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!

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.

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.

A bill banning public access policies like the one recently enacted by the National Institutes of Health was introduced to Congress last week, as reported in Library Journal.

The article takes a look at related issues: changes in Congress and the White House, and the departure of public access advocate Elias Zerhouni from the NIH.

Registration is now open for the 42nd Annual APLIC Conference, to be held April 27-29 in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

The program includes:

• a tour of the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR)
• a keynote by Myron Gutmann, Director of ICPSR and Professor of History at the University of Michigan
• a talk on ROI for libraries by Joan Durrance, author of How Libraries and Librarians Help and Margaret Mann Collegiate Professor, School of Information, University of Michigan
• the annual APLIC banquet, board meeting, and business meeting

You won’t want to miss it!

The Winter/Spring 2009 issue of the APLIC Communicator, APLIC’s newsletter, is now available online. There is lots of news from APLIC: an announcement of the 2009 conference, a recap of the discussion about APLIC’s identity and future from last year’s conference, and our new tagline and blog. Enjoy!

Many thanks to my co-editor Laurie Calhoun, and the newsletter contributors (Lori Delaney, Kiet Bang, Joann Donatiello, and Yan Fu).

We’ll use the APLIC Blog to keep our members up to date with the latest about APLIC, libraries, information services, population, reproductive health, and other topics of interest.

The APLIC Blog will supplement our other communication channels: the APLIC Communicator and discussion lists.

You can read the blog on the web, or subscribe to our RSS feed. If you’re not sure what RSS is or how to use it, see this guide from BBC News.

The blog was created by the APLIC Communications Committee (Tara Murray, Kiet Bang, Laurie Calhoun, and Nykia Perez). We’d love to hear what you think! Leave a comment on this post, or email me. If you’re an APLIC member and would like to contribute as a blogger, please let me know.