As this year’s AACR meeting came to a close, Pieter Droppert, of the Biotech Strategy Blog, wrote about the relative lack of involvement by cancer scientists on twitter during the meeting compared to other conferences. He encouraged researchers to join clinicians and patient advocates who have embraced social media, and pointed out to readers that one of the great opportunities offered by social media in this tough funding climate is the opportunity to communicate the value of your work. You can see this post and link to many other insights from the meeting here.

Mendeley has been purchased by Elsevier and there has been a lot of commentary on social media about what that may mean for the openness Mendeley has been known for. It will be very interesting to see what happens at Mendeley and to the applications running with information from Mendeley’s API, but for the time being here are just a smattering of links to items on this story…

• The Scholarly Kitchen says how you look at the deal is A Matter of Perspective… .
• Former Mendeley research and development head, Jason Hoyt, blogged about the deal, how Elsevier influenced Mendeley’s work while he was there, and why he left.
• William Gunn, Mendeley’s Head of Academic Outreach, offered this sensible response on Quora to the question Mendeley: Is Mendeley’s open character at risk after its acquisition by Elsevier?

Complicated questions of consent, openness, ownership and bioethics continue to unfold in relation to the HeLa cell line. NPR’s shots blog had this coverage about the recent publication (and subsequent withdrawal) of the genome. Jonathan Eisen has discussed the incident (with some strong language) and collected social media discussion of it on his blog. An item from the MIT Technology Review has a very different take. Can anyone own DNA? What are individuals’ rights to privacy when it comes to their DNA? Since we are dealing with heritable information, where do privacy rights end (children, grandchildren)? A post from Michelle Huckaby Lewis at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics discusses the new privacy concerns surrounding genetics research and the need to build public trust in this emerging area.

The Pinakes has a roundup of posts about the board of the Journal of Library Administration (JLA) stepping down to protest the publisher’s policies, which the board felt were too restrictive and discouraging to authors considering publication in the journal. Scott Walker at ACRLog says that the former board of JLA Lights the Way.

Curious about the big Health Systems Meeting? What has the White House announced about Open Access? What is this “Nightmare Bacteria” in the news? All in this dose of blog buzz…

• On the HealthBlawg, David Harlow writes about the announcement at HIMSS of an RFI on increasing  interoperability of electronic health records, announced by Farzad Mostashari, the National Coordinator for Health IT. Interested parties are encouraged to comment by April 21.

• Harlow also wrote about the unveiling of the CommonWell Health Alliance at the conference. For another take, an opinion piece from the HealthCare Blog, which sees the unveiling of CommonWell as a missed opportunity, has generated an active discussion.

• In encouraging Open Access news, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy released a policy memo on February 22 in support of enhanced public access to federally funded research. The White House Blog has links to the full text memo and Chief Science Advisor Dr. John Holdren’s response to the We The People petition. Open Access advocate Peter Suber wrote this post explaining the difference between the White House announcement and the proposed FASTR legislation.

• National Geographic’s Phenomena blog has a great post from journalist Carl Zimmer explaining recent coverage of “Nightmare Bacteria”.