The Week in Links — March 14

What has been happening in the world of Open Access in the last week (or two)?

The Frontiers in Innovation, Research, Science and Technology (FIRST) Act was introduced into the United States House of Representatives. Section 303 of the FIRST Act would be a leap backwards for open access to United States federally funded research articles. Some of the harms in Section 303 include embargoes increasing from six to 12 months up to three years, failing to ensure federal agencies have full text copies of their articles to archive, and a lack of clarity about what data will be made accessible and where it would be stored. Read more about the FIRST Act from SPARC and take action to support open access by opposing section 303 of the FIRST Act if you’re a U.S. Citizen.

Kevin Smith, Scholarly Communications Officer at Duke University, reviewed Dr. Erin McKiernan’s talk from SPARC 2014, saying that, “After listening to her expression of such a heartfelt commitment … I began to realize that, in reality, OA is the only choice.”

Hebrew Studies is now open access with content after 1990 being made available through the Free Library platform.

Dr. Peter Murray-Rust blogged “Elsevier are still charging THOUSANDS of pounds for CC-BY articles.” Murray-Rust found that many open access CC-BY articles were labeled as “All rights reserved” and users would be charged hefty sums for permission to reprint the articles.

Dominque Babini discussed open access initiatives in the Global South.

MIT celebrates the fifth anniversary of their Faculty Open Access Policy. Readers regularly download MIT authored articles from DSpace@MIT. 38% of the access is from the United States, with heavy use from China, India, the United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, Republic of Korea, Japan, and France, in that order.

PLOS clarified part of their new data sharing policy.

The National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS, Japan) and IOP Publishing are have announced that Science and Technology of Advanced Materials (STAM) has adopted the Creative Commons license (CC-BY 3.0) for all articles published in the journal.

Times Higher Education reviewed PeerJ’s first year of the $99 open access model.

The American Sociology Association Council has voted to launch a new open access journal called Sociology Open with their publishing partner SAGE. The news has been met with an interesting discussion and criticism about the partnership and the possible “cloning” of the open access sociology journal Sociological Science.