http://www.creativecommons.org.au/node/295

Big news from the Australian Federal Government on the issue of access to public sector information (PSI).

CCau followers will remember the Government 2.0 Taskforce report released in December last year, which gave Creative Commons a very big tick as the licensing model of choice for Australian PSI. The Federal Government's official response to the report was released yesterday and is generally positive, with the Federal Government agreeing (at least substantially) to 12 of the 13 recommendations to come out of the report.

The response, which was released by the Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner via the Australian Government Information Office (AGIMO) blog, includes a commitment to the development of a comprehensive set of IP guidelines covering all Australian Federal agencies developed by the new Information Commissioner. These guidelines will, in principle, follow the Gov 2.0 recommendations that PSI should:

be by default free, open, and reusable;
be released as quickly as possible;
only be withheld where there is a legal obligation preventing its release;
be discoverable and accessible by a central government portal; and
when it becomes available for public access under the Archives Act 1983, will be automatically licensed under an appropriate open attribution licence.

by RICHARD PEARCE-MOSES
http://www.archivists.org/glossary/list.asp

Probably most of you have heard that the Wellcome Trust and UCL plan to close down the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine. A petition has been launched that calls upon “the Trust to reconsider its decision” and “upon UCL to maintain the history of medicine as a visible entity within College”.

To sign the petition, click here.
http://www.petitiononline.com/WTCHOM/

Via
http://historypsychiatry.wordpress.com/

Dismayed Parks Canada staff arrived at work early Tuesday morning to find the 6,000-square-foot basement of their leased office space under two metres (seven feet) of water. The flood badly damaged the parks' huge archival inventory documenting the cultural and natural history of the area to the early 1900s.

Read more: Vancouver Sun

"Librarians and archivists at Queen's University recognize the importance of open access to content creators and researchers in fostering new ideas, creating knowledge and ensuring that it is available as widely as possible. In keeping with our long-standing support of the Open Access movement, Queen's librarians and archivists move to adopt a policy which would ensure our research is disseminated as widely as possible and available in perpetuity through deposit in Queen's institutional repository, QSpace"

http://post.queensu.ca/~qula/open_access.html

Directory of Open Access Journals reaches new milestones – now 7 years of operation, now more than 5 000 journals, now more than 2 000 journals searchable on article level, very soon more than 400 000 articles searchable!

http://www.doaj.org

http://digitalprojects.libraries.uc.edu/spanishantiphoner/index.asp

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/29/AR2010042904584.html

Update:

" The United States has agreed to return millions of documents to Iraq, including Baghdad's Jewish archives, that were seized by the US military after the 2003 invasion, a minister said on Thursday.
The documents, which fill 48,000 containers, are currently being held by the US State Department, the National Archives and the Hoover Institute, a think-tank."

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gF1oPz1OBsZo0ZiEuFglET5TvC3w