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.

Nature Publishing Group (NPG) have announced the development of a licence that will explicitly permit academic reuse of archived author manuscripts. “NPG supports reuse for academic purposes of the content we publish. We want the excellent research that we publish to help further discovery, and recognize that data-mining and text-mining are important aspects of that,” said David Hoole, Head of Content Licensing David Hoole.

Presentation given at the RIN/RSP conference Research in the Open: how mandates work in practice on the 29th May 2009. The presentation looks at a number of funder open access mandates, with special reference to the Wellcome Trust’s policy and its implementation. The presentation also considers the author-pays model and provides data on the level of compliance with the Wellcome Trust OA mandate.

The Royal Society have announced a change in the pricing structure for its author-pays, open access model, known as EXiS Open Choice. Responding to author feedback, EXiS fees will now be based on a per-article rate, rather than a per-page rate.

Research Councils UK (RCUK) have published an independent study commissioned by the Research Councils into open access to research outputs. The purpose of the study was to identify the effects and impacts of open access on publishing models and institutional repositories in light of national and international trends. This included the impact of open access on the quality and efficiency of scholarly outputs, specifically journal articles.

As reported by Jennifer McLennan (Association of Research Libraries) on the SPARC-OpenData mailing list: 2009 Consolidated Appropriations Act ensures NIH public access policy will persist Washington, D.C. – March 12, 2009 – President Obama yesterday signed into law the 2009 Consolidated Appropriations Act, which includes a provision making the National Institutes’ of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy permanent.