It’s been interesting to watch publishers open up their H1N1 articles and resources to the general public. (Disclaimer: I know that part is only interesting to me as a librarian. But the question remains: Is the future of publishing a ‘hybrid’ open-source model? Hmmm….)
Here’s a summary:
- Scientific American mainly sums up blog entries from the “60 Second Science” blog. But there’s also a detailed interview transcript with Dr. Chris Olsen, Director of the Olsen Laboratory, a veterinary medicine lab in Wisconsin where Influenza ‘A’ viruses are studied, and a link to the April 2009 cover story called, “How to Prevent the Next Pandemic” that describes the work of the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative.
- The New England Journal of Medicine is, of course, a fantastic authoritative source in medical research, and their H1N1 page contains many interesting articles, including “Managing and Reducing Uncertainty in an Emerging Influenza Pandemic”, which honestly asserts the fact that pandemic control must begin when the spread and fatality of the disease are unknown. Editorials and “Perspective” articles, with titles such as, “Digital Disease Detection – Harnessing the Web for Public Health Surveillance” flesh out (no pun intended) the hard-core science articles.
- The Lancet (a British medical journal) has also opened their pages:
“The Lancet’s H1N1 Resource Centre is the result of a collaborative effort by the editors of over 40 Elsevier-published journals and 11 learned societies who have agreed to make freely available on this site any relevant content. All papers have been selected by a Lancet editor, grouped by topic and fulltext pdfs made available to download free of charge.”
(If you haven’t seen an Elsevier price quote, you can’t appreciate the magnitude of this – Elsevier articles are notoriously expensive.)
- Finally, the NLM/NIH Environmental Health and Toxicology page is a wonderful compendium of all things related to H1N1. Among other resources, they link to 8 different National Academies Press titles, and the fulltext of the 1978 Institute of Medicine (also National Academies) book “The swine flu affair: decision-making on a slippery disease“.