Your signature is wanted for open access petition to the White House
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HELP TO MAKE OPEN ACCESS A WORLDWIDE STANDARD FOR PUBLISHING SCIENCE
A very important point to make about this campaign is that THE PETITION CAN BE SIGNED BY ANYONE over 13 years in age with an email address, and from all parts of the world. So by signing this petition YOU CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE. The more signatures there are , the louder the message will be and the more chance there will be for rapid change.
If you are willing to sign the petition please go to the website access2research and follow the directives. Alternatively you can go direct to the WEthePEOPLE website.
Please sign and tell your colleagues, family, friends that they can sign too.
This week, Harvard School of Public Health's Associate Professor Winston Hide made a courageous move: he resigned from being the associate editor of the journal Genomics (an Elsevier journal). Why? Because he could no longer accept the inability of scientists in developing countries to access full articles stuck behind paywalls thrown up by publishers. A bold and remarkable step. He published the rationale for making this decision this week in the 
This week WHO reiterated the fragility of the gains the world has made over the last decade through intense deployment of vector control in the fight against malaria. Reuters published an online article on the matter titled '
Last week, WHO published a statement regarding the potential of larviciding for malaria control in Africa. This followed the circulation of a draft version of the statement in August 2011. That draft was sent to a limited group of people (how many I don't know) for comments (including myself). I attach the official version to this editorial.
Professor Tanner is Chief Executive of the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute (Swiss TPH), based in Basel. He is an epidemiologist and chair of medical parasitology and epidemiology at the University of Basel. Besides this, he is engaged in numerous activities and initiatives that research and control communicable diseases, notably malaria. 
The editorial below was written by Camilla Beech, Regulatory Affairs Manager, Oxitec Ltd, UK, partially as a response to 
It is unfortunate that we have recently seen a great deal of confusion about the amount of malaria in Africa. The confusion arises because most of the people making the estimates are not scientists but artists; computer artists. It would be better if we relied on scientists. Computer artists, using their own data and their own inspirations, get varying answers and generate conflicting maps and graphs. But scientists, using standardized techniques and randomized sampling, get the same answers, no matter who is doing the work. We urgently need accurate numbers on malaria...
This 
Field trials of genetically modified Aedes aegypti mosquitoes have already progressed to free releases in populated areas in a number of countries. A recent publication in PLoS NTD provides a critical summary of the events leading up to these trials and is aimed at non-specialist readers. While advocating the value of field testing transgenic techniques for suppressing disease vector populations, it highlights a number of troubling scientific precedents.
One thing that the poorest living in developing countries recognize is real hazard. What does this mean for those planning to implement genetic control programs?