Since I have developed a habit of writing elsewhere, which necessarily takes time and words away from the blog here at Reciprocal Space, I thought I would try to make amends by developing the habit of linking to the pieces that appear in other corners of the internet.  To kick off therefore, permit me to alert you to a short article this week published in The Biologist, the house magazine of the Royal Society of Biology.

I got impatient waiting for my latest review article to come out, so here it is. The scheduled publication date has slipped twice now without the publisher getting in touch to explain why. The latest I’ve heard, after querying the editor who commissioned the piece, is that it will be out by the end of the month. But I’ve paid my £500 fee to make the work open access and don’t see any good reason to delay further.

This is a guest post by Pete Binfield and Jason Hoyt, co-founders of the open access journal PeerJ. I don’t make a habit of running posts from private companies here at Reciprocal Space but have been impressed by the innovative model of open access publishing that PeerJ represents and was glad to be able to provide them with a forum to expound on their publishing philosophy. No payment was made or requested.

A round-up of some of the issues that got an airing during Open Access (OA) Week and in the days that followed, including more rumination on the implementation and implications of the RCUK OA policy, more bad (and some good) publisher behaviour, ideas for new directions in OA publishing and, finally, an important African perspective on the rumbling debate. The start of open access week From 22-28 October

Well that was quick. Less than a month after the Finch working group published its recommendations on the future of open access, UK science minister David Willetts has responded, saying in effect “Let’s go for it.” The government has taken essentially all of the recommendations on board and has committed the country to making all its publicly-funded research available for free online by 2014. Except that it’s not quite that simple.

If Elsevier calculated that its withdrawal of support for the Research Works Act (RWA) would neutralise the arguments stirred up around academic publishing, I think the company is mistaken.

This week I got to visit a part of London that is for me a hallowed place – the offices of The Guardian newspaper. I was participating in a workshop for the people who had been short-listed for the Wellcome Science Writing Prize, which is sponsored by the Guardian , and so made my way to its large glass headquarters behind Kings Cross.