The stuff we didn't have time to blog about in July

This is a guest post by Joe Dunckley
Some old fashioned publishers are still claiming that open-access mandates -- by forcing the publishers to acknowledge that the internet has happened and that this event makes the status quo business model that they cling to wasteful and unsustainable -- will "stifle innovation". In other news, war has been found to be peace and it was discovered that freedom is slavery.

An unexpected and not entirely welcome development in open science: the Information Commissioner -- charged with enforcing the UK's freedom of information act -- has ruled that data collected by a Queen's University Belfast researcher falls under the remit of the act, and the data must now be released. This seems to be something of an accidental victory for open science, though rather unfortunate that it should come about as the result of a stunt by a climate change denier, and not as part of a planned, consensual, and multilateral shift in academic culture. I've yet to see much written on the repercussions of the decision (though I am a little behind on reading).

WikiReviews? A potentially interesting project for collaborating on "living" review articles, initially on cancer, introduced by George Lundberg.

Scientists who end up in industry could inadvertently find themselves in trouble when the natural tendency of the scientist to share information for the benefit of mankind conflicts with the natural tendency of big companies to jealously and zealously guard everything they have. In the US, researchers innocently publishing a scientific paper can face (at least, the threat of) decades in prison for industrial espionage if they're not very careful.