The Finch Report is the result of a Working Group on Expanding Access to Published Research Findings, chaired by Dame Janet Finch. The independent working group was set up to examine "how UK-funded research findings can be made more accessible." (Read the Press Release here.)

The Report recommends that all publicly funded research be made freely available on an Open Access (OA) basis, and that the traditional subscription model be phased out. The Report includes recommended actions that would help the UK promote research and publications internationally, and to develop a clear policy direction towards OA publishing.

While the outcome is positive, the recommendation does not come without challenges. The main difficulty being locating the extra funding required to disseminate research findings via an OA model.

The Finch Group Report is freely available to read online, as is the Executive Summary.

A range of responses are emerging - click the links for further discussion on the Finch Report:

• Wellcome Trust responds to Finch Report on open access
• Nature - 'Britain aims for broad open access'
• The Guardian - 'Open Access is the future of academic publishing, says Find report'
• From Open and Shut - 'The Finch Report: UCL's David Price Responds'
  

In early June, the Repositories Support Project (RSP) held an interesting and well-received event on "Scholarly Communications: New Developments in Open Access." The event was attended by librarians, repositories specialists, research officers and copyright consultants. Presentations were held on open access, social media, data citation, and research networking.

You can view the presentations by downloading Powerpoints, or watching YouTube videos of the original event.
Future events include webinars on "Repositories: management, policies and best practices" and "Bibliometrics: A way of demonstrating the importance of institutional research".

RSP is a JISC-funded initiative to build "repository capacity, knowledge and skills within UK higher education institutions. The project aim is to "progress the vision of a deployed network of interoperable repositories for academic papers, learning materials and research data across the UK."

The Atlas of Living Australia (Atlas) contains information on all the known species in Australia aggregated from a wide range of data providers: museums, herbaria, community groups, government departments, individuals and universities. The Atlas is the Australian node of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), and since 2001 the GBIF has been encouraging free and open access to biodiversity data through global online networks.

The Atlas of Living Australia can be used to:

• access information pages for each species containing photos, descriptions, maps and observations
• access scientific and common names
• explore the flora and fauna reported around your neighbourhood
• learn about Australia's biodiversity collections at museums, herbaria and other institutions
• learn about citizen science projects
• map, analyse and visualise biodiversity and environmental data and trends
• access tools to help track changes in biodiversity and the environment
• download and use open source tools
• download biodiversity data
• access images, literature and genetic information through Australian nodes of international data repositories
• volunteer for digitisation projects
• Upload datasets.

There are 370 datasets available in the Atlas, and the licensing tags make it clear which data can be used and how. The site also provides extensive explanatory information and help pages, including overviews on how data are integrated and described.

Search for records in the Atlas or browse the site today at http://www.ala.org.au/.

The Atlas of Living Australia is an Australian Government Initiative and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Australia License.

The Global Open Access Portal (GOAP) presents a snapshot of the status of Open Access (OA) to scientific information around the world. For countries that have been more successful in implementing Open Access, the portal highlights critical success factors and aspects of the enabling environment. For countries and regions that are still in the early stages of Open Access development, the portal identifies key players, potential barriers and opportunities. The portal has country reports from over 148 countries with weblinks to over 2000 initiatives/projects in Member States. The portal is supported by an existing Community of Practice (CoP) on Open Access on the WSIS Knowledge Communities Platform that has over 1400 members.

Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has been recruited by the UK government as part of its move to make all taxpayer-funded academic research from the UK freely available online.

David Willetts, the UK Minister of State for Universities and Science, made the open access announcement yesterday at the Publishers Association annual general meeting in London.

The move is significant. According to Willetts, "The UK has many of the leading academic journals globally - of the world's 23,000 peer-reviewed journals, 5,000 are published from the UK."