Evaluation 2.0: Clinical Reader

It's been two weeks since I posted my original critique of Clinical Reader.

Website Update

The good news is the 5-star 'according to' the National Library of Medicine and other organizations graphic and the 3 copyrighted images that were being used without permission are gone.

The so-so news is there is still no identification or specific contact information on the website about who is running Clinical Reader or on their Editorial Board. Does 'A junior doctor and a small group of forward thinking young tech programmers' make for an 'authoritative source' for health news and information? (About/Beginnings)

The bad news is in the multimedia section. I've created a one minute screencast demonstrating why



Below is SpringerImages Terms of Use policy section 5b, bold emphasis mine:

You shall not use the Content for commercial purposes, i.e., for the purposes of monetary reward by means of the sale, resale, loan, transfer, hire or other similar form of exploitation of the Content, direct or indirect, including the placement or upload of the Licensed Content on a commercial entity’s internet website.

The definition of a commercial or legal entity is a person or organization that can legally enter a contract, and therefore may be sued for failure to comply with the terms of the contract. (source)

Clinical Reader is a commercial entity. They are soliciting advertising contracts per their Advertising. The wording of Clinical Reader's Privacy Policy section 5 also indicates interest in working with marketing and pharmaceutical companies with We may share your personal information with companies performing services on our behalf (such as direct marketing agents or pharmaceutical companies) who will only use the information to provide that service. The Privacy Policy is about midway down through Clinical Reader's Terms of Use.

Hotlinking, or directly linking to an image and using an outside server's bandwidth to display it on your website, is not considered a good website practice with the exception of banner advertisements. The source of one of the images displayed on Clinical Reader is http://img.springerimages.com/Images/Springer/PUB=Springer-Verlag-Berlin-Heidelberg/JOU=00167/VOL=2009.17/ISU=8/ART=2009_798/MediaObjects/THUMB_167_2009_798_Fig3_HTML.jpg

This is a new development as the screencast of the Clinical Reader multimedia page from the Google cache dated July 24, 2009 22:54:29 GMT shows nothing from SpringerImages.

Social Media Update

Here is a sampling of blog coverage about this aspect of Clinical Reader, the variety of viewpoints from different audiences is quite interesting.

• Completely noir-bizarre (end of Act 5) - an honor and pleasure to be included in Vol 5 No 44 of Grand Rounds, hosted at Doc Gurley
  
  
• Sturm und drang - Roy Tennant of Library Journal's perspective largely drawn from both the
  
  
• 'toxic and dangerous' category - Steve Lawson, the first to blog what happened next, and
  
  
• Stranger and stranger - Disruptive Library Technology Jester's second (first here) narrative of the saga
  
  
• Don't piss off librarians - understatement of the month by Jill Hurst-Wahl of eNetworking101, also part 2
  
  
• Best bad marketing ever - by Iris of Pegasus Librarian (also part 2, notice theme?) and
  
  
• 'Legal ramifications,' my Aunt Fanny - David Rothman always tells it like it is

A comment from David Lee King includes

The web tends to magnify personalities. If you’re a good person, it will show. If you run a company that links to un(typo?)copyrighted stuff & posts fake recommendations, then posts defensive tweets about it … well, that shows too.

Indeed.