From Peter Suber's blog
1. Finland's university rectors commit to OA The Finnish Council of University Rectors decided today to support a wide-ranging set of initiatives to advance OA in Finland. (Thanks to Kalle Korhonen.) From the minutes of its meeting: The Finnish Council of University Rectors has, in its meeting today, decided to sign the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities. The council is a non-governmental association representing the heads of all 21 Finnish universities. In this occasion, it is important to point out also the more concrete open access activities in Finland. In April 2006, an initiative was started for the advancement of open access activities in Finland, funded by the Ministry of Education. The project, known as OA-JES, is coordinated by the Finnish Open Access Working Group, FinnOA. It is a collaboration between the University of Helsinki, Helsinki University of Technology, the National Library of Finland, and the Federation of Finnish Learned Societies (TSV). The objectives of the initiative are: 1) to give aid to universities and research institutes in setting up institutional repositories; 2) to inform researchers about how open access is a part of the research process; and 3) to provide an easy-to-use platform for the open access journals of Finnish learned societies. The Ministry of Education will also be funding a digital infrastructure initiative in the centre campus the University of Helsinki, starting in 2007. In the centre campus are situated the faculties of arts, behavioural sciences, law, social sciences, and theology. The aims will be twofold: 1) to support scholarly open access publishing, which will include repository services both for researchers and for scholarly journals of the departments, and 2) to build a supportive infrastructure for the accessibility and preservation of primary research materials of the departments. The idea is to provide faculty with a comprehensive set of services for own publications and research materials. These activities are a concrete manifestation of the recommendations of the Open Access Publishing Committee, issued by the ministry in 2005. Comment. Finland is one of only three countries so far with a national-level OA policy that has gone beyond proposal to adoption. The other two are the US (NIH policy) and Germany (DFG policy). The minutes above link to an abstract (in English) of the policy, but also see the full-text (in English). The new initiatives supported by the rectors focus on what remains to be done: funding, educational outreach, and OA infrastructure. Kudos to Finland for these important steps. With the new OA bill in Germany I blogged yesterday, these are signs of growing momentum not only toward OA, but toward national commitments to OA. 2. Background on the US National Science Digital Library Dean Krafft, Building a National Science Digital Library, a webcast lecture and PPT slides from the Educause webinar series, delivered May 8, 2006. (Thanks to ResourceShelf.) From the summary: Since 2000, the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) Core Integration team has been creating the infrastructure for a digital library of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics resources. That library now contains more than a million resources from approximately 100 collections. In this talk, Dean Krafft will give a short historical overview of the NSDL and describe the current NSDL community and participants. He will then review the technical underpinnings of NSDL 1.0, a library built on metadata harvesting, and describe some of the challenges encountered. For the past year, the project has been working on NSDL 2.0, a new version of the library built on the Fedora repository architecture. For the last part of the talk, Krafft will describe this new library architecture and explain how it supports creating context for science resources, how it enhances the selection and use of library materials, and what these capabilities mean for the users of the NSDL.