The American Society for Microbiology have launched a full online only, open access journal, known as mBio. In an attempt to “break away from the current publication model”, mBio editors will “ either accept or reject manuscripts and will request only minor revisions; editors generally will not require authors to make extensive modifications or perform additional experiments.

The Royal Society has announced plans to develop a transparent pricing policy in which the subscription cost of its journals are linked to the uptake of author-pays, open access articles. “ From 2012 we shall implement a new and more transparent pricing policy in which the price of each journal is tied to the number of non-open access articles published in that journal and each journal will publish the relevant article counts annually.

Open Access can offer universities real cost saving benefits, claims Alma Swan in a report – ‘Modelling Scholarly Communication Options: Costs and Benefits for Univeresities’, published in February 2010 (download here: http://ie-repository.jisc.ac.uk/442/). Swan claims that the move to Open Access can ‘disrupt systems and processes that have been in place for a very long time’ (page i, Executive Summary) but the report makes it clear that it

Four European research funders have today added their support to the open access repository UK PubMed Central (UKPMC) by agreeing that the life sciences research outputs made possible with their funding are made freely available through this repository. Launched in January 2007, UKPMC is a free-to-access digital archive of full-text, peer-reviewed biomedical and life sciences research.

The Wellcome Trust, on behalf of the UKPMC Funders’ Group, held a workshop in September 2009, for HEI repository managers and research/open access administrators, to discuss the issues involved in ensuring that funder open access mandates are met. Prior to the workshop, a questionnaire was distributed to delegates, to identify the different barriers (and the most important of these) which prevent adherence to the mandates.

Maney Publishing have developed an author-pays option for around 40 of their journals, including 15 titles in the health sciences with the intention to expand this to humanities journals in the future.

The British Library have issued a press release to announce the launch of the new UK PubMed Central Open Beta website at beta.ukpmc.ac.uk: Helping researchers access and exploit over 1.7 million full-text, peer reviewed biomedical research articles and over 19 million other life science research papers, on 12 January the British Library will showcase a whole range of new search and data mining tools designed to unlock the scientific knowledge

Nature Publishing Group (NPG) and the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) have announced that the prices for site licence access to The EMBO Journal and EMBO reports will be reduced by 9% in 2010, reflecting the increased publication of Open Access content in 2008.

PubMed Central Canada is now live. PMC Canada is a partnership between the National Research Council’s Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (NRC-CISTI), the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), and the US National Library of Medicine (NLM) PMC Canada is the second PMC International site to be established.

The European Respiratory Society, publishers of the European Respiratory Journal, have confirmed that they will shortly be amending their instructions to authors to add that Wellcome Trust (or other members of the UK PMC Funders Group) will be permitted to deposit a copy of the final, peer-reviewed author-supplied manuscript (before copy-editing and publication) in PMC 6 months from publication in a print issue.