Pew released their Health Online 2013 report on Tuesday, exploring the use of the internet for health information by Americans. Nikki Dettmar over at EagleDawg has written a response to the report from the medical librarian perspective and highlights the findings that “One in four people seeking health information online have hit a paywall” and “Respondents living in lower-income households were significantly more likely than their wealthier counterparts to say that they gave up at that point.” These are clearly areas of concern for medical librarians, and as Dettmar points out, there remains “much to be done to raise public awareness that librarians are there to help you access the information the internet is trying to charge you for… or locate an information resource that is an even better match for your question in the first place.” Amen!

Kent Anderson, in PubMed and F1000 Research — Unclear Standards Applied Unevenly, makes points about F1000 that which may be valid, but something in the underlying point about confusion between Medline and PubMed (and the roles of PubMed and PubMed Central) reminded me of a post he had back in October… Something’s Rotten in Bethesda… to which Michelle Kraft of the Krafty Librarian offered this response. Perhaps these issues are growing pains that are to be expected (and resolved over time) as the publishing landscape changes with the emergence of new open access models.

A new open access publishing project called Frontiers is offering a radically reconfigured peer review system and publishing platform for the life sciences. This new approach has reviewers and authors collaborate to improve and work toward published articles! Check out this interview with Frontier’s president on the Chronicle of Higher Education’s blog, ProfHacker, for more on this innovative approach.

With Dr. James D. Watson in the news last week following publication of a paper criticizing the war on cancer (this piece – including quotes from several MSKCC doctors – covers the hubbub), who better than the archivist at Cold Spring Harbor to remind us in this blog post (featuring collection materials) that generating this type of debate “is really old hat” for Dr. Watson.

Scientific dog tricks, a social media user rebellion, a huge pharma settlement and third party free twitter archiving…all coming your way in this week’s blog buzz!

Over at microbe.net Jonathan Eisen introduces us to Cliff, the beagle trained to smell Clostridium difficile in hospitals! There is also a fascinating (and adorable) video of Cliff at work.

There was quite a to-do this week following a Facebook-style change in Instagram’s user agreement which opponents argued allowed the company to sell user photos without paying or notifying them.  The uproar from angry users was followed by some speedy back pedaling by Instagram.  

 The NY Times reported that Amgen has agreed to pay $762 Million for marketing an anemia drug for uses not approved by the FDA.

For all you micro-bloggers out there interested in archiving your tweets, Twitter has announced that you can now download all of your tweets and retweets from the beginning.

Overscreening  for cancer and ebook reader privacy… just two of the stories making a buzz, but plenty to chew on!

Last Friday, Gary Schwitzer at HealthNewsReview.org gathered some of the very active online commentary related to a recent NEJM paper on mammograms and whether or not they are effective at saving lives. Concerns about the potential harm of overscreening keep coming up regarding breast (and prostate) cancers and make a big media splash each time. Schwitzer’s post, which was updated this week to include more pieces in the NY Times, highlights some of the voices and ideas in the discussion and is a great jumping off point for readers interested in diving in to this complex issue.

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