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TOP STORIES FOR FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 04, 2005 NIH Calls for Online Research Penn Turns Away RIAA UC Considering RFID for Cadavers NIH CALLS FOR ONLINE RESEARCH The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) has expressed its support for an open-access model of publishing, at least for research that it funds. The agency called on scientists who receive grants from the NIH to submit their research to PubMed Central, an online database operated by the National Library of Medicine, after such research is published in medical or scientific journals. Elias Zerhouni, director of the NIH, said, "Scientists have a right to see the results of their work disseminated as quickly and broadly as possible, and NIH is committed to helping our scientists exercise this right." Zerhouni said for-profit journals should not be significantly affected by the policy because they only publish a small number of papers on NIH-funded research. Still, he said researchers could request a delay of up to one year after publication before research is made publicly available. According to NIH estimates, in 2003, 60,000 published papers dealt with research the agency funded. In 2004, the NIH distributed $19.3 billion to 212,000 researchers around the world. Reuters, 3 February 2005 http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?&storyID=7532589 PENN TURNS AWAY RIAA Officials at the University of Pennsylvania have declined to disclose the identities of two users of its campus network to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), saying it cannot accurately identify the individuals. In its efforts to enforce music copyrights, the RIAA must file "John Doe" lawsuits against Internet users suspected of illegally sharing files. Those individuals are typically identified by their IP addresses, but in this case, according to David R. Millar, the university's information security officer, circumstances including "multiple users and public-access computers ... prevent us from being able to identify users of an IP address." A similar situation arose in March 2004 when officials at the university were unable to identify five of six individuals sought by the RIAA. Millar said the university's actions should not be interpreted as a comment on the RIAA's legal action. "Our policy has always been to comply with lawful subpoenas," he said. Wendy Seltzer, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the institution is within its rights not to disclose identities to the RIAA, noting that ISPs are not required to keep logs of who their users are or what activities they engage in. Chronicle of Higher Education, 4 February 2005 (sub. req'd) http://chronicle.com/prm/daily/2005/02/2005020406n.htm UC CONSIDERING RFID FOR CADAVERS Following a series of allegations of fraud and criminal behavior in the handling of cadavers in medical schools, officials at the University of California (UC) are considering implanting radio frequency identification (RFID) tags in corpses and in individual body parts that are separated from corpses. The RFID tags, similar to those used at highway toll plazas, can be read by a device held near the tag. Last year, a court suspended the Willed Body program at UCLA after two employees were arrested for suspicion of selling body parts on the black market. In another incident, the director of the UC Irvine program was accused of illegally selling body parts, and several hundred bodies willed to the program were not accounted for. Michael Drake, UC vice president for health affairs, said action is necessary in the handling of cadavers to make the programs successful and "maintain the public trust." Arthur Caplan, a professor of bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, pointed out that despite the benefits such a program would provide, human oversight must remain part of the solution. "If you want to beat [the bad guys]," he said, "you need to have someone come in occasionally and say, 'I'm doing an audit.'" Wall Street Journal, 4 February 2005 (sub. req'd) http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB110754374614746322,00.html ***************************************************** EDUPAGE INFORMATION To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your settings, or access the Edupage archive, visit http://www.educause.edu/Edupage/639 Or, you can subscribe or unsubscribe by sending e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To SUBSCRIBE, in the body of the message type: SUBSCRIBE Edupage YourFirstName YourLastName To UNSUBSCRIBE, in the body of the message type: SIGNOFF Edupage If you have subscription problems, send e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] ***************************************************** OTHER EDUCAUSE RESOURCES The EDUCAUSE Resource Center is a repository for information concerning use and management of IT in higher education. 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