Peter Suber will "step back from systematic daily blogging" on Open Access News so that he can focus on his new job at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.
The open access movement owes a huge debt of gratitude to Peter and to Gavin Baker (who joined OAN on February 03, 2008) for their incredible work on OAN, which passed 15,000 posts on September 29, 2008. Unless you have done it, it's difficult to appreciate how time-consuming doing this kind of high-volume news and commentary blogging is, which involves a considerable amount of effort to identify, filter, summarize, and comment on relevant and timely news items. OAN is not just an excellent current news source—it's an important advocacy platform and the best historical chronicle of the open access movement that exists.
Here's an excerpt from "Housekeeping":
Today I step back from systematic daily blogging in order to free up time for my new position at the Berkman Center.
The blog itself will continue and Gavin will continue at something like his current pace. I will continue my daily crawl for OA-related news. I'll continue to tag what I find for the OA tracking project (OATP). I'll continue to write the monthly SPARC Open Access Newsletter (SOAN). I'll continue to work full-time for OA.
I'll even continue to blog, though only sporadically. Open Access News (OAN) will be smaller and more selective than in the past. I cannot assure you that the news it covers will be the most important subset. (That presupposes that Gavin and I will be on top of all new developments and in a position to pick the most important.) I'll blog what I notice, what moves me, and what I have time for, with the accent on the third criterion. It should be a eclectic bunch. I know that I'll notice a lot of important news, thanks to OATP, and I know that I'll be moved to blog a lot of it. But because of my new projects, even the most important news will be important news that I only have time to tag, not to blog.
For a comprehensive source of OA news, subscribe to the OATP feed, which is available by RSS, email, and a blog-like web page with the most recent items displayed first. The OATP feed has been more comprehensive than this blog since April and it grows more comprehensive and useful every day. To help the cause, please join OATP as a tagger and help select new items for inclusion in the feed. For more details, see the OATP home page or my SOAN article about it from May 2009.
