Business meeting on open access, emerging infectious diseases
This morning was exciting as the business meeting, normally not the pinnacle of the event, discussed a motion to stop MLA taking money from any publishers who don't support open access. The motion was referred to the Executive of the MLA Board, who wil discuss as a matter of urgency and report back in September. While the motion was perhaps naiive, it set me to thinking that we in the UK have not done enough to support open access, particularly with our own journal, Health Information & Libraries Journal.
The new President, Joannae Marshall took over and gave a fine speech, identifying what she thought important for the year ahead, and there seemed to be a lot of common ground between MLA and the way our own CILIP is going forward.
In the afternoon I went to the Emerging Infectious Diseases session, three presentations, one from some Australians on the tools they built on a hospital intranet to help doctors and other cope with the SARS outbreak, one from Vanderbilt University, Tennessee on information to help manage reemerging diseases, such as anthrax, botulism, plague, small pox and tularemia (I was reminded of my experiences at the RCVS during the foot and mouth disease outbreak during this presentation) and one form Yale on building a database of the animal sentinel literature, culled from a series of existing bibliographic databases.