Update: NIH Public Access Mandate

Although I realize this blog is a platform for bringing fellow staff up-to-speed on information gleaned from various meetings and conferences we attend, I wanted to take this opportunity to update everyone on recent Congressional action that, if signed into law, will have significant impact for our campus.

Last week, the Senate passed an appropriations bill that includes language that would strengthen the current NIH Public Access Policy from a request to a mandate, making manuscript archiving in PubMed Central a condition of receiving NIH funding. In July, the House passed a similar bill also stipulating a mandate. Both bills are now in conference to be reconciled before being sent to the President. Unfortunately, due to disagreements over funding, the President has threatened to veto this bill. Although the veto threat is not over the proposed NIH Public Access Mandate, lobbyists are working hard to see that the mandate language is removed altogether. In fact, although they were withdrawn before the final Senate vote, publisher lobbyists were successful in persuading Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) to attach two amendments to the bill that would have rendered the mandate language null.

If this bill becomes law with the mandate provision intact, here is what you need to know:

• The NIH Public Access Mandate would apply to any research article accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal (both traditional and open access journals) that stems from research funded in whole or in part by NIH awards
• Authors would be responsible for ensuring that a copy of their final peer-reviewed manuscript (commonly known as a postprint) is archived in PubMed Central within 12 months of publication
• The mandate would be fully compliant with existing U.S. copyright law, and although it would be wise for our faculty authors to retain their copyrights when publishing, they may still transfer their copyrights to publishers AND archive their postprints in PMC; approx. 70% of publisher policies already enable authors to archive postprints in either institutional or subject repositories; publisher archiving policies may be searched using the SHERPA-RoMEO database
• Approx. 68% of all external research funding at WFUHS in the past five fiscal years came from NIH (this excludes any subcontract awards)
• Currently, voluntary compliance to the NIH Public Access Policy by WFUHS faculty authors is consistent with the national average – around 5%; however, because publishers can also contribute publications to PMC, closer to 10% of WFUHS faculty-authored journal articles are freely accessible in PMC
• In anticipation of a mandate, and to highlight papers already in PMC, a field for the PMCID (the unique identifier assigned to archived articles) has been added to the Faculty Publications input screen in PeopleSoft; by including the PMCID, users who search Fac Pubs will be able to link directly to those articles

Please see the November issue of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter for Peter Suber's recap of the NIH Public Access Policy/Mandate progress to date and explanation of what to expect in the future.

There has been interesting discussion about the NIH Public Access Mandate and its implications on the Liblicense listserv in recent days. You can read the archived discussion that took place in October here, and the ongoing discussion here. As you can imagine, confusion over this mandate and its effects on scholarly publishing is rampant, and debates over the necessity of open/public access mandates are rife with misinformation and misunderstanding. If you have any questions, feel free to ask me.

MAC - Part 4 "Cleaning Up"

There a couple of little things still left to share. The Association of North Carolina Health and Science Librarians' (http://www.rtpnet.org/~anchasl/) reception on Wednesday evening, October 10 was lots of fun. I was the only person out of the group of 20 or so that has ever ridden a camel! Everyone eventually won a prize and then came announcements, like the group's annual meeting on Friday, November 30 in Chapel Hill. Being a history person, it sounds exciting since the group will celebrate its 25th anniversary including a presentation on the history of the medical library as well as honoring past presidents. Margaret Cobb, librarian at Forsyth Medical Center, will wrap up the day.

On Thursday, I was eating again at the Marketing Your Services roundtable discussion hosted by Shannon Jones of Virginia Commonwealth University. The group of 10 shared the different ways that they market their services either in an academic medical or hospital library. I shared our service, if we're still doing it, of delivering public interest magazines to various patient floor lobbies with a simple label on the front that says: Compliments of Coy C. Carpenter Library and Dorothy Carpenter Medical Archives. The hospital librarians especially like this idea as a way to recycle donated magazines. Some ideas I heard about were:
*sending announcements of classes/lectures to departmental listserves (VCU's departments have their own listserves)
*bringing in federal health officials like Center For Disease Control employees for free, targeted classes
*using www.publichealthgrandrounds.unc.edu for continuing education credit courses
*grabbing all the freebies at conferences to share with patrons
*partnering/collaborating with other departments on campus for programs

To wipe it up, I would say I enjoyed the conference. While I don't consider myself a "true" academic medical center librarian, I still felt like I had several things in common with the MAC group and it was nice to network and meet some hospital librarians, including Ms. Cobb. I am glad I had the opportunity to represent Carpenter Library at the conference.

MAC - Part 3 "Awesome Desserts"

My favorite part (desserts are the best part of any meal) of MAC or at least the part where I learned the most was actually on two different days.

On Wednesday, October 10, 2007, Bart Ragon and colleagues from the University of Virginia presented a paper entitled: When a Blog is Not a Blog. Basically, it involved using blog software for other uses. I immediately thought of the Digital Forsyth (www.digitalforsyth.org) website in Wordpress software. Mr. Ragon gave examples of using blog software as an information aggregator, for a room/equipment self-booking system as well as a place for medical students to comment.

Thursday morning, October 11 found me again listening to Mr. Ragon as part of the panel discussion on Web 2.0 technologies. In this panel, Mr. Ragon discussed collaborative tools, such as blogs, wikis and specifically Google Presentation, Zoho online and Sakai - a free, open source product. He also talked about Social Networking like the use of Facebook and Ning by the American Library Association. Perhaps the most interesting names were Moodle and Sloodle which are course management software programs.

The other panelists were Michelle Kraft, newly appointed senior health librarain at the Cleveland Clinic and author of the blog: http://kraftylibrarian.com/, who discussed mash-ups and sharing photographs; and Max Anderson with SOLINET who talked about changing the of colleagues and patrons attitude toward technology as well as obtaining information services support in a larger institution.

I was intrigued the most by Mr. Ragon's comments so I e-mailed him for his PowerPoint presentations which I have placed in the Shared Documents section of Carpetner Library's Sharepoint. I'm sure you could contact Ms. Kraft and Mr. Anderson about their presentations. Meanwhile, enjoy your desserts compliments of Mr. Ragon!

MAC - Part 2 "Lots of Eating"

Wednesday (Oct. 10, 2007) morning breakfast with the exhibitors was only the beginning of what felt like two days of non-stop food in more ways than one. We did manage to actually speak to some of them, like Meredith being shown Diagnosis Consult from MD Consult respresentative.

But after breakfast, Meredith and I meandered through Poster Session I. The list of abstracts as well as some mini-handouts is circulating around the CCCL staff now. Perhaps the one that stuck out for me was East Carolina University because they had several, all of which had a basic design that was eye-catching. Of course, the theme had to do with FOOD. You can read about each poster in the list of abstracts.

The morning also consisted of a National Library of Medicine update from David Gillikin, chief of bibliographic services. I honestly don't remember much of it because it is was mostly information on NLM's For Librarians' webpage, such as the new site search engine and adding Citing Medicine to NCBI Bookshelf. It didn't have a whole lot to do with food either, although I did enjoy my Starbucks Frappucino in the already freezing room.

After a crab cake sandwich for lunch at a local restaurant, we walked briskly back to the hotel to hear some paper presentations. Again, the list of abstracts is circulating with the staff. I was captured by UNC Chapel Hill's "Fast Food for Clinicians: Recipe for Improving Subject Access to Electronic Resources." Since the room was tiny and we arrived late, we were in the hall. I did hear that the health science librarians have created electronic resource pages specific to departments by partnering with the department. It is more of a focused outreach for library liaisons and the difference is the partnering with a member of the department. I had to dig on UNC Health Sciences Library's homepage, but here is the example shown at the presentation:

http://www.hsl.unc.edu/Services/Guides/Anesthesiology.cfm. I liked the RSS feed listing the Current Table of Contents from the Anesthesiology journal. I found this webpage under Special Collections, then More Collections, then More Collections, A to Z.

I'll save the other interesting paper for another post. Now that I'm hungry, I will enjoy my lunch!

MAC - Part 1 - "Nearly a Disaster"

The purpose of me attending the Mid-Atlantic Chapter of the Medical Library Association conference in Baltimore, Md. Oct 9-12, 2007 was to present a poster: The D-Word: Deciding What to Digitize. The actual poster presentation was on Thursday, Oct. 11 during the Technology Symposium.

But, since I'm a linear person, I need to post the events in the order in which they happened! So first up is Dr. Georges C. Benjamin, MD, FACP, FACEP and director of the American Public Health Association. He spoke about the need for disaster preparedness from a public health view. His speech was decent and appropriate for our time but I felt like he had given it many times before and worked in a couple of slides in his PowerPoint to make it appropriate to medical librarians.

The one interesting fact I gathered from it was that medical and hospital libraries can serve as a gathering place/triage location in a disaster because they have space, technology access if equipment is still available and in particular medical and hospital libraries are close if not already in hospitals. Another interesting part of the speech is the American Public Health Association (http://www.apha.org/) is developing a movement for national disaster preparedness, perhaps somewhat late after Hurricane Katrina, but at least the group is exploring it. This association is focusing on preparing for pandemic flu.

To veer off the linear path a bit, the conference also included an update from the National Network of Libraries of Medicine (NN/LM) Southeastern/Atlantic Region and Janice Kelly gave that update on Thursday, Oct. 11. The Regional Libraries of NN/LM (University of Maryland-Baltimore is where the Southeastern library is located) are becoming buddies with another medical library in preparation for a national and/or regional disaster. An example is the Southeastern/Atlantic Region Library's buddy is the University of Washington-Seattle. Ms. Kelly suggested that MAC members start thinking about a buddy library for their libraries.

And finally as a side and very related note, while Ms. Kelly was giving the update of NN/LM and happened to be discussing disaster preparedness, the hotel's alarm system went off and we immediately evacuated the hotel to across the street to the University of Maryland-Baltimore research section of the library. Now can it get any more exciting than that experience? See below for an "evacuation" shot.

No, we did not find out why we had to evacuate but returned out of the chilly weather back to the hotel within 10 minutes and I heard no sirens even though there is a fire department across the street from the Marriott Inner Harbor hotel.

Digital Forsyth Year 2

Dianne, Monica and Mark with some help from Julie continue to plug away in the Digital Forsyth Grant. Year two of the potential three-year grant started July 1 and CCCL is expected to choose, label, scan and catalog 375 images that will help depict the history of Forsyth County.

Year one entailed a lot of learning, setting up equipment, hiring temporary staff and establishing workflows along with completing 189 images, 39 images over the expected number.

Year two will be a year of production. The staff will have help again this year to produce - one person for scanning and entering the information into an Access database and one person for cataloging in EnCompass. While Monica chooses most of the photographs, Dianne is going to be working on various "stories," brief written snapshots of our institution, to be included on the webpage. Mark continues his work with the User Services Committee who hopes to have the initial user web interface launched by the end of August.

Look for Digital Forsyth at the Bookmarks Festival on September 8 and at the NCLA Conference in Hickory on October 18, 2007.

Basic Archives

During the month of June, Monica and I enjoyed learning about basic archives work without leaving our desks!

The American Association for State and Local History offered an online workshop that allowed you to work at your own pace until the deadline on July 6. It also offered two live chat sessions during the course from an experienced archivist and one of the authors of the workshop. After each course, you reviewed it and took a short test or quiz.

The workshop information was not new for me but definitely verified that what I have been doing for seven years is good. Monica, on the other hand, learned tons of new information and she is excited to have a real certificate for completing it.

The workshop was divided into five courses covering the following topics:
Introduction to Archives and Archivists; What Do You Collect and How Do You Collect It; Processing; Housing Your Collections and Access and Outreach.

To summarize, we learned that you need a collection development policy, processing policy/manual, disaster plan, lots of supplies, lots of space for storing and processing and a sense of humor and attention to detail.

For the very-curious-minded colleagues, we have the entire workshop on CD that we would be happy to share.

Copyright Utopia, Day 3 - Technological Alternatives Panel

Transforming Copyright: Technological Alternatives
Kimberly Kelley (moderator), Karen Coyle, Laurence Roth, David Sohn

• DRM (digital rights management) has been market failure because consumers not happy with digital controls
• not all technical protection is bad; some protection is important, useful, needed
• files today will outlive software needed to open them
• technology does fail: not if, but when
• when technology fails in regard to DRM, there is nothing that can be done
• users need to explicitly know what they can and cannot do under DRM of each individual file; shouldn't have to discover limitations when they are stopped trying to do something not permissible
• we should be informing people every time they access something of the copyright that applies: holder, date enacted, uses permitted
• possibly include copyright in metadata of MARC records
• DRM likely to remain part of copyright landscape
• if public understands DRM, they will exert pressure on DRM developers for more choice and flexibility
• DRM developers need to contribute by making infringement unattractive not technologically impossible
• DRM has collateral impact: privacy - data collection questions; computer security - are necessary downloads/installations safe
• DRM must have transparency/disclosure, both initial and ongoing
• not all DRM systems raise problems in all areas
• if more files are available DRM-free (iTunes songs), will public have enough information to make informed decisions?
• similar to DRM are digital watermarks
• almost all TV broadcasts have digital watermarks
• Photoshop has digital watermarking capability
• watermarks provide persistent digital identity with embedded metadata defining origin, use permissions
• watermarks can be made resistant to standard content processing techniques
• watermarks used for copyright communication, copy protection, monitoring, filtering/classification, authentication/identity, media serialization & tracking, asset/content management, rights management, remote triggering, linking/ecommerce
• digital watermarks similar to automobile VIN
• work as compliments to DRM
• could possibly help identify data leaks
• would help in identification of future born-digital orphan works
• ancillary copyright violations could (and should) be accounted for by digital watermarking (accidentally filming Disney movie in background of home video of child's birthday party)

Evidence-Based Library/Info Practice Meeting

This was a different kind of meeting for me, used to MAC and MLA. It was a small meeting (230 participants) and very international in flavor. It also included lots of different kinds of librarians, not just medical librarians. It was co-sponsored by the EBLIP guru Andrew Booth and the Library School at UNC and held in Research Triangle Park. I wondered what the foreign librarians found to do in the RTP when the meeting wasn't taking them out in buses. Since the airport is across I-40 and RTP is composed of businesses, there was only a Gold's Gym and a walking trail as destinations in RTP without a rental car. Rochelle and I joined the meeting halfway through and stayed for CE classes. The meeting focused on library research, how to make it better, how to fit it in, how to get it published, how to evaluate it. I attended the debate on whether EBLibrarianship was useful/necessary by Scott Pluchak and Andrew Booth. This talk and the following discussion was fairly contentious. I went to sessions where librarians presented their research on teaching, including Connie Schardt who studied a course taught locally and as a distance ed class. The final luncheon had several library heads discussing the importance of EB research in running libraries. These included a small special library, Duke Med library, NCSU library, a school library professor, and a state library. The CE class I took, on critically appraising library research/articles, was one of the best CEs I ever taken, probably due to the knowledge and personality of the instructor who was from Newfoundland.

Copyright Utopia, Day 3 - Licensing Panel

Licensing and the Commons as Copyright Alternatives
Kimberly Bonner (moderator), Mike Carroll, Solveig Singleton, Elizabeth Winston

Cautionary/negative view (Elizabeth Winston):

• copyright does not fit all takers - some want tighter controls, others want fewer
• legislation restricts copyright holders' rights after the first sale, but licensing enables holders to retain control
• using licenses to transfer copyrights (retaining titles) risks monopolization [*I personally believe such risks are minimal*]
• one legitimate justification for use of license does not automatically justify licensing rather than transferring, as other user rights may be unnecessarily corroded

Supportive view (Mike Carroll):

• goal of Creative Commons is to get out of normal copyright allowances by licensing legal sharing of creative, scientific & educational materials
• one size does not fit all but standards are nonetheless necessary
• CC provides standardization in licensing
• CC inspired by Open Source movement; idea born in 2001, licenses released 2002
• each of the 6 possible licenses have three versions: metadata, human readable, legal
• CC licenses do not apply only to digital works; try to be medium-neutral
• have been used on blogs, photos, research articles, teaching materials, music, film, books
• CC licenses have role to play in domain where researchers just want credit/prestige for their work, not monetary compensation
• growth in use of CC licenses impressive (measured by link backs): Dec. 2003=1 million; Dec. 2004=5 million; June 2005=12 million; June 2006=145 million [*when these numbers where shared the person sitting beside me - a top administrator with the Copyright Clearance Center - softly exclaimed "Wow"*]

Cautionary/positive view (Solveig Singleton):

• licensing may not solve copyright problems
• trade creates wealth, voluntary licenses are trade, so both parties are better off, both benefit
• compulsory licensing, however, cuts into benefits; top-down, non-negotiable, one side raw deal
• voluntary licensing is form of Utopia but requires active participation
• nevertheless, there are problems with voluntary licensing: fragmentation (think of all the issues with music: composer, performer, producer, etc.); getting around public legislation (DRM); public legislation itself (criminalization of violations)
• the need to get around public legislation and the extent of public legislation are themselves symptoms of a collapse of copyright enforcement in the digital landscape, an issue which none of the licensing options address
• it is worth thinking hard, creatively about Congressional-level addressing of license fragmentation and non-enforceability issues in technological world
• think "hatless": when thinking about how to solve copyright problems, we need to take off the multiple hats we wear (those of consumer, producer)
• private licensing agreements are worthwhile experiments that need to go forward