According to Marilia Maciel at InfoJustice:

Read more of "Creative Commons licenses gone from Brazilian government site"

I’ve been thinking about an idea that doesn’t seem to be working yet. But gonna throw it out here anyway.

Read more of "personal paths through information"

Science Magazine reports on a study sponsored by the EU that found that 89% of the 50,000 researchers surveyed think open access is good for their field. On the other hand, the reporter, Gretchen Vogel, points out that while 53% said they had published at least one open access article, only 10% of papers are published in open access journals. What’s holding them back from doing more open access publishing? About 40% said it was because there wasn’t enough funding to cover the publication fees, and 30% said there weren’t high-quality open access journals in their field.

Read more of "This open access stuff is catching on!"

BoingBoing.net reports:

The library in Stony Stratford near Milton Keynes, England, urged its patrons to check out every book on the shelves as a way of proving to the local council that its collection and facilities provide a vital service to the community. Stony Stratford is one of many towns across the UK that are facing severe library closures as the Tory-LibDem coalition government recklessly slashes its transfer payments to local governments (while breaking their promise to rein in enormous bonuses at the banks, even the ones that are owned by the taxpayer).

Read more of "Library patrons empty its shelves to prove its value"

An open set of people—“2 Librarians, A Mathematician, An Economist, a Computer Scientist, a Library developer and a chemist,” according to the blog post—has been working on principles for open bibliographic data. They’re going to launch it on January 17 at the PMR Symposium.

Read more of "Principles for the Openness of Bibliographic Data to launch"

The Book Industry Study Group just released a survey of undergraduate students regarding their format preference for reading textbooks. Most still say they prefer print.

NotionInk [blog] is showing this at CES:

They are not accepting any more pre-orders :(

Jeff’s copy of A Pattern Language illustrates the value of social reading: Works are made more publicly beautiful every time they are read.

Friend of the Library Peter Suber has posted his year-end round up of what’s happened with Open Access. It’s a massive record–—Peter acknowledges at the outset that there’s too much happening for a full acounting–—but in section 10 there’s some highlights and lowlights.

There is a lot going on–—much of it quite good.

May 2011 be the best year for libraries in a couple of millennia!

It could be, you know. (And how often do you get to say that?)