LISNews: Librarian News

The World Health Organization Says Forty-three new countries were added to the list of eligible participants in the Health InterNetwork Access to Research Initiative (HINARI) this week, giving them online access to 2,200 high-quality medical journals at drastically reduced prices.

The 43 countries, which all have gross national products per capita of between $1,000-$3,000, join the 69 low-income countries (GNP/capita below $1,000) whose hospitals, medical schools and research institutions already access the package for free.

Jen Young sent over This Chronicle of Higher Education story on Elsevier Science quietly withdrawing dozens of journal articles from ScienceDirect since at least January 2000, often providing no details as to its reasons.
Elsevier says it has expunged no more than 30 journal articles from ScienceDirect. That total represents only a fraction of the millions of articles in Elsevier\'s database.

Slashdot and Lee Hadden pointed the way to This NYTimes Story on Public Library of Science, an outgrowth of several years of friction between scientists and the journals over who should control access to scientific literature in the electronic age. Supporters of the Public Library of Science say the point is not how much money the journals make, but their monopoly control over literature that should belong to the public.

Be sure to read the Slashdot thread as well.

\"We would be perfectly happy for them to have huge profit margins providing that in exchange for all this money we\'re giving them we got to own the literature and the literature did not belong to them,\"

Steve Fesenmaier passed along This One from American Journalism Review on West Virginia’s rural weeklies. They call them \"invaluable voices,\" as they are often the only source of local news.
They say when you\'re the editor and co-owner of an aggressive weekly in a struggling West Virginia county, population 10,291, it\'s tough to find a story where interests don\'t collide. Almost everything you write involves someone you know.