"Amazon Fever" is the title of a draft novel by Amy Bishop, who is accused of killing three fellow biology professors at the University of Alabama at Huntsville last week. The draft, obtained Wednesday by The Boston Globe, features a female scientist fearful of not getting tenure, and has a researcher called James Anderson, the real name of Ms. Bishop's husband. In real life, Ms. Bishop was upset at being denied tenure; in fiction, her heroine is depressed "with her career breathing its last." Earlier, the Globe reported that investigators had found another draft novel on Ms. Bishop's computer in 1993, when they suspected she was involved in a mail-bomb case. In that novel, a woman wanted to become a great scientist to atone for killing her brother. Ms. Bishop shot and killed her own brother, in a reported accident, in 1986.

Associations representing academic libraries have asked the Justice Department to oversee Google's plans to create a vast digital library, the Library Journal reports. The associations are concerned that the company might charge high subscription prices to institutional libraries, straining their budgets. The next legal hearing on the plan is scheduled for February 18, 2010.

The scientific publisher Elsevier today started SciVal Funding, a Web-based search service to help American institutions locate grants, particularly collaborative and multidisciplinary ones. The service joins the company's SciVal Spotlight, a strategy tool aimed at revealing university-research strengths and weaknesses -- at a price, The Chronicle reported in June, that could climb to six figures, based on an institution's size.

Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors, said on Thursday that academic freedom was infringed by Yale University Press when it removed previously published images depicting the Prophet Muhammad from a forthcoming book, The Cartoons That Shook The World, by a Brandeis University scholar. The press was concerned that the images might incite violence; Mr. Nelson said in a written statement that the action has "the potential to encourage broader censorship of speech by faculty members."

Questions raised by the magazine New Scientist about the veracity of images in a scientific paper on the therapeutic use of stem cells have prompted the University of Minnesota to begin an investigation of the author of that paper, Jizhen Lin, a scientist at the university's Stem Cell Institute.

The Association of College and Research Libraries and several other library groups have filed a brief asking the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit to overturn a lower-court ruling that blocked publication of a book on J.D. Salinger, arguing that the ruling infringes upon freedom-of-speech rights.

The decision to build a new government laboratory to study dangerous animal diseases at Kansas State University was seriously flawed, according to a Government Accountability Office draft report obtained by The Washington Post.

The association of college media advisers has censured Morgan State University, charging that the institution did not rehire its student-media adviser because she defended students who had published articles critical of the university administration.