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Useful, broad, measured perspective from Felice Levine with a focus on how the OA position might develop in the US "The best current intelligence for where we are in the US is that the US Federal Government is not likely to issue a narrowly tailored policy on OA which would constrain or define business models. It is clear about the value of OA but it has not mandated particular models of OA. Will there be arrogance from US journals towards non-US scholars and their need for OA? The current model (and the AERA parallels most learned societies) provides toll-free links to authors' webpages and institutional archives of publications and online-first publication. If this does not satisfy the requirements, then the author-fee option is still there."

Ross Mounce is a final year PhD Student at the University of Bath & Open Knowledge Foundation Panton Fellow. His well-linked response to the Inquiry has a pragmatic and sensible feel, though he down-plays the impact on learned societies of loss of income, and wrongly reduces their outreach work to "perks".

Piece in Nature about the "Episciences Project" which, with money from the French Government aims to launch a series of free open-access journals that will host their peer-reviewed articles on the preprint server arXiv. See also Tim Gowers on the subject: http://gowers.wordpress.com/2013/01/16/why-ive-also-joined-the-good-guys/

But if the sciences can do it, why not also the humanities and social sciences? Long, enthusiastic but basically exhortatory piece by Gary F Daught promoting "bright and energetic young scholar" Martin Eve's idea.

RLUK's response is forcefully supportive of the current policy, and firmly dismissive of HSS objections to short embargo periods. But does it sidestep the longer term concerns of learned societies?

Interesting blog post by Stephen Curry from the 25/2/2013 Royal Society's conference "Open access in the UK and what it means for scientific research". Excerpt (but the post has a broader focus than this): " I would like to hear more from advocates of a transition based only on green OA mandates on exactly how the ultimate switch to gold OA can be made from the melee of subscription cancellations that they reckon will be the inevitable consequence of the success of their approach, particularly since green OA depends on compliance from the companies and learned societies that will suffer short-term financial losses. The transition problem, whatever the route plotted through it, remains a tough nut to crack. No-one I spoke to at Monday's meeting had a clear idea of how it would occur. We are on an experimental journey feeling our way more or less blindly - a source of occasional but considerable frustration. "

Here is the full transcript of an unprecedentedly speedily convened 28 February 2014 debate on the report of the House of Lords S&T Committee's Inquiry, with several of the members of the committee speaking. A key exchange takes place towards the end when Lord Krebs questions the Government Minister on what he sees as a key issue: Lord Krebs "My Lords, I thank the Minister for his very helpful response. However, will he confirm that RCUK will revise its policy and guidance statement to reflect what he has just said-namely that the research councils will follow the decision tree which has been adopted by BIS and was produced originally by the Publishers Association? The Minister said that that was the Government's position but I want to be clear that RCUK is following that and is revising its guidelines and policy statement." Lord Popat (Conservative - responding on behalf of the Government) "I thank the noble Lord for that question. To the best of the Government's knowledge, RCUK has accepted the decision tree. However, I will write to the noble Lord once we have the paperwork on the implementation, which I believe will be by the end of this month." [http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201213/ldselect/ldsctech/122/12206.htm#a6 points to the diagram mentioned]

Mike Taylor writes sceptically about Green OA highlighting practical risks of relying on institutional repositories, and pointing to four "in principal" reasons for scepticism: the "two class" system; the expense of continuing subscriptions; embargoes; and non-open licences.

http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/documents/documents/RCUKOpenAccessPolicyandRevisedguidance.pdf (to which this media release links) is a revised version of the RCUK guidance on Open Access, published on 6 March and open for comments till 20 March. RCUK will then revise the guidance further to take account of comments received.

Paul Jump writes in the 14 March THE about the continuing confusion as to the meaning RCUK's revised open-access guidance, indicating that the publishers remain unhappy. Stevan Harnad, Charles Oppenheim, and Mike Taylor are three of the four commenters.