A recent report on Open Access predicts that over the next 10 years the proportion of Open Access articles is likely to increase by 15-50%. The scale of the shift will depend on national and international policy decisions.

Libraries have a key role to play in making Open Access articles discoverable by the use of metadata and managing institutional repositories.

The report produced by the academic publisher SAGE in conjunction with the British Library brought together librarians and other industry exports to consider the role of librarians in the future of Open Access. As with all publishing models there are benefits and costs associated with Open Access.

The report advocates an ongoing dialogue on Open Access. The full report is available here.

In The Conversation on the 26th September 2012, Alex O. Holcombe and Matthew Todd published an open letter to the Australian Research Council on why scientific data should be shared. Alex and Matthew stated in the letter "It may be only through open science, with massively collaborative efforts, that urgent problems of the world can be solved." To read the article and letter, visit The Conversation Scientific data should be shared: an open letter to the ARC.

Researchers and students please take note of the following comment submitted to Beall's List of Predatory, Open-Access Publishers blog:

"Hello.
I write to you after reading your blog and for advice.
I had a serious problem with one of the journals of OMICS Group. After receiving a lot of emails offering me publish my works in their journals, I asked them about the possibility of publishing a research paper. They never told me to pay for publishing. They asked me to read the paper and I made the mistake of sending it. I did not hear anything about this editorial, until three months later they told me that they had accepted the paper and would publish it if I paid to them $ 2,700. Then the manuscript has not been published yet and I told them to publish in its magazine not interested me. I did not receive any review of the manuscript and I saw that the data on the web magazine about impact index were false. I only asked for information and I never authorized the publication of my work. Two months later, they published it without my permission. The published paper is full of errors. Since then I have sent a dozen emails urging the withdrawal of my work on their site. However, they did not withdraw and would require payment of $ 2700. What do you recommend I do? No doubt this is a fraud, and I do not know how to get them to withdraw the work and they stop sending payment requirements.
Thanks for your interest.
Best regards."

Allen Press has produced a 2012 Study of Subscription Prices for Scholarly Society Journals based on historical prices over the past two years from 220 journals and survey findings from 20 society/association publishers. The study reveals how libraries are dealing with the present budget challenges and the consequences for scholarly publishers.

A breakdown of the average price increase by subject is included. For all titles in the study, price increases in 2012 averaged 5.8%, down from 7.5% in 2011. This was the first time in seven years the average increase for USA journals has fallen belown 6%.

The European Commission's recent announcement on access to scientific data specifically mentions not only scientists and research institutions, but also members of the public as potential users of scientific data.
Jonathon Gray from the Open Knowledge Foundation writes: While the benefits of open scientific data for scientists and research institutions are reasonably well documented - the Human Genome Project is probably the best known exemplar - one wonders what innovations we might see from non-experts and non-scientists, and what more open policies might mean for the public understanding of science.
Read the full article here.

The Australian reported on July 11 2012, a plan for the CSIRO to make 200,000 research papers freely available, dating back to the 1920s.
Jon Curran, CSIRO's general manager of communications stated in the article, "we are removing the reasons why staff shouldn't put their work in our open-access repository."

In addition, to the publication repository, the CSIRO is also aiming to create a portal to contain raw research data.

The article also gives a general overview on the current progression and deliberation into open access by Australia's funding bodies and research organisations.

To find out more, visit CSIRO Research Publications Repository.

The Data Hub describes itself as "the easy way to get, use and share data".

The Data Hub is a community driven catalogue of datasets on the Internet. It uses open-source data cataloguing software CKAN, which provides each dataset record with fields for descriptions, formats, ownership, access and subject areas, among others.

Most of the data indexed is open data, which means it is openly licensed, and free to use.

On the site, you can:

• Find data - the Hub contains 3840 datasets that can be viewed or downloaded
• Share data - sign up to add your own datasets

Datasets can also be located under groups, such as Linking Open Data, which contains 81 datasets and Bibliographic Data, which has 77 datasets.

In some cases, the Data Hub can provide data storage, and basic visualisation tools.

Visit the Data Hub at - http://thedatahub.org/