Blogger is working again, sporadically. Since Friday, April 8, however, I've been almost entirely unable to update Open Access News. In fact, on Friday I was unable to finish uploading the previous version of the file, so that for about a day OAN was fragmented as well as frozen. On Saturday it was simply frozen. I apologize for the poor service. These problems occur now and then but rarely for more than a couple of hours. This has been the longest downtime since I launched the blog in June 2002.
The problems seem to lie with Blogger itself. It's possible that the ultimate problem at Blogger didn't last as long as my total downtime, but the rush of Blogger-bloggers trying to catch up afterwards caused my FTP sessions to time out again and again.
As glitches recur, I'll post messages to the SPARC Open Access Forum about the problems and any progress in solving them. See Friday's message, for example. The Blogger problems have already lasted long enough that I've had to send news items to SOAF that I would normally have posted to the blog. (Read SOAF, subscribe to SOAF.)
I hate to write housekeeping notes when I could be writing about OA instead. But I hate unexpected and unexplained downtime even more. If you visited OAN during its frozen state, thanks for coming back.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 4/10/2005 04:23:00 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.
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.
