A recent opinion piece from the Scholarly Kitchen on the UK government deliberations on Open Access... See the article, Predictable Problems - The UK's Move to Open Access.

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.

Heather Morrison's blog post the June 30, 2012 Dramatic Growth of Open Access http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.ca/2012/07/inevitability-of-open-access-june-30.html provides an excellent summary of open access search engines, world archives and the recent growth of their content. Here is a snap shot of the figures:

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:

CSIRO's Information Management & Technology team has won the 2012 Excellence in eGovernment Awards: Project and Program Management Category. The award was received for their Research Data Service program.

The Awards website, describes the CSIRO Research Data Service (RDS) as follows:

The Getty Research Portal provides global access to digitised art history texts in the public domain. The catalogue is multilingual, and provides an open access platform from which to search and download digital copies of publications in the scholarly areas of art, architecture, material culture and other fields.

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.)

PeerJ offers academics two Open Access publication options:

PeerJ - a peer-reviewed open access academic journal
PeerJ PrePrints - a 'pre-print' server that allows you to gain credit and feedback from peers before publishing.

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.

The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) Academic Senate has voted to make electronic versions of current and future scientific articles freely available to the public. Richard A.