Following up on the selection of a new tagline for APLIC –a global network of
population information professionals, the board asked the membership to choose between two proposed logo designs for the organization. The winner
(below) was unveiled at the Business meeting in Ann Arbor on April 29, 2009. Look forward to seeing it on all of our communications soon.

The APLIC Communicator is looking for people to report on sessions at the APLIC conference in Ann Arbor next week. If you are attending the conference and would like to submit a brief report on a session, or on the conference as a whole, contact Laurie Calhoun and let her know.

If you can’t make it to the conference, keep an eye on this blog for announcements from our team of APLIC bloggers!

We will soon be sending out a survey to vote on the new APLIC logo.  It will come from SurveyMonkey and only go to active (currently paid) members. In order to participate, your contact information must be current.  Please confirm that Kiet Bang ( bang@pop.psu.edu ) has the correct e-mail address for you (it may be different than the one you use to subscribe to the APLIC listserv).

A draft of the notes from the 2008 business meeting held during the APLIC Annual Conference in New Orleans is now available.

I’ve started using the hashtag #aplic2009 to share news and thoughts about the upcoming APLIC conference in Ann Arbor on Twitter. You can see all the #aplic2009 posts on the Twitter site, or you can subscribe to an RSS feed.

If you’re going to the conference, join in the conversation by adding #aplic2009 to your posts.

Not familiar with Twitter? It’s a service that allows users to post short (up to 140 characters) updates, either from a computer or from a mobile phone.

The program for APLIC’s 2009 Annual Conference is now available on our web site.

The deadline to mail in your registration is today (April 1) – don’t miss out on this conference, to be held on the University of Michigan campus and featuring an exciting line-up of speakers and tours.

The appropriations bill that President Obama signed earlier this week made the US National Institutes of Health Public Access mandate permanent (as reported on Library Journal‘s web site). The mandate requires research articles resulting from NIH-funded research to be made publicly available in PubMed Central within 12 months of publication.

APLIC members have been active in assisting researchers in their organizations in understanding and complying with the mandate. Lori Delaney has led an effort to compile information about the public access policies of select journals that publish population research. The journal policy database, updated this week, is available on the Carolina Population Center’s web site.

The CPC web site also includes a resource section dedicated to the public access policy. I created a similar guide for researchers at Penn State’s Population Research Institute, as have the University of Pennsylvania’s Population Research Center, the University of Wisconsin’s Center for Demography and Ecology, and the University of Washington’s Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology.

APLIC members: what are you doing to help people in your organization comply with the policy? Have you benefitted from the policy? Leave a comment on this post.

Bye, Tech: Dealing with Data Rot
CBS Sunday Morning, March 1, 2009

Sooner or later, it affects every audio recording, video recording and computer file. Contributor David Pogue looks at what happens when technological progress leaves your most precious memories and recordings behind.

Full story here and video here:

New Collaborative Online Medical Encyclopedia Launches

The Medpedia Project announced the public launch of the beta version of a technology platform for the worldwide health community. Harvard Medical School, Stanford School of Medicine, Berkeley School of Public Health, University of Michigan Medical School, and other leading global health organizations are contributing in various ways to Medpedia. The goal of The Medpedia Project is to create a new model of the way the world will assemble, maintain, critique, and access medical knowledge. It will, over time, be a repository of up-to-date, unbiased medical information, contributed and maintained by health experts around the world, and freely available to everyone.

è       http://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/wndReader.asp?ArticleId=52687

 

I hope you are making your plans to attend APLIC’s 42nd Annual Conference this April. To assist you in making travel arrangements, we’ve added some information about the conference schedule to the conference web page.