Peter Suber has announced that Open Access News has ceased publication. OAN was a prolific (over 18,000 posts) and enormously influential blog that played a major role in launching and energizing the open access movement. Hats off to Peter Suber and Gavin Baker for writing this incredible publication.
Here's an excerpt from the announcement:
Tomorrow (May 1, 2010) Google will turn off FTP updating for Blogger. The old FTP-based Blogger blogs can migrate to a new Google-hosted site where FTP won't be necessary. If a blog migrates, then all the posts in its archive will receive new URLs, all links to the old URLs will be redirected, all posts will carry their old page-rank to their new addresses, and Google will start indexing the new versions of the posts and stop indexing the old. If a blog doesn't migrate, it will die. Its archive may remain online, but it cannot be updated with new posts.
My days of heavy blogging at Open Access News are behind me. In July 2009, I curtailed my blogging to make room for my new work at the Berkman Center, and in January 2010 I cut back even further—essentially to zero—in favor of the Open Access Tracking Project, a more comprehensive and scalable alert service for the now very large and very fast-growing OA movement. OATP was not designed to do what OAN once did. But for several years now, the high volume of daily OA news has made it impossible to keep doing what OAN once did, even with an assistant.
Despite that, my plan was to keep Open Access News alive and contribute sporadically. But now Google has forced my hand.
I've decided not to migrate OAN. At first I worried about the risks to the large OAN archive: more than 18,000 posts in more than 400 files. I use the archive every day in my own research and I know that many of you use it too. It's still the best source for news and links about any OA development in the last eight years, and I didn't want to take the chance that even part of it might not survive the migration or might disappear behind broken links. Blogger has been very good about answering my anxious queries and I'm persuaded that the risks are low. But the fact remains that migration is irreversible.