Update: dsm5.org walled up

On 11/15, access to dsm5.org, the site for the revisions process of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, was substantially blocked by its management. At first, the links from the main page to the revisions material were removed, but with a link to an inside page, say from Google, it was possible to still read the revisions. But later in that day, almost everything was put behind a password screen. The reason, according to the front page, was that the comment period was over and it was time to prepare for publication in May 2013.

So much for science, open discussion, and intellectual history. Turns out (what many critics have been saying all along) the DSM is a commercial product with a thin veneer of science, and the American Psychiatric Association considers the information its "intellectual property". I'm not totally clear on what they are achieving by taking the material offline, since it isn't going to affect sales of the books much, and it has driven a big hole in scholarship. It smells like censorship.

Update: the dsm.org site is back up. Same walled condition as above.

Bad enough. But now things seem somehow worse. At this point (Sunday 11/18), the entire dsm5.org site seems to have gone offline. Ping and traceroute both show the site as non-responsive. Sometime on Saturday evening, it just went away. I hope it's merely some technical glitch, because there is still important information available, including links to critical documents, and its always possible that they could drop the wall again.

By the way, Google has cached the pages as of early November, which may still provide researchers the opportunity to continue to download and "review and comment" (in the terms of use of the site) on the various changes. I'm not certain how long they will stay in the cache, so storing a copy locally might be helpful.

One small way to overcome the pettiness of the APA.