Open Access Roundup

Over the past several weeks, we’ve witnessed a number of announcements, launches, and news stories related to open access (OA). This roundup of top stories includes the launch of a student-developed OA tool, the boycott of “luxury” journals by a Nobel Prize winner and his lab, a new national OA policy, and the debut of a long-awaited, long-planned-for initiative to support gold OA.

...the Argentine Senate unanimously passed legislation requiring publicly funded research outputs to be made available via OA—a huge step forward for OA in Latin America.

...the [Open Access] button itself is a browser-based bookmarklet that users are encouraged to click each time they hit a paywall when trying to access scholarly research.

...Creative Commons announced a new suite of licenses “specifically designed for intergovernmental organizations (IGOs).

...CERN announced that the SCOAP3 publishing initiative would commence on Jan. 1, 2014. SCOAP3—Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics—is a unique experiment designed to try a new funding model to pay for OA publishing.