*[Update 2015-03-13: I have blogged further about this here and provided a recap here. This post has been viewed over 10,000 times. Clearly some people want to sweep this under the carpet and pretend this is just ‘a storm in a teacup’ but it did happen and people do care about this.

Tītitipounamu, Rifleman, female (left) and male (right) Our New Zealand based Commissioning Editor, Nicole Nogoy, was asked by Creative Commons Aotearoa (New Zealand) to write a guest blog on open licensing from a Kiwi perspective. Being big users and fans of their licenses we were happy to oblige.

Last week, on Monday 19th January, I co-organised the first ever Open Research London event at Imperial College London, with the help of local organisers; Jon Tennant & Torsten Reimer. We invited two speakers for our first meeting: Chris Banks (Director of Library Services at Imperial, and an elected Board Member of Research Libraries UK) &

[Update: I’ve submitted this idea as a FORCE11 £1K Challenge research proposal 2015-01-13. I may be unemployed from April 2015 onwards (unsolicited job offers welcome!), so I certainly might find myself with plenty of time on my hands to properly get this done…!] Inspired by something I heard Stephen Curry say recently, and with a little bit of help from Jo McIntyre I’ve started a project to compare EuropePMC author manuscripts

So, apparently Elsevier are launching a new open access mega-journal some time this year, joining the bandwagon of similar efforts from almost every other major publisher. A lovely acknowledgement of the roaring success of PLOS ONE, who did it first a long time ago. They’re only ~8 years behind, but they’re learning. I for one am pleased they are asking the research community what they want from this new journal.

Die Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) fördert seit Mitte der 1990er-Jahre die Entwicklung digitaler Informationsinfrastrukturen für die Wissenschaft. Mit den beiden Förderprogrammen “Elektronische Publikationen” und “Wissenschaftliche Zeitschriften” wurden in der Vergangenheit wichtige Impulse zur Förderung von Open Access in Deutschland gesetzt.

*yawn*

Der österreichische Wissenschaftsfonds (FWF) hat seine Open-Access-Policy erneuert. Mit einer klaren Verpflichtung, mit der Kappung von APC, mit Verschärfungen bei Forschungsdaten, aber auch mit der Ausweitung über Zeitschriftenartikel hinaus setzt der FWF Zeichen in Sachen Open Access. In Ergänzung zur ersten positiven Rezeption gibt es aber auch problematische Stellen.

Der erste Open Access Newsletter der VSNU ist erschienen. Mit minimalen Zusatzkosten schnell zu Gold OA bei etablierten Journals.

I wrote last week that I can’t support Nature’s new broken-access initiative for two reasons: practically, I can’t rely on it; and philosophically I can’t abide work being done to reduce utility. More recently I read a post on Nature’s blog: Content sharing is *not* open access and why NPG is committed to both. It’s well worth reading: concise, clear and helpful.