Timeline 2009

This list is part of the Open Access Directory.


 * This is a section within the larger Timeline of the open access movement.


 * January, 2009. Napier University effected an OA mandate (adopted April 2008) which, unlike previous university mandates, stated that "all publication lists required for...promotion will be generated from" the institutional repository (additional author incentive).


 * January 1, 2009. The Netherlands declares 2009 Open Access Year.


 * January 1, 2009. In response to OCLC's reminder that it owns the copyright on the Dewey Decimal system, John Mark Ockerbloom proposed the basics of a free decimal classification system.


 * January 22, 2009. The Australian Research Council made deposit in IRs and OA mandatory whenever possible.


 * January 26, 2009. The UK Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) revealed that it had adopted an OA mandate, making it the seventh out of the seven Research Councils UK to do so.


 * February, 2009. The Association of American Universities', [http://www.arl.org/ Association of Research Libraries, Coalition for Networked Information, and National Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges released a joint statement on The University's Role in the Dissemination of Research and Scholarship, calling for OA and the "broadest possible access" to research.


 * February, 2009. NECOBELAC (NEtwork of COllaboration Between Europe and Latin American Caribbean) is launched to promote OA for health-care information.


 * February, 2009. China's National Science Library (NSL) and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) launched an OA repository and adopted an OA mandate.


 * Feburary 8, 2009. Wikileaks provided OA for thousands of CRS Reports.


 * Februrary 13, 2009. GlaxoSmithKline announced deep price cuts on all its drugs in developing countries, a patent pool for all its patents related to drugs for neglected diseases, and OA for all its clinical trial data, positive or negative.


 * March 4, 2009. Representatives from 27 African governments and four intergovernmental organizations issued the Kigali Declaration on the Development of an Equitable Information Society in Africa, calling for equitable access to information and knowledge but not necessarily OA.


 * March 11, 2009. Creative Commons officially launched CC-Zero.


 * March 18, 2009. The MIT faculty unanimously adopted a university-wide OA mandate.


 * April, 2009. The University of the People, a tuition-free university built upon the growing body of open courseware and OERs, began admitting students.


 * April 3, 2009. A US federal district court ruled that restoring copyrights to works already in the public domain is unconstitutional, the first time a US federal court applied First-Amendment scrutiny to copyright law.


 * April 16, 2009. Peter Suber launched the OA tracking project (beta).


 * April 21, 2009. UNESCO, the Library of Congress, and dozens of other partners launched the OA World Digital Library.


 * May, 2009. The 2009 Swine Flu pandemic provided the impetus for widespread application of OA as part of a response. (American Medical Association, Proceeding of theNational Academy of Sciences, EBSCO and DynaMed, NCBI)


 * May, 2009. Peter Murray-Rust, Cameron Neylon, Rufus Pollock, and others formulated the Panton Principles for open data, named after a Cambridge pub.


 * May, 2009. The Library of Congress launched its OA subject-heading data service, Authorities & Vocabularies.


 * May 8, 2009. Elizabeth Pisani released the first draft of the / Bamako data sharing code of conduct.


 * June, 2009. The Encyclopedia Britannica officially launched a set of wiki-like features.


 * June 15, 2009. Senators John Cornyn and Joe Lieberman re-introduced the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) in the US Senate.  FRPAA would mandate OA at a wide range of US federal agencies.  Cornyn and Lieberman originally introduced FRPAA in 2006, when I didn't come up for a vote.  (Details on the reintroduction.)


 * June 26, 2009. The University of Kansas became the first public university in the US to adopt a university-wide OA policy.


 * June 26, 2009. Ted Bergstrom and Paul Courant used an OA public-records law to force the disclosure of / Elsevier's licensing contract with Washington State University, and plan to force the disclosure of other Elsevier licensing contracts. http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2009/07/court-orders-release-of-elsevier.html


 * July, 2009. The world's oldest book, the Codex Sinaiticus bible, was digitized for OA. The 800+ pages were held by different museums in four countries and brought together for the new OA edition.


 * July 6, 2009. Pope Benedict XVI criticized "excessive zeal for protecting knowledge through an unduly rigid assertion of the right to intellectual property, especially in the field of health care."


 * August, 2009. Ted Bergstrom, Paul Courant, and R. Preston McAfee launched the Big Deal Contract Project, to publish the Big Deal contracts between publishers and academic libraries.


 * August 26, 2009. The Internet Archive, Amazon, Microsoft, Yahoo joined with other major players to form the Open Book Alliance.


 * September 10, 2009. Participants in the May 2009 CASIMIR meeting in Rome released the Rome Agenda, recommending (inter alia) that "data on which publications are based should be made available immediately through public databases on publication" and that "materials and data should be shared under the least restrictive terms possible".


 * October, 2009. The Internet Archive launched BookServer, an open platform for discovering, selling, loaning, and giving away ebooks, and indexing them for search.


 * October, 2009. The US federal government published an [http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/Federal-Register-20-Opening-a-Window-onto-the-Inner-Workings-of-Government/ OA edition of the Federal Register in XML. The XML is designed to allow citizen-initiated mashups, several of which are already featured on the site.


 * October 01, 2009. Bill Gasarch posted his Journal Manifesto 2.0, seven steps that researchers can take on their own without appealing to publishers, funders, or universities.


 * October 19, 2009. The EC adopted a Communication on Copyright in the Knowledge Economy, designed to remove legal obstacles to the mass digitization of European books.


 * October 19-23, 2009. First international Open Access Week.


 * November 2009. The Research Libraries Group released an Academic Library Manifesto . Among its 10 recommendations: "Offer alternative scholarly publishing and dissemination platforms that are integrated with appropriate repositories and preservation services."


 * November 1, 2009. Charter for Innovation, Creativity and Access to Knowledge, drafted by the Free Culture Forum (Barcelona), called for OA to publicly-funded research.


 * November 17, 2009. Google Scholar began providing full-text OA to US case law (federal and state, district and appellate), along with "cited by" and "related" links to other cases.


 * December 10, 2009. Elinor Ostrom won the 2009 Nobel Prize in economics (with Oliver Williamson) for her work on the economics of the commons.