What is a blog? There are several definitions, but mostly, it's a chronologically ordered journal with links. In this case, we're using a blog to present news about open access and about the Institute. We hope you'll read it, and even take advantage of our Atom feed, to get its news delivered to your desktop. Not up on feeds and RSS? Here's a nice overview.

France Calls For Digitization Project for Europe

A lot of the library listservs have been discussing French President Jacques Chirac's statement that European countries need a large-scale project to digitize books, much like Google's now-famous project.
The Search Engine Watch blog has a nice overview of the situation, with some good links.

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Open Access in Scotland

The Scottish university community is getting active about open access.
Sixteen universities have signed a declaration of open access The schools agree to set up online libraries of research findings and post doctorate papers. Some schools will make it mandatory for its scholars to publish their work in an open access environment.

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ARL's Open Access Bibliography Published

The Association of Research Libraries has published "Open Access Bibliography:
Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals."
The ARL is selling it, but in keeping with the spirit of open access, it's also available here as a PDF.

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The Keystroke Strategy

The Guardian has news on an open access strategy that might be gaining steam in the United Kingdom.
It's called the "keystroke strategy":

[It] calls for all academics who have had research papers accepted by journals to place information about the paper — such as its title and author, known as metadata — on a university's own archive for all to see. Alongside that should be a copy of the article itself.

Apparently, in the UK 92% of academic publishers allow this type of behavior, which is considered self-archiving.
You just have to wonder how easy it will be to find all of this research, scattered all over the Internet.

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