Author Archives: James A Jacobs

NIEHS is considering privatizing the journal Environmental Health Perspectives (EHP) (http://purl.access.gpo.gov/GPO/LPS1466 -- http://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/docs/allpubs.html). It is a monthly open-access journal published by the NIEHS and is read in nearly every country of the world. It covers environmental news, environmental medicine, and children's environmental health. It is available on the web and made available to Pubmed Central, Medscape, and JSTOR. Its highly successful monthly Student Edition "sponsors development of teacher lesson plans based on environmental news articles." It is ranked second of 132 environmental sciences journals and fifth of 90 public, environmental, and occupational health journals.

The announcement says that, NIEHS has not reached a final decision about potential privatization of EHP. Nor has an implementation plan for carrying out such a decision been developed. Implementation, if executed, would address several core issues, which are listed below with questions for which public input is sought in developing agency strategy. It poses several questions including: How should EHP's current open access policy and commitments to provide content to public archives be addressed in a potential privatization? and Overall, how would a privatization of EHP be an advantage or disadvantage to the NIEHS and to environmental health science?

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Timely, Effective and Fair? Justice Department makes a valuable public database all but inaccessible By Bob Williams, Center for Public Integrity, September 13, 2005.

It is a detailed database that could be shining a constant light on the shadowy and complicated world of Washington lobbyists working for foreign governments and overseas companies, a potentially invaluable tool for promoting government transparency, honesty and accountability. Instead, the Foreign Agent Registration Act database housed at the Justice Department— which is a public record by law—is a shadowy, complicated beast. And that seems to be just fine with the government officials in charge of it.

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According to a press release from the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ), the lead hurricane reporter for New Orleans Times-Picayune newspaper has "turned in desperation to the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to answer a basic question: Where are dangerous chemicals leaking as a result of Hurricane Katrina?"

• Katrina Only Latest Example of Feds Withholding Environmental Data, Press Release, Society of Environmental Journalists, Monday September 12, 10:02 am ET

The paper's Mark Schleifstein, "had been asking the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that question for days -- without an answer. So he filed a request under FOIA. Even though the federal statute provides for "expedited review" when a situation "could reasonably be expected to pose an imminent threat to the life or physical safety" of the public, he still has not received a response.

The SEJ notes that "Government compliance with FOIA appears to be deteriorating in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks" and has issued a new report:

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FEMA requires Internet Explorer

Following up on the Copyright Office's proposal to have copyright registration limited to Internet Explorer (IE) users (see What the Copyright Office / Internet Explorer rule tells us about government information), we have news today that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is doing something similar:

• The Online registration requires Microsoft's Internet Explorer 6.0 or above

IE version 6 is only available for Microsoft Windows and has problems of standards compatibility. More information here:

• FEMA requires IE 6 and JavaScript. "I tried the latest Safari, IE and Firefox, none work. Heaven help all the Mac users in the South...."

As government information moves increasingly from documents to transactions and government web-sites become "e-government" sites where every individual user gets different information, the importance of standards-based web sites and usability becomes more and more important.

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