The French digital Republic bill was presented to MPs on 19 January, for a a public session examination. The National Union of Publishing /Syndicat National de l’Edition and the National Federation of Specialized Information Press / Fédération nationale de la presse d’information spécialisée denounced a project that would jeopardize the French Scientific Research. If the researchers and the publishing community claim for a real discussion, the government representatives assert that the economic risks have been taken into account.  [Since the publication of this article, the amendment has been adopted]   (Article in French)

Education minister Sander Dekker will push to make more journal papers free to bring the Netherlands’ presidency of the EU Council. The aim is to confront the inequality of scientific research publishing in Open Access domain and the budget they diposed to do so.

The importance of blogging and twitting about journals articles – even old ones – makes a difference in the regularity of a journal and on how often they are read and cited. That debate was initiated by Melissa Terras, Director of University College London’s (UCL) Centre for Digital Humanities. The benefits for both scholars and journals are presented.

The Netherlands is leading what it hopes will be a pan-European effort in 2016 to push scholarly publishers towards open-access (OA) business models: making more papers free for all users as soon as they are published.

A close review is made on the situation in The Netherlands and the UK, as well as some other proposals coming from other Northern European countries. In the end, may be a successful push for immediate OA would ultimately need to be global — not limited to Europe.

A standoff between Dutch universities and publishing giant Elsevier is finally over. After more than a year of negotiations—and a threat to boycott Elsevier’s 2500 journals—a deal has been struck: For no additional charge beyond subscription fees, 30% of research published by Dutch researchers in Elsevier journals will be open access by 2018.

The evolution of Open access in South America and an analysis of the low proportion of predatory journal in the continent’s most important database, SciELO.

This article gives an overview of the history and current status of the DOAJ. After a brief historical overview, DOAJ policies regarding open access, intellectual property rights and questionable publishers are explained in detail. The larger part of this article is a much requested explanation on how DOAJ uses its new set of criteria for the evaluation of open access journals and the rationale behind chosing the seven extra criteria that qualify for the DOAJ Seal.

Rutgers faculty members (New Brunswick), citing philosophical concerns and errors, are pushing back against the use of Academic Analytics to evaluate their productivity.

On November 2015, representatives from LA Referencia, OpenAIRE and COAR met in Rio de Janeiro to discuss the adoption of common metadata guidelines for repository networks and identify areas for further collaboration.

On September 28th 2015, the greatly anticipated open access mega-journal, the Open Library of Humanities (OLH) was launched. The author provides a brief overview of what sets this journal project apart from the rest and how the new funding model offers an economic, social and technological platform for the humanities and social sciences to transition to open access.