U.S. House Science committee considering OA -in secret

According to Gavin Baker on Open Access News, a U.S. House Science Committee is considering OA - in secret.

Why would a country that has seen lots of public discussion on this topic over the past few years suddenly decide on secret discussions? This doesn't exactly sound like democracy, does it?

Peter Suber's Knowledge as a Public Good

Peter Suber's latest article, , Knowledge as a Public Good, has just been released as the feature article of the November 2009 SPARC Open Access Newsletter.

This article explains in depth why knowledge makes sense as a public good, and the happy coincidence that this is the month when Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize for physics. Ostrom is well-known for her writing on the commons.

Austrian Science Fund: more good news for OA funding

Thanks to Dr. Falk Reckling of the Austrian Science Fund for more good news on OA funding, extending the Austrian Science Fund pre-existing subsidy for publication charges to cover not only OA articles, but also peer-reviewed monographs and more.

October 2009 SPARC Open Access Newsletter

Peter Suber has released the October 2009 SPARC Open Access Newsletter. Featured this month is "10 challenges for open access journals", an expansion of his keynote talk at the first Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) conference held in September.

Dramatic Growth of Open Access: September 30, 2009

The September 30, 2009 Dramatic Growth of Open Access is now available.

Abstract

This issue of The Dramatic Growth of Open Access features a few key quotable numbers to illustrate the growth and current extent of open access: more than 4,000 fully open access, peer reviewed journals in DOAJ, growing by 2 titles per day; close to 1,500 open access repositories listed in OpenDOAR, adding a new repository every business day; over 30 million free publications through Scientific Commons, growing by more than 20 thousands items per day; more than 20% of the world's medical literature is freely available 2 years after publication, and close to 10% is freely available immediately on publication; 1 more journal decides to submit all or most content to PMC every business day, and growth of open access journals in PMC is one new journal every other business day. The number of open access mandate policies is well over a hundred, and growing rapidly - but also likely understated. If you have a policy, please be sure to register with ROARMAP. This quarter saw some minor setbacks. Most notable (but still small) is a decrease in free content through Highwire Press.

Compact for Open Access Publishing Equity: a key step in transitioning to open access

My comments on the Compact on Open Access Publishing Equity (COPE) are available on the Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics. In brief, I recommend that every library and university join. No immediate financial commitment is required, rather a commitment to develop models that provide equity for open access journals. Commitment entails recognition of the key role that libraries provide in supporting scholarly journals.

For links to COPE, see Andrew's post.

Compact for Open Access Publishing Equity (COPE)

Five major US universities (Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of California, Berkeley) have announced that they have joined together in a compact for Open Access publication. Each university commits "to the timely establishment of durable mechanisms for underwriting reasonable publication fees for open-access journal articles written by its faculty for which other institutions would not be expected to provide funds". Other universities are being asked to sign on to the compact.

More details can be found here:

The announcement/press release: http://hul.harvard.edu/news/2009_0914_compact.html

The website for the compact: http://www.oacompact.org/