Art crime expert's Database Open Access

Dr Donna Yates is clearly considered very newsworthy north of the Border, yet another article has appeared in the national newspaper which is clearly following her work with fascination (Martin Hannan, 'Dr Donna Yates makes her research available free online in bid to help beat the thieves' June 2nd, 2016)

In an act of rare academic generosity, a prominent expert on antique trafficking and art crime at Glasgow University is to make her research available online to spread information about the relatively unknown “grey market” in art and antiques. [...] The 33-year-old lecturer in Antiquities Trafficking and Art Crime at the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research at Glasgow University has been collecting and collating material on her subjects for more than two years [...] She hopes that the reports she has found across the globe about art crime and trafficking in antiques will show the scale of the black market industry that has been created. [...] Yates hopes that greater awareness of the problem of art crime will help to promote much more research into the subject.

Black or Grey? I wonder though just how much "awareness" one can create by yet another news aggregator. We've been aware of these problems since the 1950s, and they've been getting worse and worse down the decades. What can we do to give this issue enough prominence in public eye that an outcry is initiated? How can we create a situation where we (all) can "beat the thieves"? One of them of course is stop pussy-footing around the issue of naming and shaming those caught out handling dodgy goods. I hope Dr Yates will take that bold step.

The news aggregator can be found here: http://news.culturecrime.org