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.

We’re currently in open access week, and one of the things I’ve noticed has been a rash of tweets of the form “I support #OpenAccess because …”. Here is a random collection. We support #OpenAccess because #OpenScience needs good infrastructures. — @ZB_MED We support #OpenAccess because we believe that research results made possible by public funds should be accessible to everyone.

It’s open access week! As part of their involvement with OA Week, Jisc interviewed me. You can read the interview here. A brief taster: Read the full interview here.

Last night, I did a Twitter interview with Open Access Nigeria (@OpenAccessNG). To make it easy to follow in real time, I created a list whose only members were me and OA Nigeria. But because Twitter lists posts in reverse order, and because each individual tweet is encumbered with so much chrome, it’s rather an awkward way to read a sustained argument. So here is a transcript of those tweets, only lightly edited. They are in bold;

This morning sees the publication of the new Policy for open access in the post-2014 Research Excellence Framework from HEFCE, the Higher Education Funding Council for England.

In a comment on an previous post, wycx articulated a position that sounds all too familiar: I have heard a lot of people say things like this in the last couple of months.  It makes pretty depressing reading. “Non-open scholarly publishing? Don’t talk to me about non-open scholarly publishing. Oh God, it’s so depressing.” But how true is it?

At the 2007 SVP meeting in Austin, Texas, I noticed that the suffix “-ass” was ubiquitiously used as a modifier: where an Englishman such as myself might say “This beer is very expensive”, a Texan would say “That is one expensive-ass beer” — and the disease seemed to spread by osmosis through the delegates, so that by my last day in Austin is was seemingly impossible to hear an adjective without the “-ass” suffix.

Just a quick post to let you know that I will be presenting two different talks at the Berlin 11 open access conference on Monday and Tuesday next week.

In the first of two disapointing scholarly-communication announcements last week, Jisc announced its report on progress towards open access in the UK. The key finding is: But that’s not the part that disappoints me. Here’s the part that disappoints me: Sometimes I think people don’t know what “transitional” means.

Here at SV-POW! Towers, we have often lamented that so much dinosaur research is locked up behind the paywalls of big for-profit commercial publishers, and that even work that’s been funded by public money is often not available to the public.