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FASTR – Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act

This bill will give the American people greater access to the important scientific research results they’ve paid for,” Congressman Doyle said today.”Supporting greater collaboration among researchers in the sciences will accelerate scientific innovation and discovery, while giving the public a greater return on their scientific investment.
See also this article on FASTR by Robin Lloyd, responsible for editing and assigning stories and managing the twitter feeds for Scientificamerican.com or this article by John Morgan, deputy news editor of TimesHigherEducation.co.uk Peter Suber, director of the Harvard Open Access Project, collects major information material on FASTR here. Berkman Center provides further detailed information here.

Fools‘ gold?

Open-access publishing, once a niche preoccupation, is now a hot-button issue. But concern is growing that unintended consequences of new publication mandates will cost individual scholars and the UK sector dear. Paul Jump reports
Times Higher Education.

Open Data without Open Access?

Velichka Dimitrova, Project Coordinator of Open Economics at the Open Knowledge Foundation, sums up the open access workshops at Minho University, Portugal:
While open access policies and structures might be getting more popular in some countries or science fields, there is still limited understanding of how to make data from research available on a wider scale. It is however clear that the experiences of the open access movement are key lessons for our understanding of how to make research data openly available.

Academic Publishing Survey of funders supports the benign Open Access outcome priced into shares

Public sector funders finance ~80% of world’s academic research.
  • Proprietary survey of research funders reinforces our view of an earningsneutral transition to Open Access.
  • However, the OA discount in share prices has largely corrected; we lower our ratings for the first time in 3 years.
  • Downgrade Reed Elsevier Plc to N from OW (TP 720p) and Informa to UW from N (TP 440p); maintain OW on Reed Elsevier NV (TP EUR13.30).
HSBC Global Research.

Set the Default to „Open“: Reproducible Science in the Computer Age

While different types and degrees of reproducible research were discussed, many argued that the community needs to move to “open research,” which means research where widely used software tools are routinely used to (a) fully ‘audit’ the computationally procedure, (b) replicate and independently reproduce the results of the research, and (c) extend the results or apply the method to new problems.

The Need For Open Science

Over some years now scientists and science-enthusiasts across the globe have been trying to open up the way science is done. Movements like the ‘Budapest Open Access Initiative‘ or the ‘BOAI‘ have been more than successful in this. Scientists all over the world boycotted a few journals, that were against Open Access, and many of the journals now have accepted Open Access of research as a necessity. The Public Library of Science publishes the PLOS journals that are very much Open Access. However, a great deal is to be done yet to make the publication process in sciences democratized.

Business, Innovation and Skills Committee Inquiry into the Government’s Open Access Policy

Mike Taylor’s submission to the House of Commons inquiry on open access. He includes an executive summary and concludes:
It is not the job of government to concern itself with challenges faced by the publishing community at the expense of other stakeholders. This assertion does not arise from hostility to publishers, but from a simple recognition of who the government serves.

Researchers opt to limit uses of open-access publications

In many parts of the world, anyone wishing to re-use papers must get permission from the copyright owner (usually either the publisher or the author). Often, the owner will forbid re-use or demand payment. Supporters of open access argue that free papers should come with licences attached, making it clear what kinds of re-use are allowed.  
Nature. See also the discussion following the article.