Science Foundation Ireland's Open Access mandate is now effective

ScienceFoundation Ireland's Open Access mandate is now effective (from February 1st2009).

Science Foundation Ireland is Ireland's largest funding council.

The policy is clearly outlined on the SFI website under 'Grant policies':http://www.sfi.ie/content/content.asp?section_id=471&language_id=1#oa

The full text of the policy is available here:
http://www.sfi.ie/uploads/documents/upload/SFI_OA_policy_2009_v3.pdf
It covers peer-reviewed papers, conference papers, reports, monographs anddatasets and generally follows the EURAB recomendations.

Now all Irish funding councils but one have open access policies: the HigherEducation Authority (HEA), the Irish Research Council for Science, Engineeringand Technology (IRCSET), Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) and the HealthResearch Board (HRB) - the latter has OA recommendation which are expected tobecome mandatory later this year). All of the others have Open Access mandatesin line with the EURAB recommendations.

Apparently discussions are underway inthe only Irish research funding council without an OA policy, the IrishResearch Council for Humanities and Social Sciences (IRCHSS).

Columbia University joins NEREUS

Columbia University became the first U.S. institution to join the Network of European Economists Online (NEEO), an international economics research project to which UCD economic researchers are also participating with UCD Library

Spain to introduce OA mandate

Next Wednesday, [Spain's] Minister of Science and Innovation, Cristina Garmendia, will formally present the draft of the new and awaited Law of Science and Technology ... Regarding the dissemination of results, Chapter III establishes the obligation to publish in open access texts that have been accepted for publication in scientific journals where these have been financed with public funds from the General Administration of State. ...

An OA repository for nanoscience

The project brings together partners from the EU, China, India and Russia and aims to...[create] an open access electronic archive of nanoscience publications and tools to facilitate networking between scientists in different world regions.....

Economics Portal launching February 2nd

Review of Open Access in 2008

Peter Suber's review of OA progress in 2008 is now available. Heather Morrison introduced this in her OA Librarian blog: "... this piece succinctly captures the major events of 2008 - the widely heralded such as the strong NIH mandate, the Harvard mandate, and the Springer acquisition of BioMedCentral - to the more important but perhaps less noticed events - such as the fact that BMC achieved profitability before being bought by Springer. Highly recommended as a review for those who keep up, or an overview for those who don't always have the time"

Dramatic Growth of Open Access in 2008 reported

Highlights: a quick snapshot of the continuum of access to scholarly journals suggests not only strong growth of open access journals, but a scholarly communications system well on its way to transitioning from toll to open access, with the pure toll access journal (no author self-archiving allowed, no back issues, etc.) a small, and diminishing, portion of the total. The growth of open access journals continues to be dramatic; there are now over 3,700 journals in DOAJ, 781 more journals than last year, 2 new titles per day. While content recruitment at the local repository may seem painfully slow, on a global basis the content and growth are phenomenal, with more than 24 million publications available through Scientific Commons, 19 million through OAIster. Every week, close to 150,000 new items become available through Scientific Commons.