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It’s been a busy few weeks, so we missed a few roundups of open science news, but it was so busy because there was a LOT going on in the open science world! Here is a very brief summary of just the key news of the past weeks: funding news and meeting summaries.

Better funder policies for open access policies

Two major research funders recently published new guidelines for open access publishing.

• NWO, the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, mandates open access publishing for the research they fund (and they have special incentive funds available for OA publishing). Their new policy is tightening the regulations, and will no longer fund payment for OA articles in hybrid journals. They will not allow an embargo period (with an exception for patent applications), so all research must be made open access immediately, either via Green or Gold route.
• The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s open access policy, released this week, is even more open: the Gates Foundation requests immediate open access (with no exceptions), and also asks for all underlying data to be made available on publication of the results. All articles should carry the CC-BY 4.0 licence, which rules out publishing in journals that licence their OA articles as CC-BY-NC.

Recent meetings that covered various aspects of open science

• SpotOn London – November 14-15 London
  • Topic: science and the web, in particular balancing public and private aspects of online information. Included a panel on open peer review.
  • Videos from SpotOn London
• Open Con – November 15-17, Washington DC (and global satellite meetings)
  • Topic: open science for early career researchers
  • Videos from Open Con
• Open Education Conference – November 19-21, Washington DC
  • Topic: Although the main theme was open education, open science covered in keynote talks by Heather Joseph and John Wilbanks, and in Erin McKiernan’s & Eva Amsen’s session on open peer review in the sciences.
  • Tweets from #opened14
• Open Science and Research Forum –November 25, Helsinki
  • Topic: open science
  • Video part 1
  • Video part 2
  • Video part 3
• Munin Conference  – November 26-27, Tromsø
  • Topic: open access publishing
  • Tweets from #MuninConf