Policy & Internet

The Policy Studies Organization has a rich website given the list of open access journals they publish, including Policy & Internet, Poverty & Public Policy, Risk, Hazards & Crisis in Public Policy, World Medical and Health Policy, and, coming soon, Online Education.

The latest issue of Policy & Internet is on the subject of eHealth, as described below by editors Rik Crutzen, (Maastricht University) and Guodong (Gordon) Gao, (University of Maryland):

The explosive growth of the Internet and its omnipresence in people's daily lives has facilitated a shift in information seeking on health, with the Internet now a key information source for the general public, patients, and health professionals. The Internet has also driven an increase in eHealth initiatives, ranging from Internet-delivered interventions and therapy focusing on specific behaviors or diseases, to maintenance of electronic health records. A lack of policy measures is a common barrier to success of eHealth initiatives; we hope that the empirical research and perspectives gathered here in this Policy & Internet special issue on eHealth will make a significant impact among eHealth policymakers, academics, and professionals, and make a valuable contribution to future policy and research efforts in this area.

For political communication types check out PSO's upcoming conference  in September 2012. Internet, Politics, Policy 2012: Big Data, Big Challenges?

Benton Foundation

The Benton Foundation is a private foundation in existence since 1948 that works in the areas of public policy, specifically serving the public interest in the media and telecommunications arena.
Current priorities include Current priorities include: "promoting a vision and policy alternatives for the digital age in which the benefit to the public is paramount; raising awareness among funders and nonprofits on their stake in critical policy issues; enabling communities and nonprofits to produce diverse and locally responsive media content."

They are worth pointing out on a library resource blog because their site is resource rich. Homepage sections includes Recent Headlines (free, daily summaries of articles on telecommunications policy), Policy Initiatives (on such topics as media ownership, affordable broadband, and other communication legislation), digital Beat Blog (Charles Benton and others' take on communications policy), and Community Media (the foundations work in educating nonprofits in this area) and more.

The Library and Topics sections are full of annual reports, research papers, news articles, and postings on a variety of topics in the areas of advertising, broadcasting, cable, children and media, community media, cyberwarfare and cybersecurity, digital content, digital divide, diversity, elections and media, emergency communication, energy and climate, FCC reform, health and media, indecency regulation, internet/broadband, journalism, labor, localism, media ownership, satellite, spectrum, telecom, violence, and wireless.

New Public Policy Archive

PolicyArchive is a new, innovative public policy archive of global, non-partisan public policy research brought to us by the Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis Library and the Center for Governmental Studies, a nonprofit group that encourages civic engagement.

The archive "makes use Internet technology to collect and disseminate summaries and full texts, videos, reports, briefs, and multimedia material of think tank, university, government, and foundation-funded policy research. It offers a subject index, an internal search engine, useful abstracts, email notifications of newly added research, and will soon expand to offer information on researchers and funders, and even user-generated publication reviews. Over time, it will grow to include policy content from international and corporate organizations." (website)

PolicyArchive's goals are ambitious. While it now holds more than 12,000 policy documents from about 220 think tanks and research groups, archive’s developers say they hope to be at 20,000 documents by the end of 2008. They expect to become the largest online repository of public-policy research in the world.

Among the general topics listed is "Media, telecommunications, and information" which is further divided into: Broadcasting, Communication systems, Electronic data processing, transmission, and retrieval, Film and video, Information policy, Journalism and the news, Mass media , Radio, Telecommunications, and Telephone. There is also a general topic of "Culture and Religion," which includes: Arts and arts policy, Cultural heritage and preservation, Culture and civilization, Language and languages, Museums, memorials, and monuments, and Symbols, emblems, and awards, among others.

The archive documents are free and available to all; researchers are encouraged to upload their documents to the site.