Welcome to the 
Paradigm RedShift
Information Business
Newsletter

If you have any
comments
or suggestions
please e-mail :

Jack Lee

**************************

NOTES

**************************

Some links may require
you to register before
you can see the page
we have linked to.

These pages are tagged "Registration required"

**************************

Some items do not have web links, or are on web sites which do not have stable URLs.

**************************

Items which have appeared
in print are labelled
"print source"

**************************

The doctor’s tie, a traditional symbol of medical authority which inspires respect and fear in patients, nurses and orderlies alike, may have to be mothballed after being identified as a breeding ground for potentially lethal infections.

A Federal Trade Commission rule  requires that unsolicited commercial e-mail that contains sexually oriented material include the words "SEXUALLY EXPLICIT" in the subject line.

A revival is expected to lift online ad spending this year above the record set at the peak of the dot-com boom in 2000, industry participants say.

Cinven, the private equity firm, has entered the auction for WH Smith. (Last month WH Smith had a £950 million approach from Permira, another private equity group).

Since initial changes to their crawler (the "Googlebot") in late February of 2004, Google has been indexing the freely available metadata on Ingenta.com at a rate of 20,000 to 30,000 pages per day, ensuring that article titles, keywords, author names and abstracts appear in search results for 5.4 million Google users. As of March 2004, Ingenta has enabled full text access for the crawler, meaning all words in the article, not just the abstracts and keywords, are indexed and searchable on Google.

Finland is the first country to make a nationwide commitment to Open Access, it was announced today. All universities, polytechnics and research institutes in Finland have become BioMed Central members. The membership agreement covers the cost of publication, in BioMed Central's 100+ Open Access journals, for all 25000 publicly funded researchers and teachers in Finland.

Nurses have overwhelmingly rejected Tory plans for a patient passport scheme. Under the plans, patients could either use the NHS, or get the government to pay 60% of their private healthcare bills.

Extenza e-Publishing Services today announced the Google indexing of e-journal content held on the Extenza e-Publishing Services journal hosting platform. The implementation of this functionality will enable Google to index all content, held in either Adobe PDF or full text HTML which will provide enhanced search results on Google for end users.

China has closed 8,600 Internet cafes since February as part of an ongoing national campaign to clamp down on Internet cafes that violate government Internet regulations, according to a report by the official Xinhua news agency.

Cambridge University Press has formed a new global board of directors and put in place a team of 18 executive managers world-wide. Michael Holdsworth, development director, has been promoted to MD. of UK and European operations.

Minutes of evidence taken before the science and technology committee, regarding the arguments for and against open-access publishing.  (Note: the transcript is not yet an approved formal record of these proceedings).