International Outlook
Hong Kong Bookstore Disappearances Shock Publishing Industry
“In a frenetic commercial district of Hong Kong, sandwiched between shops selling vitamins and clothing to tourists, the Causeway Bay Bookstore touts itself as the authority on Chinese politics.”
“The tiny shop specialises in selling gossipy paperbacks that are highly critical of China’s leadership. They are particularly popular with mainland Chinese visitors who cannot buy the banned books at home.”
“But two weeks ago, four men who work for the bookstore and its affiliated publishing house went missing. Their colleagues believe they have been detained by Chinese officials because of their work.”
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-34782266
———————————-
Libraries and Librarians
King County Library System Book-Sorting Crew Reclaims ‘National’ Title
“PRESTON — In his office at the King County Library System distribution center, in front of a crowd of cameramen and reporters, Tony Miranda called up his counterpart in New York to compare results in Tuesday’s bicoastal book-sorting smackdown.”
“The New Yorkers were 201 books short.”
“So while the Sounders are out, and the Seahawks are struggling, it appears books will be one domain in which the Northwest reigns supreme (at least until next year)”.
Learn Guitar, Final Cut Pro, Project Management Online Courses Offered Free Through the Boston Public Library
“Today, the Boston Public Library announced that all BPL card holders now have access to more than 300 free online learning classes. The web-based, instructor-led courses from Gale Courses, are six-week classes for personal and professional development, some with accreditation, and covering topics ranging from project management to guitar from grant writing to programs like Excel and cutting-edge video editing software Final Cut Pro X.”
———————————-
Privacy Issues
Cell Phone Location Tracking Laws By State
“Location records can reveal an enormous of information about a person, especially with the proliferation of smartphones that constantly track our whereabouts. Because privacy laws haven’t kept up with advances in technology, police have long claimed the authority to access this information from cell phone companies without warrants.”
“That’s changing. While Congress and the Supreme Court haven’t yet weighed in on whether a warrant should be required for location information, little by little, state legislatures and lower courts are expanding privacy protections for more and more Americans.”
https://www.aclu.org/map/cell-phone-location-tracking-laws-state
Building Trust and Protecting Privacy: Progress on the President’s Precision Medicine Initiative
“Today, the White House is releasing the Privacy and Trust Principles for the President’s Precision Medicine Initiative (PMI). These principles are a foundation for protecting participant privacy and building trust in activities within PMI.”
“PMI is a bold new research effort to transform how we characterize health and treat disease. PMI will pioneer a new model of patient-powered research that promises to accelerate biomedical discoveries and provide clinicians with new tools, knowledge, and therapies to select which treatments will work best for which patients. The initiative includes development of a new voluntary research cohort by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), a novel regulatory approach to genomic technologies by the Food and Drug Administration, and new cancer clinical trials by the National Cancer Institute at NIH. In addition, PMI includes aligned efforts by the Federal government and private sector collaborators to pioneer a new approach for health research and healthcare delivery that prioritizes patient empowerment through access to information and policies that enable safe, effective, and innovative technologies to be tested and made available to the public.”
———————————-
Open Access
Find Open Access Dissertations and Theses
“PQDT Open provides the full text of open access dissertations and theses free of charge. You can quickly and easily locate dissertations and theses relevant to your discipline, and view the complete text in PDF format.”
http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/search.html
What Open-Access Publishing Actually Costs
“In academe, ideas cost money. But how much?”
“Advocates for open-access journals say that academic research should be free for everyone to read. But even those proponents acknowledge that publishing costs money — the disagreement is over the amount.”
“The issue was highlighted last month, when all six editors and all 31 editorial-board members resigned from Lingua, a prominent linguistics journal, after a disagreement with the journal’s publisher, Elsevier, over how much libraries and authors should pay.”
http://chronicle.com/article/What-Open-Access-Publishing/234108
———————————-
Please feel free to pass along in part or in its entirety.
The Intersect Alert is a newsletter of the Government Relations Committee, San Francisco Bay Region Chapter, Special Libraries Association.