The Finch Report was commissioned by the UK Minister for Universities and Science to investigate possible routes for the UK to adopt Open Access for publicly funded research. The report was released last night and I have had just the chance to skim it over breakfast. These are just some first observations. Overall my impression is that the overall direction of travel is very positive but the detail shows some important missed opportunities.

Die Projektgruppe “Bildung und Forschung” der Enquete-Kommission “Internet und digitale Gesellschaft” hat nach dreizehnmonatiger Arbeit Handlungsempfehlungen zu Bildung und Forschung im digitalen Zeitalter veröffentlicht (PDF). Neben Themen wie  “Lernen mit Social Media”, “Bildungs- und Wissenschaftsschranke im Urheberrecht” sowie “E-Books in der Bibliothek” wird der offene Zugang zu wissenschaftlicher Information behandelt.

Die CDU/CSU-Bundestagsfraktion hat heute in Berlin ein Diskussionspapier zum “Urheberrecht in der digitalen Gesellschaft“ vorgestellt.

Oh dear, this is depressing to watch. The Problem Last year (2011-12-01), Peter Murray Rust of Cambridge University published an article in BMC’s Journal of Cheminformatics — which, like all BMC journals, is owned by Springer.

I just sent this letter to Matthew Cockerill, the co-founder of the open-access publisher BioMed Central, which was acquired by Springer a few years ago. It arose from a mistake on Springer’s part that was discussed on Twitter initially. As I wrote this I didn’t particularly intend it to be an open letter.

An article in Times Higher Education tells of a new report, The Potential Effect of Making Journals Free After a Six Month Embargo , prepared by Linda Bennett of Gold Leaf for the Association of Learned, Professional and Society Publishers [ALPSP] and our old friends The Publishers Association. And this report contains very good news.

1. Publishing economics 101 Although publishing journal articles is now much less costly than it used to be (thanks to machine-readable submissions, paperless electronic distribution, etc.) it still costs some money to get a research paper from manuscript to its published form. So publishers — unless supported by grants, by government agencies or similar — need a revenue stream.

Folgendes Video bewirbt eine laufende Petition zur Förderung von Open Access in den USA. Die Petition, die auch von Personen außerhalb der USA unterzeichnet werden kann, zielt darauf ab wissenschaftliche Zeitschriften-Artikel, die im Rahmen der öffentlich geförderten Forschung in den USA entstehen, frei zugänglich zu machen.

[A monthly update on my Panton Fellowship related activities] Last month I was slightly late with my monthly report, so this month I’m going to get things back on track and write my post now, on this leisurely sunny Sunday afternoon… It’s been a good month: First of all, I had the chance to speak about my Fellowship work for the Ede & Ravenscroft Prize final.

I have previously commented elsewhere on other blogs, that uniquely, with BOAI-compliant Open Access literature, one is able to re-distribute research however one wishes (provided proper attribution is given). I believe this to be hugely beneficial and perhaps a rather under-appreciated facet of the plurality of benefits offered by Open Access publishing.