Selected news about this controversial topic taken from the excellent Open Access News (Peter Suber's OA blog):

Selected major announcements include:

• SPARC Guide to the NIH Public-Access Policy,
• SPARC Author's Addendum to help authors of journal articles retain the rights they need to authorize OA.
• open-access position statement issued by Wellcome Trust. "The Trust now supports the launch of new OA journals and repositories, promises its grantees that it will pay the processing fees charged by OA journals, and encourages authors to retain copyright and make their work openly accessible whenever possible."
• The Company of Biologists announced today that all three of its journals will offer a year-long experiment with open access starting in January 2004.
• September: the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) will cover the cost of article charges for their researchers.
• CERN has issued a press release on its OA policy (March 31). Excerpt: 'CERN confirms its commitment to open access to scientific information. At a meeting last Wednesday, the Organization's executive committee endorsed a policy of open access to all the laboratory's results, as expressed in the document Continuing CERN action on Open Access, released by its Scientific Information Policy Board (SIPB) earlier in the month.
• The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) in the UK has announced an extension to its current funding agreement with the journal to December 31, 2005. This means that all staff members of eligible higher and further education institutions in the UK can publish work that they submit to the New Journal of Physics before the end of 2005 without charge.
• SciELo -- Scientific Electronic Library Online is a multinational endeavor to provide Open Access to wealth of scientific research produced in Latin America and Spain.
• Four major French public research agencies --INRA, CNRS, INRIA, and Inserm -- issued a joint press release announcing a common policy to launch OA archives to disseminate their research output.
• DAREnet: Jan Libbenga, Dutch academics declare research free-for-all, The Register, May 11, 2005. Excerpt: 'Scientists from all major Dutch universities officially launched a website on Tuesday where all their research material can be accessed for free. Interested parties can get hold of a total of 47,000 digital documents from 16 institutions the Digital Academic Repositories. No other nation in the world offers such easy access to its complete academic research output in digital form, the researchers claim. Obviously, commercial publishers are not amused. DAREnet was already launched about a year ago, but for demonstration purposes only. The €2m DARE programme - a joint initiative by all the Dutch universities, the National Library of the Netherlands, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) - harvests all digital available material from local repositories, making it fully searchable. Aside from bibliographical information, the content can be full text, or even audio and video files.'
• New ALPSP study on the effects of Open Access on scholarly publishing
  The facts about Open Access
  The main findings are that: (1) many current OA journals do not use the OA cost-recovery model, (2) some current OA journals are having trouble making ends meet, (3) some current OA journals may have lower quality standards.
• Not-for-Profit Publishers Commit to Providing Free Access to Research
  On March 16, 2004 representatives from the nation's leading not-for-profit medical/scientific societies and publishers announced their commitment to providing free access and wide dissemination of published research findings. The Washington DC Principles for Free Access to Science outlines the commitment of not-for-profit publishers to work in partnership with scholarly communities such as libraries to "ensure that these communities are sustained, science is advanced, research meets the highest standards and patient care is enhanced with accurate and timely information." The DC Principles provide what has been called the needed "middle ground" in the increasingly heated debate between those who advocate immediate unfettered online access to medical and scientific research findings and advocates of the current journal publishing system. The document was drafted in response to recent claims that these publishers' practices hinder the public's ability to access published scientific research.
• Oxford UP journal info page -- outlines implications for authors of a hybrid institutional membership reduced author charges model.
• Publishers Experiment with Hybrid Journal Publishing Models:
  Open access is often misrepresented as a new business model based on author payments. Some open access journals employ author side payments; however, publishers are increasingly experimenting with the use of author side payments in subscription journals. So-called hybrid models offer the authors of individual articles the opportunity to pay for public access to their work while maintaining the general subscription model for other articles in the journal. Recently a very small group of pioneers has been joined by a number of large publishers of scientific journals. Since May 2006, Elsevier, Wiley, Cambridge University Press, the British Medical Journal, the Royal Society, Taylor and Francis, the American Chemical Society, the Royal Society of Chemistry, and the American Physical Society have begun to experiment with this approach. This burgeoning trend may reflect recent reports from early adopters, the National Academy of Sciences and Oxford University Press, indicating that many authors are willing to find funds to make their work freely available on the Internet at the time of publication. For more information, contact Karla Hahn, Director, ARL Office of Scholarly Communication, karla@arl.org.
• Encyclopedia of Earth -- a new electronic reference aboutthe Earth, its natural environments, and their interaction with society. The Encyclopedia is a free, fully searchable collection of articles written by scholars, professionals, educators, and experts who collaborate and review each other's work. The articles are written in non-technical language and will be useful to students, educators, scholars, professionals, as well as to the general public.
• The Scholar's Copyright Addendum Engine helps authors generate a PDF form that can be attached to a journal publisher's copyright agreement to ensure that the author retains certain rights.

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