A study by Congrong He, Lidia Morawska, and Len Taplin in Environmental Science & Technology titled "Particle Emission Characteristics of Office Printers" raises questions about the safety of laser printers.

Here's an excerpt from a related Environmental Science & Technology news article:

When researchers in Australia discovered that particulate matter levels were five times higher during the workday inside a nonsmoking office building than outside near a freeway, they looked for indoor culprits. After testing more than 50 printers throughout the building, they found that particle emissions varied depending on the type and age of the printer. In one case, standing near a working printer was much like standing next to a cigarette smoker.

Here's an excerpt from a related Scientific American article:

When the researchers investigated emissions from all 62 printers in the entire six-story building, they found that 25 of them (40 percent) were emitting particles. Among those, 17 (27 percent) were "high emitters" (including HP LaserJet and HP Color LaserJet models, and one Toshiba Studio model), which caused the concentration of particles in the surrounding air to jump tenfold when just one page was printed. The majority of particles were ultrafine, or less than 0.1 micrometer in diameter.

"Because these particles are so small, there is a very high probability for these particles to deposit in the deepest alveoli in the lung. . .; from there they can enter the bloodstream," Morawska says. This could cause changes in blood properties that lead to cardiovascular disease, she notes. If the particles contain cancer-causing agents, exposure could also increase the risk of cancer, but Morawska says researchers did not test the chemical composition of the particles. The primary purpose of this study was to determine the concentration of ultrafine particles emitted by laser printers.

More coverage: "HP Dismisses Laser Printer Health Risks," "Is Your Printer Polluting the Air You Breathe?," "Printer Emissions as Bad as Cigarettes?," "Some Top Laser Printers Called Office Polluters," "Study: Laser Printers May Pose Health Risks," and "Warning: Laser Printers Could Be a Health Hazard."

Sources: He, Congrong, Lidia Morawska, and Len Taplin. "Particle Emission Characteristics of Office Printers." Environmental Science & Technology Articles ASAP, 1 August 2007; Lubick, Naomi. Printer Particle Emissions Add Up. Environmental Science & Technology: Science News, 1 August 2007.

Last July, I reported on use of the Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals, which is both a printed book and a freely available e-book. Both versions are under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 License. You can get a detailed history at the prior posting; the major changes since then have been the conversion of the HTML version to XHTML and the addition of a Google Custom Search Engine.

So, what does cumulative use of the e-book OAB version look like slightly over one year down the road from the last posting? Here's a summary:

• UH PDF: 29,255 (March through May 2005)
• All Web files on both Digital Scholarship hosts: 192,849 (33,814 uses of the PDF file; June 2005 through July 2007)
• dLIST PDF: 655 (March 2005 to present)
• E-LIS PDF: 556 (November 2005 to present)
• ARL PDF: Not Available

Combined, OAB Web files have been accessed 223,315 times since March 2005.

The SURFfoundation has released A Portal for Doctoral E-Theses in Europe: Lessons Learned from a Demonstrator Project by M. P. J. P. Vanderfeesten. The portal project was funded by JISC, the National Library of Sweden, and the SURFfoundation. The SURFfoundation ran the project.

Here’s an excerpt from the "Management Summary":

For the first time various repositories with doctoral e-theses have been harvested on an international scale. This report describes a small pilot project which tested the interoperability of repositories for e-theses and has set up a freely accessible European portal with over 10,000 doctoral e-theses.

Five repositories from five different countries in Europe were involved: Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and the UK. The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) was the common protocol used to test the interoperability. Based upon earlier experiences and developed tools (harvester, search engine) of the national DAREnet service in the Netherlands, SURFfoundation could establish a prototype for this European e-theses Demonstrator relatively fast and simple.

Nevertheless, some critical issues and problems occurred. They can be categorised into the following topics:

a) Generic issues related to repositories: the language used in the metadata fields differs per repository. . . . Furthermore, the quality of the data presented differs.. . . A further issue is the semantic and syntactic differences in metadata between repositories, which means that the format and content of the information exchange requests are not unambiguously defined. . . .

b) E-theses specific issues: to be able to harvest doctoral theses, the service provider needs to be able to filter on this document type. Up to now there is no commonly agreed format, which makes semantic interoperability possible [specific Dublin core recommendations omitted]. . . .

c) Issues related to data providers and service providers: besides the use of the OAI-protocol for metadata harvesting and the use of Dublin Core it is recommended for data providers to further standardise on the semantic interoperability by using the DRIVER guidelines with an addition of the e-Theses specific recommendations described above. To be able to offer more than basic services for e-Theses, one has to change the metadata format from simple Dublin Core to a richer and e-Theses specific one. . . . We needed to fix, normalise and crosswalk the differences between every repository to get a standard syntactic and semantic metadata structure. . . . The scaling up is a big issue. To stimulate the broad take up of various services, data providers have to work on implementing standards that create interoperability on syntactic and semantic levels.

d) Cultural and educational differences: In every country the educational processes are different. . . . Not only the graduation and publication process differs, but also the duration of the research process. Therefore the quality of the results in a cross-European search of doctoral theses may vary enormously.

(Thanks to Open Access News.)

Pamela Samuelson, Professor at the School of Information and the School of Law, University of California at Berkeley, has written an interesting paper about copyright reform. While not very hopeful about immediate action, she outlines a number of reasons why such an effort is still worthwhile, blocks out the main areas of concern, and offers suggestions about possible reforms.

Here's an extract from the paper:

The 1976 Act has been amended more than twenty times since 1976. As a result of these many amendments to its text, the 1976 Act has become an amalgam of inter- and intra-industry negotiated compromises. As a consequence, it has become a hodgepodge law. Although Congress has occasionally given the Copyright Office rule-making authority, most of the controversial issues have been left for the Congress or the courts to resolve. This has given rise to serious public choice problems with the copyright law and policy making process. The copyright industries have become accustomed to drafting legislation that suits their perceived needs and to having that legislation adopted without careful scrutiny.

The ’76 Act is, moreover, the intellectual work product of a copyright reform process that was initiated in the late 1950’s. This legislation was written without giving serious thought to how it would apply to computers, computer programs, or computer networks. . . .

The ’76 Act was also drafted in an era when it mainly regulated the copyright industries and left alone the acts of ordinary people and non-copyright industries who might interact with copyrighted works. The copyright industries had negotiated many of the fine details of the statute and knew what they meant, even if no one else did. Advances in digital technologies have, among other things, democratized the creation and dissemination of new works of authorship and brought ordinary persons into the copyright realm not only as creators but also as users of others’ works. . . .

Thirty years after enactment of the ’76 Act, with the benefit of considerable experience with computer and other advanced technologies and the rise of amateur creators, it may finally be possible to think through in a more comprehensive way how to adapt copyright to digital networked environments as well as how to maintain its integrity as to existing industry products and services that do not exist outside of the digital realm. If one considers, as I do, that the 1976 Act was the product of 1950/1960’s thinking, then a copyright reform process should be well underway, for copyright revision projects have occurred roughly every 40 years in the U.S.25 A copyright reform project would, moreover, take years of careful thought, analysis, and drafting, and would then face the daunting challenge of persuading legislators to enact it. Viewed in this light, time’s awasting, and someone should get on with it.

Source: Samuelson, Pamela. "Preliminary Thoughts on Copyright Reform." SSRN. (2007).