Our External Links Service means that we link out to free resources that enrich our articles.

Today (12th February) is the one-year anniversary of the first PeerJ papers! As Matt put it in an email this morning: That’s exactly right.

Stop what you’re doing and go read Cameron Neylon’s blog. Specifically, read his new post, Improving on “Access to Research”. Regular readers of SV-POW! might legitimately complain that my so-called advocacy consists mostly of whining about how rubbish things are.

From the files of J. K. Rowling. Publisher #1 Dear Ms. Rowling, Thank you for submitting your manuscript Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. We will be happy to consider it for publication. However we have some concerns about the excessive length of this manuscript. We usually handle works of 5-20 pages, sometimes as much as 30 pages. Your 1337-page manuscript exceeds these limits, and requires some trimming.

Lost in the stacks bills itself as “the one-and-only research-library rock’n’ roll radio show”. Every Friday, they broadcast a one-hour show on WREK Atlanta, where they chat about research-library issues and play tenuously relevant songs. The week’s show features Matt and me chatting about open access (and a bit about sauropods), interspersed with dinosaur-themed songs.

[ Introduction from Mike. I’m on the OKFN’s open-access mailing list, where we’re currently embroiled in a rather tedious reiteration of the debate about the merits of the various open-access licences.

My thanks to Steve Wang for pointing out that The Paleontological Society (in the USA, not to be confused the UK’s Palaeontological Association) has a new open access policy. The highlights are: Positives It’s good to see this real step forwards, and a lot of people are going to be particularly pleased that both Gold and Green are on offer.

Last September, I attended the Fifth Annual Conference on Open Access Scholarly Publishing, held in Riga, at which I had been invited to give a paper entitled The Open Citations Corpus – freeing scholarly citation data .  A recording of my talk is available here, and my PowerPoint presentation is separately available here.

I got in a conversation recently with a friend who is about to have his first paper published. It’s been through review and is now accepted at a well-respected old-school journal owned by a legacy publisher. It’s not an open-access journal, and he asked my advice on how he could make the paper open access. We had a fruitful discussion, and we agreed that I’d write up the conclusions for this blog.

It is, truly, excellent news that the US budget passed by Congress on Thursday night includes open-access language that effectively extends the NIH open access policy to many other federal agencies. It’s a huge and important step forward.