Expect Resistance & Library Autonomous Zone

DOJ Says It Has Never Used Key PATRIOT Provision, September 23, 2003. The PATRIOT Act and librarians’ response to it are in the news a lot this week. U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft has been excoriating librarians; Former Attorney General Edwin Meese has weighed in as well. Tirades from conservatives have begun appearing on op-ed pages. And now,
The Center For Democracy & Technology notes that
the Department of Justice, after defending the appropriateness of the Act and the rich resource that library records will give to fighting terrorism, has announced “that it had never once used a contentious provision of the USA PATRIOT Act authorizing the FBI to obtain access to business records containing personal information… What gives?”

Secrecy News 09/25/03. This issue of Secrecy News from the Federation of American Scientists, has a brief article on the State Department publication Foreign Relations of the United States” (FRUS) and the “Historical Advisory Committee.” Steven Aftergood writes,
“… Johnson volumes on the Congo and Japan have not yet received clearance for publication. Why not? They don’t say.” Also, “the CIA is becoming more assertive in imposing new restrictions on the FRUS publication process.”

See the June 2003 meeting minutes here:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/advisory/state/hac0603.html

Nature Publishing Group - Citation Results
by Declan Butler,
Nature 425, 334
(25 September 2003); doi:10.1038/425334a

A spat between the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) and one of the leaders of a movement for open access to the scientific literature has resulted in the journal rejecting a paper on kidney transplants at the last minute Ñ and immediately reaccepting it without the names of four of the original authors.

Information Quality, Liability, and Corrections
By Stephen Adams
Online, Vol. 27 No. 5 Ñ Sep/Oct 2003.

Public Record Office | UK Central Government Web Archive
“This new initiative will collect and preserve 50 government websites,
including the Hutton Inquiry, 10 Downing Street and the Northern Ireland
Office. Sites are being collected as weekly or 6-monthly snapshots, using a
specially-modified version of the Internet Archive’s web crawler. The
complete archive is being made available on the web and in the National
Archives’ public search rooms at Kew. A copy of each snapshot is also being
accessioned for long-term preservation by our Digital Preservation
Department.”

Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things had a post yesterday about Neil Stephenson starting a Wiki to support his new novel, Quicksilver. What a great idea for a use for this collaborative tool. For those of you going, “huh, what’s a wiki?!” see wikipedia.

Linus Torvalds and Alan Cox have written an Open Letter to the European Parliament. They ask for strict limitations to software patents in their letter to the members of the European Parliament. The vote on the Directive will be on Wednesday and it is expected to be a very close one.

Software patents are also the utmost threat to the development of Linux and other free software products, as we are forced to see every day while we work with the Linux development. We want to be able to provide the world with free high class, high quality, highly innovative software products that really empower the users and offer the best and only real chance to narrow the digital divide. Please do not make this harder to us that it already is!

Uncoupling Campus and Company
“A CONVERSATION WITH: SHELDON KRIMSKY”
Uncoupling Campus and Company,
by Melody Petersen
New York Times,
September 23, 2003, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final, Section F; Page 2; Column 2; Science Desk.
In this interview with the author of Science in the Private Interest, subjects covered include ties between companies and academic scientists, privatization of research, private control of research data, intellectual property offices in universities, and more. Krimsky compares the climate around the Salk vaccine with today’s research climate:

When Jonas Salk was questioned about patenting the vaccine, he replied, “Could you patent the sun?” For him, he was doing something in the public interest. But attitudes changed in 1980. The Supreme Court ruled that patents could be issued on living things sui generis, independent of a product or process of development. That meant that you could get a patent for a discovery of a virus or by altering a plant or by finding a gene and isolating it. Then a gold rush mentality began.

Universities, seeking new sources of revenue, began turning themselves into engines for economic development. They began establishing intellectual property offices and provided incentives and rewards for faculty who patented their discoveries. In 1965, universities were awarded 95 patents. In 2000, universities were awarded 3,200.

Wired News: E-Voting Audit Ready for Public. This will be interesting to see in light of the serious security flaws (PDF) that researchers at Johns Hopkins University and Rice University discovered.

ongoing - Moveable Text
This story by Tim Bray uses a feature of the RSS newsreading software NetNewsWire that will show you the differences in successive revisions of a story posted with RSS. Bray has a couple of examples of stories as they changed
in online postings from the New York Times. The examples are facinating. Bray concludes that “itÕs going to be toughÑmaybe impossibleÑto keep your edits to yourself.” The flip side of that question, of course, is, “will anyone preserve the different versions?” Certainly not the producers! Yet another job for libraries.