Even in the depths of summer, the scholarly-publishing world produces some news. Here are some developments from the last week or two that are worth noting.

—SUNY Press has two new directors. That's right: two. The State University of New York Press announced this week that James Peltz and Donna Dixon will become co-directors. Peltz already works there as an acquisitions editor and associate director under the previous director, Gary Dunham; Dixon has been the director of member services at NYLINK, an organization that serves New York State libraries. The co-director arrangement is unusual, perhaps unprecedented, in the university-press world.

—A multi-press e-book venture announced today that it has received a second round of grant money from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The four presses leading the project—New York University Press, the University of Pennsylvania Press, Rutgers University Press, and Temple University Press—will use the money to push ahead with setting up a formal consortium aimed at selling collections of e-books to libraries. The consortium has attracted interest from 55 university presses and, the organizers hope, will go live next year. "Managers at many of these presses understand that the separate efforts of individual presses are an inefficient solution to the challenge of disseminating university press e-books to academic libraries," the partners said in their statement announcing the grant. "By working together to achieve efficiencies of scale, presses that join the consortium will put the needs of the scholarly community as a whole at the top of the agenda."

—The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, or Sparc, today released a study that points to the benefits of "timely, open, online access to the results of federally funded research in the United States." The study, conducted by John Houghton with Bruce Rasmussen and Peter Sheehan of the Centre for Strategic Economic Studies at Victoria University, in Australia, concludes that such access "will significantly increase the return on the public’s investment in science," according to a press release from the coalition. Last week, a U.S. House subcommittee held a hearing at which publishers' representatives, scientists, and patients' advocates debated public-access policies governing federally funded research.

—The University of Ottawa Press has established an open-access program for some of its list. On July 30, it made 36 books available as free PDFs available for download from the university's institutional repository. Open access has its limits, however. “If a book is still really popular for courses, it’s not going to go open access at this stage,” Rebecca Ross, the press's e-book coordinator, told Quill & Quire. “We’re not yet an Open Access press. We still have to pay the bills and make revenue from what we’re publishing.” Richard Poynder, a British journalist, raised some questions on his blog about how exactly the Ottawa model will work—it doesn't use a Creative Commons license, for instance—and what it means for open access in humanities book publishing. He also did an email Q&A with Ross about the Ottawa press's experiment with open access and where it might be headed.

—The 16th edition of the Chicago Manual of Style is due out next month. An advance copy arrived in our offices this week. We noted that it has a pale-blue cover instead of the iconic orange that has graced many a copy editor's bookshelf. There are reassuring orange highlights on the dust jacket, though, and the cloth covers of the book are orange. Will we see a new vogue for Manual blue? If you're truly a CMOS devotee, you're invited to upload a photo of your copy to this Flickr group. There's also the CMOS online Web site to tide you over while you wait for the print version of the new edition—which, by the way, will be released simultaneously online.—Jennifer Howard