WHAT?!?!?!

Read this whole article, right now, if you care at all about the right to access information.


"Today through medical librarian channels, I got word that entering “abortion” as a search term in the POPLINE database now returns zero results because of a move by the database personnel to block that search. For background, POPLINE is “the world’s largest database on reproductive health, containing citations with abstracts to scientific articles, reports, books, and unpublished reports in the field of population, family planning, and related health issues.” This may seem like a long and libraryland-focused post, but I think it’s important, because it touches on government, reproductive health, and access to information, so stick with me on this one.
The librarian who noted the problem inquired about it, and was informed that it wasn’t a simple technical glitch; the response she received was, “We recently made all abortion terms stop words. As a federally funded project, we decided this was best for now.”
If you’re not familiar with “stop words,” they are typically words like “a,” “an,” and “the” that are omitted automatically from the search, because they is assumed to have no added value or meaning. Suffice it to say, it’s quite unusual for a word with “real” meaning to be a stop word, especially one so relevant to the resource being searched. "
LINK

Libraries sidestepping GoogleBooks

"Several major research libraries have rebuffed offers from Google and Microsoft to scan their books into computer databases, saying they are put off by restrictions these companies want to place on the new digital collections.

The research libraries, including a large consortium in the Boston area, are instead signing on with the Open Content Alliance, a nonprofit effort aimed at making their materials broadly available."

Link to interesting NYT article

This makes my head ache.

"PALMER, Alaska, Feb. 24 (UPI) -- Free wireless Internet service at a public library in Palmer, Alaska, doesn't mean its available for use after hours.
A Palmer man has been waiting to see if he'll be charged with criminal wrongdoing after a patrolling police officer seized the laptop he was using to play online video games in the parking lot.
Authorities told the Anchorage Daily News Saturday that Brian Tanner, 21, had been chased out of a number of locations around Palmer where he had been latching on to wireless service.
Police said that although Tanner was using an essentially free service, there are library rules governing its use and Tanner wasn't following them." LINK

Thailand breaking patents to create affordable Aids drugs

Thailand's latest coup hardly fluttered the news, but the new government is up to stuff- and this is fantastic.

"Thailand's health ministry says it has approved the production of cheaper versions of patented anti-Aids and heart disease drugs.

He said at current prices, Thailand could only afford anti-Aids medicine for a fifth of the country's HIV sufferers.

The minister said the move was permissible under international trade rules in the event of national public health emergencies." LINK

Response from the BigPharma companies whose drugs are being reproduced, Bristol-Myers Squibb Co and Abbot Laboratories, is predictably angry. They, naturally, would prefer to make money than to save lives. Looking out for their investors, you see. It's all about the economy, baby!

Dirty, dirty PR guy taking on open-access information

Free information is threatening traditional journal publishers. The Association of American Publishers (AAP) would apparently, rather charge $14,000 (not kidding at all) for a year's subscription to an Elsevier publication* than share that knowledge with the world, and they have hired a dirty hired gun to go after the open access movement.

"Although Dezenhall declines to comment on Skilling and his other clients, his firm, Dezenhall Resources, was also reported by Business Week to have used money from oil giant ExxonMobil to criticize the environmental group Greenpeace. "He's the pit bull of public relations," says Kevin McCauley, an editor at the magazine O'Dwyer's PR Report.

Now, Nature has learned, a group of big scientific publishers has hired the pit bull to take on the free-information movement, which campaigns for scientific results to be made freely available. Some traditional journals, which depend on subscription charges, say that open-access journals and public databases of scientific papers such as the National Institutes of Health's (NIH's) PubMed Central, threaten their livelihoods." LINK

*fact: Biochemica et Biophysica Acta (published by Elsevier) averaged 300 pages in the 1990s; today they are averaging 200 pages. Price in 1993 was $7,700; this year we paid $14,000. (source: R.Wilson, UC Berkeley Library) LINK