The “Open Access to Research Articles Act” (SB 1900) recently passed both houses of the Illinois General Assembly. From an Illinois Senate Democrats News Release: Legislation State Senator Daniel Biss (D-Evanston) [where Northwestern U. is located] sponsored to work toward making state universities’ taxpayer-funded research available to the public passed the House today [May 16, [...]

Since March, 2012, the Office of the Historian at the U.S. Dept. of State has been releasing digitized volumes of the Foreign Relations of the United States series and making them available online. 103 volumes are currently online (free) and available in Mobi and EPUB formats. More volumes will be made available in the future. Today, the [...]

From the Freedom To Read Foundation: The Freedom to Read Foundation (FTRF), via its Judith F.Krug Memorial Fund, has announced seven $1,000 grants to libraries, schools and community organizations in support of Banned Books Week events. Banned Books Week, which will take place Sept. 22–30, 2013, celebrates the freedom to access information, while drawing attention [...]

From Elsevier: Computers & Graphics for the first time has published executable papers in its special issue on 3D Object Retrieval within the online article framework on ScienceDirect. An executable paper combines the narrative of a traditional scholarly paper with embedded data sets and computer code that underlie the reported results. Readers can inspect code, change [...]

From Collections Link: As part of Collection Trust’s mission to give everyone greater access to culture, arts and heritage from across the globe, whilst promoting UK collections internationally, over 30 million items from 1000’s of UK and European museums, galleries, libraries and archives can now be easily found using Collection Trust’s Culture Grid search www.culturegrid.org.uk. [...]

From IEEE: IEEE today announced that all IEEE-owned peer-reviewed journals now offer open-access (OA) publishing options… [Clip] IEEE joins the open access ranks in a big way by adding to the total figure more than 100 journals capable of accepting open-access content. [Clip] “More authors, organizations and institutions want open-access options, but many authors still [...]

From The Harvard Gazette: Harvard’s Houghton Library recently purchased a copy of “The Star Trek Guide,” an intriguing and often amusing handbook that includes everything that aspiring writers might need to know before crafting a script for the ’60s cult sci-fi television series that spawned several TV sequels, numerous films, countless pop cultural references, and even a [...]

News from Amazon about a new publishing model for those who like to write fan fiction. Today, Amazon Publishing announces Kindle Worlds, the first commercial publishing platform that will enable any writer to create fan fiction based on a range of original stories and characters. Through these licenses, Kindle Worlds will allow any writer to publish authorized [...]

New Data Released by National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Using Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) Postsecondary Institutions and Price of Attendance in 2012-13 Degrees and Other Awards Conferred: 2011-12 12-Month Enrollment: 2011-12: First Look (Preliminary Data) Key Findings Between 2010-11 and 2012-13, the average tuition and required fees at 4-year public institutions (after adjusting [...]