Nature Publishing Group (NPG) and the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) have announced that the prices for site licence access to The EMBO Journal and EMBO reports will be reduced by 9% in 2010, reflecting the increased publication of Open Access content in 2008.

PubMed Central Canada is now live. PMC Canada is a partnership between the National Research Council’s Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (NRC-CISTI), the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), and the US National Library of Medicine (NLM) PMC Canada is the second PMC International site to be established.

The European Respiratory Society, publishers of the European Respiratory Journal, have confirmed that they will shortly be amending their instructions to authors to add that Wellcome Trust (or other members of the UK PMC Funders Group) will be permitted to deposit a copy of the final, peer-reviewed author-supplied manuscript (before copy-editing and publication) in PMC 6 months from publication in a print issue.

The Endocrine Society – who publish titles such as the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism and Endocrinology – have developed an open access option for Wellcome Trust funded authors. “The Endocrine Society will offer authors supported by the Wellcome Trust the option of meeting the publication requirements of the Trust by paying for an open access option. The cost to authors would be $3,000.

As Open Access Week 2009 gets underway, the Wellcome Trust has called for greater transparency among publishers to counter the argument that access fees are being paid twice – once through subscriptions and again through publication fees. The call comes as the Trust announces a further £2 million to fund open access publication fees for its researchers over the next 12 months.

The British Journal of Cancer – owned by Cancer Research UK (CR-UK) – has chosen to implement the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 3.0 licence http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ for articles published under the BJC OPEN initiative. This licence permits distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

The Wellcome Trust, on behalf of the UKPMC Funders’ Group, held a workshop on the 24th Spetember, for HEI repository managers and research/open access administrators, to discuss the issues involved in ensuring that funder open access mandates are met. The workshop was split into two sessions.

The first Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) conference took place in Lund between the 14-16th September 2009. The full set of presentations will be made available from the conference site within the next week or so. Robert Kiley, from the Wellcome Trust, spoke about the Trust’s open access policy, grantee compliance with the OA mandate, and what steps needed to be taken to achieve full OA for all Trust funded research papers.

The full archive (1947 to date) of the British Journal of Cancer -published by NPG on behalf of Cancer Research UK – is now available in UKPMC. Current content is embargoed for 12 months, though articles routed through BJC Open are made available at the time of publication. The archive was digitised through the Wellcome Trust/JISC/NLM Medical Journals Backfiles Project.

The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the National Research Council’s Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (NRC-CISTI), and the US National Library of Medicine (NLM) have announced a three-way partnership to establish PubMed Central Canada (PMC Canada). “PMC Canada is a powerful tool that will help researchers build upon one another’s work and speed up the discovery and innovation process to address important