The New York Times Bits blog reports on changes at internet forum reddit with, Reddit Introduces Anti-Harrassment Policy. Yesterday blog.reddit posted, Promote ideas, protect people explaining updates to their privacy policy and discussing the evolution of the site. reddit found that the absolute openness and anonymity of their format sometimes led to harassment and even to concerns regarding personal safety, thereby limiting some users from expressing their views and discouraging them from sharing the site with others. As this new policy and the Times coverage indicate, reddit has been evolving in recent years and clearly hopes to be known as a place for ideas rather than as a seedy message board. The challenges of a safe space where ideas can be freely explored and debated reminded me of discussions in my Librarianship 101 class. I think reddit’s decision could serve as a great way to spark dialog on the difficulties that come along with the ideals of our profession in many contexts. If you agree and have the opportunity to try this with a group of students, let me know how it goes!

Andre Picard of Canada’s The Globe and Mail wrote this thoughtful discussion of “right to try” laws which mentions Johnson & Johnson’s announcement last week of an ethics panel to deal with such cases. Hat tip to @tbtam for tweeting the Picard Article.

This week the Federal Government said that insurance companies cannot charge for anesthesia in screening colonoscopies (even if polyps are found and removed). More on this from Michelle Andrews of Kaiser Health News here.

A new IOM report, an excellent explainer piece, and some exciting social media discussions about science in this edition of Blog Buzz!

This week the Institute of Medicine (IOM) released a new report, Vital Signs: Core Metrics for Health and Health Care Progress.The report propose 15 standardized measures and recommendations for their use in order to clarify the many measurements associate with health care in the US. The IOM hopes to highlight which measurements the committee feels are the most important for various stakeholders in healthcare to watch. The full report, briefs, info graphics, and a video of the announcement are all available through the link above.

A week can feel like a long time in our modern information landscape, but you may remember the recent hubbub over a study using CRISPR to edit human embryos published by Chinese researchers very shortly after early developers of the method called for the science community to hold off on using CRISPR on human embryos. Whether you missed the story, were curious or even alarmed by it, Carl Zimmer, does a great job explaining it all on The Loom with, Editing Human Embryos so this Happened. I cannot recommend this post enough.

PLoS has been teaming up with reddit to produce a series of science themed AMAs (Ask Me Anything); a cool use of social media to allow experts to communicate with the public about science. Check out last week’s discussion with Dr. Andy Beck of Harvard on the future of cancer treatment, here, or have a peek at this week’s discussion of 3D printing your own Open Source labware, here.

Those are the two big social science and humanities news items in this installment of Blog Buzz.

Milestones:HathiTrust Reaches 5 Million Open Volumes was posted this past Saturday by Gary Price over at InfoDocket. Price links several times to a gloriously chart-and-stat-packed post from Mike Furlough, Executive Director of the HathiTrust entitled Getting to Five Million:HathiTrusts Collection of open books, as well as an earlier post from the Scholarly Kitchen on the topic. Price also points out that the HathiTrust, whose 5 millionth open book (courtesy of Ohio State University) is a treatise by King George III’s dentist, may not be the only online resource with the potential to give us insight into the monarch’s teeth — not for long anyway, as plans were recently announced by the Royal Archive to digitize 350,000 pages of source material from the Georgian period (the bulk of which is from George III’s Reign.*)

Furlough’s post is well is worth the read for those interested in the long term preservation and accessibility of library collections. In addition to the graphs and data (with links to even more data) he provides important explanations (the difference between Public Domain and Open Works) and insights on how closed copyrighted works in HathiTrust will still be of use to researchers.

The second big announcement (via Kaitlin Thaney of Mozilla Open Science) is that in Harvard’s Dataverse (from the Institute of Quantitative Social Science), “a software application that enables institutions to host research data repositories” (more about the project here), has changed the default waiver for datasets added to the system to CCo or public domain, and will give researchers the option to change the waiver for given datasets if necessary. The announcement on their blog is here.

*Attempt to remain calm, historians of the American Revolution and Georgian Period, this could take a little while.

It is so exciting to think about all work people will be able to do with this information for both HathiTrust and Dataverse!