I’m going to keep this free of advocacy. Hopefully everything I say here will be uncontroversial, because all I am doing is surveying definitions and clarifying distinctions. I’ll save my opinions for later articles (not that there is any secret about them). Open access (or OA) It may seem a bit surprising to have to define “open access” when we’ve all been talking about about constantly for a year.

An interesting move from Nature Publishing Group today… In a press release dated 7 November 2012 they’ve announced they’re allowing the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license to be applied to articles in some (but not all) of their journals, specifically citing Wellcome Trust and RCUK policies that now require their funded authors to publish Gold OA with a CC BY license (or alternatively to use the Green OA route), recognizing that more

Recently I had the opportunity to collaborate on an extremely timely paper on data sharing and data re-use in phylogenetics, as part of the continuing MIAPA (Minimal Information for a Phylogenetic Analysis) working group project:

If you’ve been following Twitter or the blogs, you’ll know that this has been Open Access Week. It’s been great to see many new open-access policies announced this week [Ireland, Belgium, Hungary], to read important explanations of why fully open (CC BY) OA is the way to go, and to see discussions from people like clinicians and librarians. It all contributes to the glorious sense that the transition to OA is beyond the tipping point.

Four things: 1. From the start of 2013, the Royal Society is abandoning issues for its journals ( Proc. B , Phil. Trans. , Biology Letters and more) and moving to a continuing publishing model — as already used for their open-access journal Open Biology . Excellent news: in a post-print world, issues achieve nothing but the imposition of arbitrary delays.

Back in July I wrote an open letter to Wiley, asking them to use the Creative Common Attribution licence for their open-access activities. They sent two brief notes in response — one from Director of OA Rachel Burley, and the other from STM Publicity Manager Jennifer Beal. Both are appended to my original post. Unfortunately, I dropped the ball in following this up — my apologies to Rachel and Jennifer.

Zum Start der heute beginnenden International Open Access Week 2012 hat die Arbeitsgruppe Open Access in der Schwerpunktinitiative „Digitale Information“ der Allianz der Wissenschaftsorganisationen die Broschüre „Open-Access-Strategien für wissenschaftlichen Einrichtungen – Bausteine und Beispiele“ (PDF) veröffentlicht. Anliegen der Veröffentlichung ist es einen Überblick über praktische Maßnahmen zur Förderung von Open Access zu geben.

“But Mike”, you say, “What’s wrong with publishers making a profit?” Nothing is wrong with publishers making a profit.

irights.info weist auf die jüngsten Beschlüsse des Bundesrates zum Thema Urheberrecht hin. In seiner Sitzung vom 12.10.2012 empfiehlt der Bundesrat die Entfristung des zum Ende des Jahres auslaufenden Paragraphen 52a UrhG. Der Paragraph regelt die Zugänglichmachung urheberrechtsgeschützter Materialien in elektronischen Semesterapparaten.

A few months ago I gave a short talk about the Open Knowledge Foundation and its activities as relevant to academics at a small (but good!) palaeontology conference in Cambridge (which I blogged about previously). I didn’t need to give this talk. Neither the OKF nor my academic progression required me to give this talk.