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Jeffrey Beall here highlights "OAJPA", a bogus new Open Access Publisher Association attempting to compete with the legitimate OASPA.

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]

Open letter from the editors of over 110 French language journals in the humanities and social sciences to the Minister of Higher Education and Research, the Minister of Culture and Communication, the presidents of universities and grandes écoles, and heads of major research institutions. Opening and closing paras: "We are calling for the urgent opening of dialogue on the issues associated with open access in the humanities and the social sciences. The definition of sufficiently long periods of embargo, allowing journals to choose their economic model (balancing what they offer for free and what they offer for payment), is the only way to guarantee diversity and independence in academic research and public debate." "Consequently, we urgently call for an independent impact assessment to be carried out on these matters. This study should take into account the specificities of the humanities and social sciences and of publications in French. We also expect without delay the opening of a genuine dialogue on these issues between the above-mentioned state actors, researcher organizations, scholarly organizations, the heads of journals in the humanities and social sciences, and editors."

"Pre-print" of forthcoming PLoS article by Mike Thelwall, Stefanie Haustein, Vincent Larivière, and Cassidy R. Sugimoto concludes that there is strong evidence that six of the eleven altmetrics (tweets, Facebook wall posts, research highlights, blog mentions, mainstream media mentions and forum posts) associate with citation counts.

4 page PDF - April 2013 - from Science Europe, a Brussels-based association of 51 European national research organisations. A key clause is "the hybrid model, as currently defined and implemented by publishers, is not a working and viable pathway to Open Access. Any model for transition to Open Access supported by Science Europe Member Organisations must prevent 'double dipping' and increase cost transparency".

Constructive coverage by the American Historical Association of Open Library of the Humanities initiative.

In 2012 over 80,000 articles were published by OASPA members under CC-BY licenses, more than double the number in 2010.