Open Access News

News from the open access movement

Friday, January 23, 2009

A few updates on U.S. President Barack Obama's first days in office:

One of the last updates to Change.gov, Obama's transition site, was a video about the transition's Technology, Innovation and Government Reform working group, which discusses OA to public sector information and alludes favorably to the open data aspects of the Human Genome Project. (Thanks to techPresident.)
Obama's nominee for Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu, was confirmed by the Senate and took office. (See our past post about Chu's OA connection.)
The new WhiteHouse.gov includes terms that third-party content on the site will be licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License. (U.S. government content is already in the public domain.) See also Michael Geist's comparison to the terms of Canada's Prime Minister's site.
Obama's WhiteHouse.gov also allows more spidering (and archiving) than the previous tenant's. See also the comments at techPresident and the Center for Democracy and Technology.
An early Obama memo on the Freedom of Information Act states that beyond responding to public requests for information, "agencies should take affirmative steps to make information public". Another early memo addresses transparency and open government. See comments by the Center for Democracy and Technology, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Sunlight Foundation, and American Library Association.

Posted by Gavin Baker at 1/23/2009 04:46:00 PM.

The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature on the internet. Making it available free of charge and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. Removing the barriers to serious research.

Why the OAN volume has been low since January 16, 2010

Why I curtailed my blogging on July 1, 2009

I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.