HIV and ID Observations

HIV researchers can now submit their abstracts to the 2014 Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections — or “CROI”.

(It rhymes with “soy”, as in “soy sauce”; or, if you prefer, “oy”, as in “oy vey”.)

Further details here. General submission for abstracts closes on October 8.

Meanwhile, people continue to wonder what happened to the now defunct CROI website, retroconference.org (not hyperlinked because there’s nothing there).

It’s not just nostalgia — that site was an invaluable repository of abstracts, posters, and web casts, the go-to place for a staggering amount of pre-publication HIV research. Many have despaired that finding the right reference for their grant and paper now requires all kinds of Google wizardry.

And just check out the abstract links in this Really Rapid Review© — all dead. Blah.

You could try this — but the searches don’t really work, it’s just a tease.

So what’s up? Here’s what it says about past CROI material on on the current site:

We would like to acknowledge that the previous CROI website: www.retroconference.org and the associated materials (abstracts, webcasts, etc), are not available at this time. The CROI Foundation previously partnered with a conference manager that constructed, owned, maintained, and has proprietary rights to the display formats and graphical elements of the website. The former website was taken off line by the former manager. The CROI Foundation fully appreciates how important the content from the prior CROI website is to the colleagues and the community it serves and efforts are underway to recover the content from prior conferences …

So why would someone take this information off-line? Additional details here — some sort of  legal fight.

Let’s hope is can be resolved soon, as much of that archived CROI material was very useful.