JISC announces support for govt. recommendations for peer review process changes

JISC  (Joint Information Systems Committee) in the U.K. is supporting an open peer review process.  It should be more transparent and reviewers should be trained.  JISC also recommends the sharing of data in the scientific community, and there is mention in this brief of the Dryad project to facilitate this sharing of data in a repository.
“The recommendations came out of a House of Commons Science and Technology
Committee report that also urged that researchers make their scientific data
publicly available, and that reviewers have formal training.”

Source: Knowledgespeak Newsletter, Aug. 2, 2011.

NIH Open Access Policy — SPARC enews

The Open Access Policy proposed by the National Institutes of Health has been made permanent.

To read more about the policy see the entry 

Here is the 1st paragraph:

"Washington, D.C. – March 12, 2009 – President Obama yesterday signed into law the 2009 Consolidated Appropriations Act, which includes a provision making the National Institutes’ of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy permanent. The NIH Revised Policy on Enhancing Public Access requires eligible NIH-funded researchers to deposit electronic copies of their peer-reviewed manuscripts into the National Library of Medicine’s online archive, PubMed Central (PMC). Full texts of the articles are made publicly available and searchable online in PMC no later than 12 months after publication in a journal."

Source: the SPARC enews which comes out monthly from The Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition.