The Denton Declaration: an Open Data Manifesto, is the latest announcement on the growing debate on open data.

The declaration includes:

• Open access to research data is critical for advancing science, scholarship, and society.
• Research data, when repurposed, has an accretive value.
• Publicly funded research should be publicly available for public good.
• Transparency in research is essential to sustain the public trust.
• The validation of research data by the peer community is an essential function of the responsible conduct of research.
• Managing research data is the responsibility of a broad community of stakeholders including researchers, funders, institutions, libraries, archivists, and the public.

To read further, go to Open Access@UNT

eLife, the new open access journal initiative of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Max Planck Society, and the Wellcome Trust, have made their first few articles available. The site will be officially launched in December 2012. The full content will also be made available via PubMed Central (PMC) and its mirror sites, such as UKPMC. The open access journal will cover advances in life sciences and biomedicine. The eLife annoucement is available from: http://www.elifesciences.org/12-1015/

SAGE Open Engineering is a new open access journal covering wide ranging topics on engineering. The new journal's aim is to be inclusive and according to the journal's website "lend itself to papers of both a multi-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary nature but all engineering research will be considered provided authors can demonstrate that their work contributes to the academic narrative in some way."

Those willing to take the risk and submit to this new journal, can do so at an introductory rate of US$495. There is no indication how long this discounted rate will apply.