The University of Kansas has taken the lead with 21 other universities and colleges in announcing they'll join forces to form the Coalition of Open Access Policy Institutions (COAPI). COAPI will collaborate and share implementation strategies and advocate on a national level for institutions with open access policies.

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute News reports that Randy W. Schekman, a distinguished cell biologist and the 14th editor of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has been named the first editor of a new journal that the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Max Planck Society, and the Wellcome Trust aim to launch next year.

The Federal Government has just launched an open access and licensing framework to encourage governments to get their data out there. Publicly funded information should be available to the public and AusGOAL, the Australian Governments' Open Access and Licensing Framework, aims to make it easier for governments to comply.

To find out which journals and publishers grant advanced permission for 'green', i.e. gratis, open access, see the SHERPA RoMEO database and its statistics page.

UK universities and other research institutions have posted a lot of academic, educational and research information in a range of systems similar to our own UQ eSpace repository. A search tool has now been developed to make this material more accessible. The tool runs a federated search across the more than 130 repositories included.

PLoS One, published by the Public Library of Science, was launched in 2006. Last year, it became the largest scientific journal in the world, publishing nearly 7,000 articles. Foir impact, it is now ranked 12th in biology journals, not bad going for a journal less than 5 years old. PLoS One's success has led other players in the field think about launching open access journals.