In a third “open letter to the mathematics community”, Elsevier have announced that, for “the primary mathematics journals”, they now offer free access to all articles over four years old. The details page shows that 53 journals are involved.

Over on Facebook, where Darren posted a note about our new paper, most of the discussion has not been about its content but about where it was published. We’re not too surprised by that, even though we’d love to be talking about the science. We did choose arXiv with our eyes open, knowing that there’s no tradition of palaeontology being published there, and wanting to start a new tradition of palaeontology being routinely published there.

Passend zu den Open-Access-Tagen 2012, die in dieser Woche in Wien stattfinden, befasst sich die aktuelle Ausgabe der Mitteilungen der Vereinigung Österreichischer Bibliothekarinnen und Bibliothekare (Jahrgang 65, Heft 2) in einer Schwerpunktausgabe mit dem Thema Open Access.

Jarosław Stolarski drew my attention to an article on the Nature News blog by Jeffrey Beall: Predatory publishers are corrupting open access . I’d not seen that specific article, but the issue of “predatory open access publishers” is well known — in fact, Beall himself maintains an excellent list of such publishers and a helpful set of criteria for recognising them.

In the midst of a busy few weeks of European meetings, GigaScience is currently in Basel, where ECCB 2012 (the European Conference of Computational Biology) has just ended. Usually overshadowed by its bigger sibling: the ISMB (particularly when both meetings are in Europe and co-hosted), this was the first time that I had attended the stand-alone meeting and it more than justified being a stand-alone event.

Im Rahmen der Open Access Week 2012, einer internationalen Aktionswoche zur Förderung von Open Access, die von wissenschaftlichen Einrichtungen weltweit getragen wird, diskutieren Expertinnen und Experten aus Wissenschaft, Verlagswesen und Forschungsförderung am 23. Oktober 2012 in Berlin über die Herausforderungen und Chancen von Open Science.

ESA has just announced that it has changed its policy on preprints and will now allow articles that have been posted on major preprint servers, like arXiv, to be considered for publication in its journals. I am very excited about this change for two reasons. First, as nicely laid out in INNGE blog post by Philippe Desjardins-Proulx*, there are many positive benefits to science of the preprint culture.

I said I would make an update on Tuesday (today), so if I get this posted before midnight I will ( just ) have met that  goal… In this (minor) update I have: added: Ubiquity Press (great low cost option!), SPIE (scored for 1-column per page), SAGE Open, Frontiers, WileyOpenAccess, OxfordOpen (OUP hybrid option), GigaScience, Open Biology (Royal Society) added the label for: Pensoft (sincerest

Since Sunday afternoon I’ve been at an International Council for Science (ICSU) / Royal Society invited workshop on ‘Revaluing Science in the Digital Age’. We’ve had a fascinating set of talks from academics, publishers (PLoS, Nature, BMC), librarians, policymakers, data managers, scientific societies… Attendees included: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Buneman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Boulton Jose Cotta, European

In den Expertenvorschlägen (PDF) zum Zukunftsdialog der Bundeskanzlerin wird Open Access zu Texten und Daten thematisiert.