A major publisher of STM, Reed Elsevier, is now offering limited open access to set of medical journals. From OA Librarian blog by Dean Giustini, “Elsevier has made a bold move into offering free journal content via a web portal in oncology called Oncology the site provides free access to current journals from Elsevier’s expensive journal titles, paying for it using ads. While Web adverts are nothing new, this combination of open access and ads is new.

Oncology asks health workers (including librarians) to register and, in exchange, provides immediate access to current cancer-related content from Reed Elsevier’s gold standards such as The Lancet and Surgical Oncology. Elsevier wants to sign up 150,000 professional users in the first year to attract advertising from pharmaceutical companies. Is this a new publishing model?”

As far as I can tell, the access is limited to selected articles and just how long access will be available is not clear either. Don’t give up you journal subscriptions just yet. Something to consider…

From their web site, once you have registered, you get:

• Access to current articles from over 100 Elsevier cancer-related journals, including The Lancet Oncology, The Breast, Lung Cancer, The American Journal of Medicine, Cancer Letters, etc.
• Recent journal scans from the leading 25 cancer-related journals ( JCO, JNCI, CA:A Cancer Journal for Clinicians, Blood, JAMA, The New England Journal of Medicine )
• 27 Cancer-type spotlights (ability to filter and view content in one click of the homepage by cancer/tumor type, eg, breast, lung, prostate, leukemia, etc).
• Select sections of textbook content from Abeloff’s Clinical Oncology (3rd edition, 2004)
• Chemotherapy regimens from The Elsevier Guide to Oncology Drugs & Regimens (2006)
• News and regulatory updates from FDC Reports’ “The Pink Sheet Daily” and Elsevier Global Medical News
• Professional drug monograph and interactions database powered by Gold Standard
• Integrated Medline search
• Weekly InfoBLAST e-newsletter
• Video network of interviews with key opinion leaders
• Downloadable patient handouts
• Forums, commentary, blogs, podcasts, surveys

New Release:
SANTA CRUZ, CA–To think that world domination could have begun in the cheeks. That’s one interpretation of a discovery, published online September 9 in Nature Genetics, which indicates that humans carry extra copies of the salivary amylase gene.

Humans have many more copies of this gene than any of their ape relatives, the study found, and they use the copies to flood their mouths with amylase, an enzyme that digests starch. The finding bolsters the idea that starch was a crucial addition to the diet of early humans, and that natural selection favored individuals who could make more starch-digesting protein.

“Extra gene copies are an easy way for evolution to ramp up expression of a protein,” said Nathaniel Dominy, assistant professor of anthropology at University of California, Santa Cruz, and one of the paper’s authors. “Why wait for chance mutations to improve gene function? Natural selection can favor duplicate copies of a gene that already works well, and enzyme production will increase.”

To read more about the paper go to: Nature News
http://www.nature.com/news/index.html

The paper can be found at: http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ng2123.htmlaccess limited by subscription.

All Homo Sapiens!
Next time you’re in Hagerty Library stop by the display cases near the entrance to view a few items illustrating Linaeus’ classification scheme for Earthly life. Many of the items represent species that Linnaeus first classified. Look for the Linn on the captions.

Check out some of the links below for more information about this awesome guy!
Uppsala University web site:
http://www.uu.se/linne2007/
Biography from Berkeley–Univ of California Museum of Paleontology
http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/linnaeus.html
The Linnean Society of London
http://linnean.org/
Official Swedish Web Site
http://www.linnaeus2007.se/
Uppsala University web site offering Linnaeus original work
http://www.linnaeus.uu.se/online/index-en.html