Citizendium is holding a Biology Week Sept 22-29

From the Citizendium announcement:

During this week, biologists and anyone interested in the topic are invited to test the Citizendium system. Editors and authors from the project’s Biology Workgroup will be on hand to meet and greet new people on the wiki. ‘I strongly believe that the Citizendium system will be appealing to many scientists and scholars’, said Sanger. ‘Many of them just need to give it a try. Biology Week is an excuse for biologists to try out the system together.’

The Citizendium, or ‘citizens’ compendium’, uses the same software as Wikipedia and is a public-expert hybrid project to produce a general reference resource. The community encourages general public participation, but makes a low-key, guiding role for experts. It also requires real names and asks contributors to sign a ‘social contract’. As a result, the project is said to be vandalism-free and, despite its youth (its public launch was just 18 months ago), has steadily added more than 8,000 articles.

Australia ups the ante on global access to research

A pioneering move by the Australian Government to allow open access to all of the nation's publicly funded research could "set all the dominoes falling worldwide", it was predicted this week....from a Times Higher report Sept 18

Bloomsbury Academic.launched - a new OA imprint

A radically new publishing imprint for humanities and social sciences, commencing in September 2008

Publications will be available on the Web free of charge and will carry Creative Commons licences.

Simultaneously physical books will be produced and sold around the world.

For the first time a major publishing company is opening up an entirely new imprint to be accessed easily and freely on the Internet. Supporting scholarly communications in this way our authors will be better served in the digital age.

A new mailing list for those interested in Open Science

Hi all,

After discussions with Cameron Neylon (Open Wetware) and Kaitlin Thaney (Science Commons), I've set up a new open science mailing list:

http://lists.okfn.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/open-science

I've blogged about this here:
http://blog.okfn.org/2008/09/05/new-open-science-mailing-list/

We'd really like to get as much of the open science community on this aspossible, so please blog and forward as appropriate!

Many thanks,
Jonathan Gray
The Open Knowledge Foundationhttp://okfn.org

Series of very short videos on various aspects of Open Access and Open Science

The Open Access Documentary Project, produced by Intelligent Television and BioMed Central, has posted some video clips of interviews conducted for the documentary. (Thanks to Science Commons.)

Ireland's Higher Education Authority has adopted an OA mandate

Here's some more good news on the Green OA Archiving front: Ireland's HigherEducation Authority has adopted an OA mandate 'in keeping with the recommendations of the European Research Advisory Board (EURAB) Policy inrelation to scientific publication'.'

Following a very supportive public consultation process' earlier this year (http://www.hea.ie/en/node/1154), the HEA mandate came into effect on June 30th2008.

It covers all research funded by the HEA (in whole or in part) whichincludes the Programme for Research in Third-Level Institutions ( PRTLI) andthe Programme of Strategic Cooperation between Irish Aid and Higher Educationand Research Institutes 2007-2011, amongst other very significant nationalfunding initiatives.The text of the mandate is available at this link: http://www.hea.ie/files/files/file/Open%20Access%20pdf_.pdf

Campus Open Access Policies: The Harvard Experience and How to Get There

Some keynote speaker videos concerning the efforts at Harvard to broaden access to their scholarly outputs via a mandate.

View other mandates at http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/