Jaclyn_McKewan

In most cases, unless a medical professional or researcher works for an organization that can afford subscriptions to medical journals, much research remains beyond their reach. There are thousands of different journals, and access to just the most well-regarded can run thousands of dollars a year.

Now, with Washington rushing to transform health care, a debate often limited to hospital wards, medical schools and Internet forums is pushing to the fore. It’s a debate deeply rooted in beliefs about access to information — medical research. Increasingly, a generational gap is emerging.
[Story @ AB News]

The blog for Mental Floss magazine reports that Google has posted a version of itself as it appeared in January 2001 (the earliest available index). They say, “Searches for today’s staple websites like Flickr, Twitter, and Digg turn up lots of interesting results, but of course the services themselves didn’t exist yet…Go search for yourself and see how things have changed in seven years. Note that the index will only be available for one month, so get it while it’s, uh, hot and very stale?”

A new company recently emerged on the publishing scene, offering writers the chance to buy and sell book endorsements. The New York Times discusses the “business” of book-blurbing.

The same problems that plagued 1.0 resources like phone books and encyclopedias still plague even the best of their 2.0 successors. These legacy issues mainly regard reliability as it pertains to accuracy. See the full post at the Wikinomics blog.

Folio reports that Time, Inc. will be offering a new service called “Maghound.” It allows consumers to choose titles from a variety of publishers for a mix-and-match “subscriptions” where they pay one monthly fee and have the ability to switch titles at any time. The Freakonomics Blog has some interesting commentary on this.

The Wikinomics blog has a post about potential privacy concerns that result from using Facebook applications:

“…many people do not realize that by adding these applications, they’re giving the applications (and therefore the application’s developer(s)) access to their personal information — irrespective of any privacy settings that a user may choose.”

An article in Scientific American states, “A small but growing number of researchers (and not just the younger ones) have begun to carry out their work via the wide-open tools of Web 2.0.” Many scientists are posting raw results online, with tools such as blogs and wikis.

“Search is dead,” begins this article from Popular Mechanics, quoting an unnamed venture capitalist. His thinking goes, “with the rise of social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Second Life, LinkedIn and even Google’s own Orkut, the next generation of Web users may find what they want by using their social network rather than a search algorithm.”

The British Library and the Joint Information Systems Committee have released a report showing that “kids born since 1993 aren’t quite the Internet super-sleuths they’re sometimes made out to be.” Story at Ars Technica.

Critical Mass, a blog for the National Book Critics Circle, reports on the results of a recent NBCC survey on the ethics of book reviewing. A similar survey was done in 1987, and both are linked to in the article. A few highlights:

“68.5 percent of book reviewers think anyone mentioned in a book’s acknowledgements should be barred from reviewing it.

64.9 percent think anyone who has written an unpaid blurb for a book should also be banned from writing a fuller review.

60.5 percent think it’s okay for a newspaper book section or magazine to ignore self-published books that authors submit to them, e.g., iUniverse type books.”