With the ultimate goal of creating an enduring network of digital mathematical literature", the General Assembly of the International Mathematical Union on August 20, 2006 at its meeting at Santiago de Compostela formally endorsed the CEIC statement Digital Mathematical Library: a vision for the Future and adopted the CEIC recommendation Some Best Practices for Retrodigitisation.

On June 7, 2005, the Physics-Astronomy-Mathematics Division of the Special Libraries Association will be giving the Jahrbuch Project the PAM Division Award for 2005 for "its significant contribution to the field of mathematics". The award honours work that demonstrably improves the exchange of information in physics, mathematics or astronomy, and that benefits libraries or enhances the ability of librarians to provide service (full text of award letter).

The European Mathematical Society has formed its Electronic Publishing Commitee for the new four year term; the list of its members can be found at http://www.euro-math-soc.eu/comm-el_publ.html (address updated in 2010).

This committee controls and steers the development of the electronic library of Mathematics in EMIS (European Mathematical Information Service). It also discusses questions of general interest in electronic publishing and makes suggestions.

Pavel Exner, Chair, EMS Electronic Publishing Committee, January 2005

On July 14, the U.S. House of Representatives Appropriations Committee approved an important provision in connection with the FY 2005 National Institutes of Health (NIH) appropriation. The Committee Report accompanying the FY 2005 Labor, HHS, Education and Related Agencies Appropriations Bill recommends that NIH provide free public access to research articles resulting from NIH-funded research. The Report calls on NIH to offer access to authors' final manuscripts (as accepted for journal publication) and supplemental materials via PubMed Central six months after publication. If the grantee used NIH funds to pay any publication charges (e.g., page or color charges, or fees for digital distribution), PMC access would be immediate. The Report instructs NIH to inform the Committee by December 1, 2004 how it intends to implement the policy.

Rick Johnson, SPARC, Open Access News 7/15/04

In order to create links from the two major reviewing databases to digitized articles, Mathematical Reviews and Zentralblatt have recommended some standards that would allow projects to transfer information simply. An explanation of these standards and their purpose can be found in a new release of the standards called Simple Metadata.

IMU on the Web is a column that will appear in each IMU-Net newsletter and will be accompanied by additional commentary and links.