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Media coverage of health news can seem to consist of a steady diet of research-based stories, but making sense of what may be relevant or important and what is not can be a tall order for most patients. Headlines may shout about dramatic breakthroughs, exciting new advances, revolutions, and even cures but there may be scant details of the evidence base of the research.

The post How fertility patients can make informed decisions on treatment appeared first on OUPblog.

Can Peer Review ever be as important as publication? This year's Peer Review Week focuses on the recognition of reviewers. Peer Review Week 2016 is an international initiative that celebrates the essential and often undervalued activity of academic peer review.

The post Publish and be cited! Impact Factors, Open Access, and the plight of peer review appeared first on OUPblog.

In thinking about the future of scholarly publishing – a topic almost as much discussed as the perennially popular ‘death of the academic monograph’ – I found a number of themes jostling for attention, some new, some all-too familiar. What are the challenges and implications of open access?

The post The future of scholarly publishing appeared first on OUPblog.

That time of the year is upon us again – Strictly Come Dancing is on the telly, Starbucks is selling spiced pumpkin lattes, and the kids are getting ready for a night of trick-or-treating. It can mean only one thing: Open Access Week is upon us.

The post Open Access Week – continuing on the journey appeared first on OUPblog.

Open access (OA) publishing stands at something of a crossroads. OA is now part of the mainstream. But with increasing success and increasing volume come increasing complexity, scrutiny, and demand. There are many facets of OA which will prove to be significant challenges for publishers over the next few years. Here I’m going to focus on one — licensing — and discuss how the arguments seen over licensing in recent months shine a light on the difference between OA as a movement, and OA as a reality.

Today’s authors face a number of conflicting pressures. Publish in a high impact journal. Publish in a journal with the correct OA options as mandated by your funder. Publish in a journal with the correct OA options as mandated by your institution. Publish your article in a way which complies with government requirements on research excellence. They are then met by a wide array of options, and it’s no wonder we at OUP sometimes receive queries from authors confused as to which OA option they should choose.

One of the most interesting aspects of the various surveys Taylor & Francis (T&F) have conducted on open access over the past year or two has been the divergence between what authors say they want, and what their funders/governments mandate. The T&F findings imply that, whilst there is generally a shared consensus as to what is meant by accessible, there are divergent positions and preferences between funders and researchers as to what constitutes reasonable reuse. T&F’s surveys always reveal the most restrictive licences in the Creative Commons (CC) suite such as Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No-Derivs (CC BY-NC-ND) to be the most popular, with the liberal Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence coming in last. This neither squares with the mandates of funders which are usually, but not always, pro CC BY, or author behaviour at OUP, where CC BY-NC-ND usually comes in a resounding third behind CC BY and CC BY-NC where it’s available. It’s not a dramatic logical step to think that proliferation may lead to confusion, but given the conflicting evidence and demand, and potential for change, it’s logical for publishers to offer myriad options. At the same time elsewhere in the OA space we have a recent example of pressure to remove choice.

In July 2014, the International Association of Science, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM) released their ‘model licences’ for open access. These were at their core a series of alternatives for, and extensions to the terms of the established CC licences. STM’s new addition did not go down well in OA circles, as a ‘Global Coalition’ subsequently called for their withdrawal. One of the interesting elements of the Coalition’s call was that, in amongst some very valid points about interoperability, etc. it fell back on the kind of language more commonly associated with a sermon to make the STM actions seem incompatible with some fundamental precepts about the practice of science: “let us work together in a world where the whole sum of human knowledge… is accessible, usable, reusable, and interoperable.” At root, it could be interpreted that the Coalition was using positive terminology to frame an essentially negative action – barring a new entry to the market. Personally, I don’t have a strong opinion on the new STM licences. We don’t have any plans to adapt them at OUP (we use CC). But it was odd and striking that rather than letting a competitor to the CC status quo exist and in all likelihood fail, some serious OA players felt the need to call for that competitor’s withdrawal.

This illustrates one of the central challenges of the dichotomy of OA. On one hand you have OA as a political movement seeking to replace commercial interests with self-organized and self-governed communities of interest – a bottom-up aspiration for the common good, often suggested to be applied in quite restricted ways, usually adhering to the Berlin, Budapest, and Bethesda declarations. On the other you have OA as a top-down pragmatic means to an end, aiming to improve the flow of research and by extension, economic performance. The OA pragmatist might suggest that it’s fine for an author to be given the choice of liberal or less liberal OA licences, as long as they meet the basic criteria of being free to read and easy to re-use. The OA dogmatist might only be satisfied with the most liberal licence, and with OA along the terms they’ve come to believe is the correct interpretation of their core precepts. The danger of this approach is that there is a ‘right’ and a ‘wrong’ and, as can be seen from the language of the Global Coalition in responding to the STM licences, that can very easily translate into; “If you’re not with us, you’re against us.”

Against this backdrop, publishers find themselves in a thorny position. Do you (a) respect author choice, but possibly at some expense of simplicity, or do you (b) offer fewer options, but potentially leave members of the scholarly community feeling dissatisfied or disenfranchised by your standard option?

Oxford University Press at the moment chooses option (a), as we feel this is the more inclusive way to proceed. To me at least it feels right to give your customers choice. But there is an argument for streamlining processes, avoiding confusion, and giving users consistent knowledge of what to expect. Nature Publishing Group (NPG), for example, recently announced that as part of their move to full OA for Nature Communications they would be making CC BY their default, and only allowing other options on request. This is notable in as much as it’s a very strong steer in a particular direction, while not ruling out everything else. NPG has done more than most to examine the choice issue – changing the order of their licences to see what authors select, sometimes varying charges, etc. Empirical evidence such as this is essential for a viable and credible resolution to the future of OA licensing. Perhaps the Global Coalition should have given a more considered and less emotional response to the STM licences. Was repudiation necessary in a broad OA community which should be able to recognise and accept different variants of OA? It would be a shame if all the positive impacts of open access for the consumer come hand in hand with a diminution of scholarly freedom for the producer.

The opinions and other information contained in this blog post and comments do not necessarily reflect the opinions or positions of Oxford University Press.

The post Questions surrounding open access licensing appeared first on OUPblog.

        

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In 2014 Oxford University Press celebrates ten years of open access (OA) publishing. In that time open access has grown massively as a movement and an industry. Here we look back at five key moments which have marked that growth.

2004/05 – Nucleic Acids Research (NAR) converts to OA

At first glance it might seem parochial to include this here, but as Rich Roberts noted on this blog in 2012, Nucleic Acids Research’s move to open access was truly ‘momentous’. To put it in context, in 2004 NAR was OUP’s biggest owned journal and it was not at all clear that many of the elements were in place to drive the growth of OA. But in 2004/2005 NAR moved from being free to publish to free to read – with authors now supporting the journal financially by paying APCs (Article Processing Charges). No wonder Roberts adds that it was ‘with great trepidation’ that OUP and the editors made the change. Roberts needn’t have worried — NAR’s switch has been a huge success — its impact factor has increased, and submissions, which could have fallen off a cliff, have continued to climb. As with anything, there are elements of the NAR model which couldn’t be replicated now, but NAR helped show the publishing world in particular that OA could work. It’s saying something that it’s only ten years on, with the transition of Nature Communications to OA, that any journal near NAR’s size has made the switch.

2008 – National Institutes of Health (NIH) Mandate Introduced

Open access presents huge opportunities for research funders; the removal of barriers to access chimes perfectly with most funders’ aim to disseminate the fruits of their research as widely as possible. But as both the NIH and Wellcome, amongst others, have found out, author interests don’t always chime exactly with theirs. Authors have other pressures to consider – primarily career development – and that means publishing in the best journal, the journal with the highest impact factor, etc. and not necessarily the one with the best open access options. So it was that in 2008 the NIH found it was getting a very low rate of compliance with its recommended OA requirements for authors. What happened next was hugely significant for the progress of open access. As part of an Act which passed through the US legislature, it was made mandatory for all NIH-funded authors to make their works available 12 months after publication. This was transformative in two ways: it meant thousands of articles published from NIH research became available through PubMed Central (PMC), and perhaps just as importantly it legitimised government intervention in OA policy, setting a precedent for future developments in Europe and the United Kingdom.

2008 – Springer buys BioMed Central (BMC)

BioMed Central was the first for-profit open access publisher – and since its inception in 2000 it was closely watched in the industry to see if it could make OA ‘work’. When it was purchased by one of the world’s largest publishers, and when that company’s CEO declared that OA was now a ‘sustainable part of STM publishing’, it was a pretty clear sign to the rest of the industry, and all OA-watchers, that the upstart business model was now proving to be more than just an interesting side line. It also reflected the big players in the industry starting to take OA very seriously, and has been followed by other acquisitions – for example Nature purchasing Frontiers in early 2013. The integration of BMC into Springer has happened gradually over the past five years, and has also been marked by a huge expansion of OA at the parent company. Springer was one of the first subscription publishers to embrace hybrid OA, in 2004, but since acquiring BMC they have also massively increased their fully OA publishing. It seems bizarre to think that back in 2008 there were even some who feared the purchase was aimed at moving all BMC’s journals back to subscription access.

2007 on – Growth of PLOS ONE

The Public Library of Science (PLOS) started publishing open access journals back in 2003, but while its journals quickly developed a reputation for high-quality publishing, the not-for-profit struggled to succeed financially. The advent of PLOS ONE changed all that. PLOS ONE has been transformative for several reasons, most notably its method of peer review. Typically top journals have tended to have their niche, and be selective. A journal on carcinogens would be unlikely to accept a paper about molecular biology, and it would only accept a paper on carcinogens if it was seen to be sufficiently novel and interesting. PLOS ONE changed that. It covers every scientific field, and its peer review is methodological (i.e. is the basic science sound) rather than looking for anything else. This enabled PLOS ONE to rapidly turn into the biggest journal in the world, publishing a staggering 31,500 papers in 2013 alone. PLOS ONE’s success cannot be solely attributed to its OA nature, but it was being OA which enabled PLOS ONE to become the ‘megajournal’ we know today. It would simply not be possible to bring such scale to a subscription journal. The price would balloon beyond the reach of even the biggest library budget. PLOS ONE has spawned a rash of similar journals and more than any one title it has energised the development of OA, dispelling previously-held notions of what could and couldn’t be done in journals publishing.

2012 – The ‘Finch’ Report

It’s difficult to sum up the vast impact of the Finch Report on journals publishing in the UK. The product of a group chaired by the eponymous Dame Janet Finch, the report, by way of two government investigations, catalysed a massive investment in gold open access (funded by APCs) from the UK government, crystallised by Research Councils UK’s OA policy. In setting the direction clearly towards gold OA, ‘Finch’ led to a huge number of journals changing their policies to accommodate UK researchers, and the establishment of OA policies, departments, and infrastructure at academic institutions and publishers across the UK and beyond. The wide-ranging policy implications of ‘Finch’ continue to be felt as time progresses, through 2014’s Higher Education Funding Council (HEFCE) for England policy, through research into the feasibility of OA monographs, and through deliberations in other jurisdictions over whether to follow the UK route to open access. HEFCE’s OA mandate in particular will prove incredibly influential for UK researchers – as it directly ties the assessment of a university’s funding to their success in ensuring their authors publish OA. The mainstream media attention paid to ‘Finch’ also brought OA publishing into the public eye in a way never seen before (or since).

Headline image credit: Storm of Stars in the Trifid Nebula. NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

The post Five key moments in the Open Access movement in the last ten years appeared first on OUPblog.

        

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I’m happy to report that my University has passed a Senate resolution (pdf) requiring all faculty members to deposit peer-reviewed journal articles in the University’s repository - Spectrum. Perhaps a little shameless promotion here, but the University Librarian and the Spectrum repository library committee really championned the cause of Open Access to Faculty in the last 2 years, and in the process, increased the visibility and importance of the library at Concordia. Small step for our library, big step for librarianship.

Another great article by Nate Anderson over at ars technica. He writes about an initiative by Cleveland’s Case Western Reserve University to bridge the digital divide. The University is rolling out 1Gbps fibre to homes around campus. That area of Cleveland is among the poorest neighborhoods, with apparently 72% of homes without Internet. According to Case University, “[o]n a national scale, neighbors of the University have as much Internet access as Panamanians or Vietnamese.”

You can also read more about it on Case’s VP for Information Technology Services blog.

The initiative will be free to the community, as the University is using it as a research opportunity to see if large broadband can bring about new uses for the Internet, such as “public safety, more educational opportunities, and better medicine.” This initiative also fits nicely with the FCC’s new broadband plan in which Goal 4 states the following:

Every community should have affordable access to at least 1 Gbps broadband service to anchor institutions such as schools, hospitals and government buildings.

In June, the OECD had a Ministerial Conference on the Future of the Internet Economy. They published a report which is intended to help countries shape policies concerning the Internet economy. The themes that are addressed are the following:

• Making Internet access available to everyone and everywhere.
• Promoting Internet-based innovation, competition and user choice.
• Securing critical information infrastructures and responding to new threats.
• Ensuring the protection of personal information, respect for intellectual property rights, and more generally a trusted Internet-based environment which offers protection to individuals, especially minors and other vulnerable groups.
• Promoting secure and responsible use of the Internet; and,
• Creating an environment that encourages infrastructure investment, higher levels of connectivity and innovative services and applications.

There were some positive policy suggestions that were made, such as:

• Promote a culture of openness and sharing of research data among public research communities.
• Raise awareness of the potential costs and benefits of restrictions and limitations on access to and sharing of research data from public funding.

The OECD Civil Society Forum, comprised of the OECD Civil Society Reference Group and the The Trade Union Advisory Committee, produced a paper (and their own conference) intended to bring to the attention of the OECD Ministers assembled and the OECD member countries the concerns of those not represented at the Ministerial conference.

Their paper highlights the following:

The policy goals for the Future Internet Economy should be considered within the broader framework of protection of human rights, the promotion of democratic institutions, access to information, and the provision of affordable and non-discriminatory access to advanced communication networks and services.

Their recommendations cover

• Freedom of expression
• Protection of Privacy and Transparency
• Consumer Protection
• Promotion of Access to Knowledge
• Internet Governance
• Promotion of Open Standards and Net Neutrality
• Balanced Intellectual Property Policies
• Support for Pluralistic Media

Robarts Library has always been a popular conversational piece. Whether you love it or hate it, the news of a $75 million upgrade reported in the Toronto Star will no doubt add interest to what is an already popular topic. The provincial government is providing a $15 million grant up front.

In addition to being known as ‘the dungeon’, looking like a turkey and its brutalist architecture, Robarts is a closed stacks system. When it opened in 1972, Robarts was initially planned to be closed to undergraduate students as well. Student protested successfully with petitions and a sit in to which 500 students showed up.

While there are plans to replace the concrete covering the stacks with windows that will let some light in, there’s no mention of changing the system from the closed stacks system to one with increased browsing access for the public.

Is there still an argument for closed stacks in academic libraries? To be fair, access is being improved through UTLibrary’s embracing of open access. Copyright friendly books are in the process of being digitized through UTL’s partnership with the Open Content Alliance. The public can also browse reference books and current journals. For access to current materials, the public can request item retrieval, but to browse the stacks or borrow current materials the minimum cost is $60 for three months.

-PC-

In a positive (perhaps pivotal) development report for Open Access, Harvard University is the first academic institution in the US requiring its scholars to make their research available in the institution’s open access repository. While it includes an opt-out provision, this is no doubt a bold and progressive move by Harvard University in support of access to knowledge.

Below are today’s blog posts, both before and after the vote:

Open Access News
Michael Geist’s blog
Joho the blog
ACRLog

-PC-

Thanks to a colleague who sent me this post from TechCrunch “Google To Become Open Source Science Repository“:

Google is said to be preparing to launch a massive repository of science data at research.google.com. The project, known internally as “Palimpsest” will become a home for terabytes of open-source scientific datasets (…). [T]he storage will be free to all scientists, access to the data will be free for all (…). Two planned datasets are 120 terabytes of data from the Hubble Space Telescope and images from the Archimedes Palimpsest.

Some of the comments on this post are interesting, including some that question just how much information Google knows and owns. How much is too much? In the field of publicly funded research, shouldn’t libraries and government be providing these types of data repositories to make sure that they stay free of advertisements or other private interests?

- DD

Google will soon be releasing their own take on a Wikipedia-style of information resource - Google Knols (screenshot).

Some of the significant differences will be: named authors (who can choose to receive a portion of ad revenue for the “knol” pages they write) instead of Wikipedia’s anonymous author model. The site will allow multiple “knols” on a single topic (each will be written by a single author) with the community voting for the best one and suggesting changes in a separate area instead of the collaborative style of composing articles used on Wikipedia.

(via MetaFilter)

On a completely unrelated note, this will be the last Friday Fun Link I post on LibrarianActivist. After some recent discussions with the other two librarians I took on this project with about the future of the site, it was felt that we need to re-focus on the serious side of activism. We also discussed some other potential changes and improvements to the site. Hopefully more details about these items will be forthcoming in the weeks and months to come.

I am happy to remain involved with LA as a contributor but for anyone who’s enjoyed this recurring feature, I will continue to post the Friday Fun Links on my personal blog.

- JH

Librarian Chick provides an exhaustive list of online resources for students and librarians in the academic environment - from audio books to test taking and everything in between.

She also has a Learning Center that lets you search for free educational information, sites, games and software online.

Finally, to complete the trifecta of excellent resources, she also offers a search for free online audio books, e-books and textbooks. The search provides results from literally dozens of the biggest and most complete libraries that host free resources.

(via MetaFilter)

- JH

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart has put up over 13 000 segments going back to 1999. That’s pretty cool…or at least it would be if I could get any of the videos in the archives to load.

Maybe the site’s just being hammered with traffic because it’s so new. But it almost makes you wish some of these media giant properties would skip the proprietary site designs and media players and just put it all up on YouTube instead.

(via MetaFilter)

- JH

Why would the copyright database in the US be copyrighted (and for sale for big bucks) if it contains public records? Some librarians didn’t agree with the “Library of Commerce’s” stance on the issue and took things into their own hands.

(via Boing Boing)

- JH

I did an earlier post about the guy who designed a program to link IP addresses to Wikipedia edits. This has led to all kinds of discoveries of spin, manipulation and outright lies being planted by individuals and organizations who want to harm others or clean up their own image.

Now a blogger has compiled a list of the seven most scandalous edits that have been discovered…so far.

- JH

Wikipedia allows anonymous edits but it does track the IP of anyone who makes the edit. So a Cal-Tech computer grad student, inspired by news last year that Congress members’ offices had been editing their own entries, and curious whether other organizations were doing anything similar, developed a program to make it much easier to see the affiliation of anyone who made edits to any Wikipedia page.

This has led to numerous revelations about corporations like Fox News, organizations like the CIA and individuals such as staffers for a current US Presidential candidate abusing the intent of Wikipedia

(via MetaFilter which has lots of other links I didn’t include in this post)

- JH

Access Copyright has partnered with Creative Commons and WikiMedia (the people behind Wikipedia) to create a ground-breaking public domain registry that they hope becomes a model for the rest of the world.

Here’s an announcement they recently sent out:

Name the Public Domain Registry!

A product is only as good as the name you give it.

As reported in our most recent newsletter (July 26, 2007), Access Copyright has been working with Creative Commons and the Wikimedia Foundation on a Canadian Public Domain Registry. The registry will be an online, globally searchable database of Canadian works in the public domain and it will allow users to search and edit records, similar to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. For more information on the registry, please click here.

While the new registry will be both comprehensive and accessible, it also requires an easily identifiable name, which is where you come in. The public domain project needs your creative input. And who better to ask than our affiliates - Canada’s greatest creative resource!

Our hope at Access Copyright is that the new online registry will be a model for similar systems from other parts of the globe. As such, the name should brief, catchy, and one which could work for other countries wishing to create a registry of its own public domain works. Other than that, the only limits are your imagination and originality.

This is your chance to be an integral part of this ground-breaking project. Please send any and all suggestions, whether a list of one or 100, via email to the Communications Department at [email protected]. We will pare down the list and keep you posted on what the winning name is.

We appreciate your feedback as we move forward with this exciting project.

- JH

The author of the popular Freakonomics book looks at the question, “If public libraries didn’t exist, could you start one today?”

“But here’s the point I’m (finally) getting to: if there was no such thing today as the public library and someone like Bill Gates proposed to establish them in cities and towns across the U.S. (much like Andrew Carnegie once did), what would happen?

I am guessing there would be a huge pushback from book publishers. Given the current state of debate about intellectual property, can you imagine modern publishers being willing to sell one copy of a book and then have the owner let an unlimited number of strangers borrow it? I don’t think so.”

He doesn’t bring it up but I wonder if an analogy could be made to bit torrent sites today? One person buys a legitimate copy and then others are able to obtain a free copy. The only difference is that instead of dozens of uses as for popular library items, bit torrent allows thousands of copies to be downloaded. The other big difference is that bit torrent tends to focus on movies, music and TV shows that don’t have the history of “free” borrowing like books in a library do. And of course, you don’t have to “return” a digital copy.

It’s not a perfect analogy but the similarities are there.

(via Reddit)

Oh, and in a semi-related story, a PhD candidate in economics contends that the optimal length of copyright in today’s digital age is…fourteen years. (via Boing Boing)

- JH

Anyone familiar with UofT’s flagship humanities and social sciences Robart’s library knows that it’s the target of a lot of well earned potshots. Here are a few of its better known claims to fame:

is it sinking?
‘Brutalist‘ architecture
it’s a peacock … !?

The ‘prison’ analogy is another fave, what with the books cloistered into a closed stack system far, far away from the scant selection of windows.

Since 2005 however, quietly in a room in the library at St. Michael’s college, UofT’s partnership with the Open Content Alliance has been digitizing public domain works (books and more) for the Internet Archive. Blackfly magazine published an article (which inspired the heading for this post) in which Carole Moore, head librarian at the St. George campus spoke to UofT’s foray into digitizing public domain works in its collection to make them more accessible and the library more democratic. Articles also appeared at the outset of the project in the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal.

Owen Jarus at Blackfly spoke to how digitization can democratize and transform information through improved access, where WP and WSJ spoke to the business angle, mainly comparing the OCA’s initiative to the Google Books/copyright lawsuit situation. The subtext of course is ‘will we still need libraries’ if all the materials are online?

This week, I finished an intensive course on “Rethinking the Library” taught by guest instructor, Dr. Joseph Janes of the University of Washington’s iSchool. It gave a handful of lucky students the opportunity to have a forum to dialogue on where ‘the library’ is/can/should/isn’t going, and engage with the tough question of what was well coined by the University of Toronto Mississauga’s chief librarian, Mary Ann Mavrinac, as defining our ‘core’. While this question is an ongoing subtext to librarianship, having a sit down in a course environment was a great move. So kudos to the Faculty of Information studies at UofT for offering a full course on this important subject.

The content for me is still percolating … more discussion on this later. In the meantime, if you have burning thoughts on the matter, please chime in!

-PC-

Here’s a quick redirect to a Library Juice post with a couple of nice resources.

First is this guide for collecting from diverse sources (or: outsourcing, how not to).
Fostering Media Diversity in Libraries: Strategies and Actions.

Second there’s a link to a note on the ALA’s opposition to media concentration in the US since June 2003.

Relevant Canadian stuff from libraryland (found by searching the CLA website) is largely falling under the information literacy umbrella:

School Libraries in Canada link.
Information Literacy in Canada blog post.

-PC-

Kudos to the Canadian Library Association and its Open Access Task Force for adopting an Open Access policy for CLA publications.

Here are main recommendatins of the report:

CLA will provide for full and immediate open access for all CLA publications, with the exception of Feliciter and monographs The embargo period for Feliciter is one issue, and the embargo policy itself will be reviewed after one year. Monographs will be considered for open access publishing on a case-by-case basis.

CLA actively encourages its members to self-archive in institutional and/or disciplinary repositories and will investigate a partnership with E-LIS, the Open Archive for Library and Information Studies.

CLA will generally provide for the author’s retention of copyright by employing Creative Commons licensing or publisher-author agreements that promote open access.

CLA will continue its long-standing policy of accessibility to virtually all CLA information except for narrowly defined confidential matters (e.g. certain personnel or legal matters).

For the full report click here.

via the CLA digest

-PC-

In keeping with the topic of the day, here’s a report on internet filtering from the National Coalition Against Censorship which is admittedly, a bit dated, having been produced in 2001. But it gives an excellent overview of many of the issues and problems being discussed in the wake of the LPL debate. And an update of the report in 2006 shows that the same concerns with internet filtering software remain to this day.

Here are some examples of what happens when you filter:

• CYBERsitter blocked a news item on the Amnesty International site after detecting the phrase “least 21.” The offending sentence described “at least 21” people killed or wounded in Indonesia.
• SurfWatch blocked the University of Kansas’s Archie R. Dykes Medical library upon detecting the word “dykes.”
• X-Stop blocked the “Let’s Have an Affair” catering company and searches for Bastard Out of Carolina and “The Owl and the Pussy Cat.”
• WebSense blocked a Texas cleanup project under the category of “sex,” and The Shoah Proj-ect, a Holocaust remembrance page, under the category of “racism/hate.”
• Cyber Patrol blocked a Knights of Columbus site and a site for aspiring dentists as “adult/sexually explicit.”
• BESS and SurfControl blocked curriculum materials on Populism because they also contained information about National Socialism. Symantec blocked the National Rifle Association and other pro-gun sites while allowing sites associated with gun control organizations.
• BESS blocked a site on fly fishing, a guide to allergies, and a site opposing the death penalty as “pornography.” It also blocked all Google and AltaVista image searches under its category of “pornography.”

- JH

Not that I want to interrupt the letter you’re writing to the LPL board of directors, but as luck would have it, this would be the week that Canadian representatives decided to make life difficult at the World Intellectual Property Organization Development Agenda meetings in Geneva.

Fortunately, Michael Geist reports a positive update today on his blog.

Update: Reports this morning indicate progress with inclusion of the access to knowledge language. A welcome development, though Canada should be leading on these issues, not aligning itself against the developing world.

Apparently the Harper government needs a wake up call. If the Access to Knowledge issue is new to you, have a look at the Wikipedia community’s summary of A2K/Access to Knowledge. It also includes a long list of organizations active in the A2K movement.

The CIPO mission statement is also worth a look. I’m not seeing anything about Canada’s role internationally.

Keep up to date on IP news through IP Watch and Sarah Bannerman

via the CLA discussion list a la Heather Morrison

-PC-