere and the press.

The libel reform campaign has yielded a spring crop: a bill to amend the law of defamation was introduced to parliament in the Queen’s Speech on May 10th. This means that legislation to amend the lax libel laws of England and Wales, which have caused a plethora of problems for scientists and science writers in recent years (not to mention many other worthy individuals and groups), will be debated in the Commons and the Lords.

I reported before on the notes from earlier meetings of the Finch Committee, which was set up by Science Minister David WIlletts to formulate proposals for making publicly-funded research more accessible. The notes of their latest meeting, held on 27th April, are now available so I wanted to add an update. I’ve uploaded a highlighted PDF for anyone who wants to read all four pages.

Mark Henderson’s The Geek Manifesto is a remarkable book. Though many of its themes are not new, it is difficult to imagine such a book being published as recently as five years ago. The Geek Manifesto provides a timely analysis of the power that different groups of geeks have levered from the growing sophistication of the of the internet.

The Finch Committee, set up last year by David Willetts to examine how UK-funded research findings can be made more accessible — and mentioned by the minister in his speech on the subject earlier this week — has been meeting regularly and is due to report within weeks. If you would like to find out more about the committee’s deliberations, you can.