Revised NIH Public Access Policy

Last Friday, the NIH released its revised Public Access Policy in response to the Congressional mandate to upgrade public archiving compliance to a funding requirement. Over the weekend, the NIH subsequently redesigned the Policy website, including the FAQs. I encourage you to visit the site and read through the FAQs, but in the meantime, here are the highlights:

• April 7, 2008 - date the Policy goes into effect; applies to grants and cooperative agreements active in Fiscal Year 2008 (Oct. 1, 2007-Sept. 30, 2008) and beyond, as well as to any contracts signed on or after the effective date
• May 25, 2008 - all applications, proposals and progress reports must include the PubMed Central ID number (PMCID) when citing articles that are affected by the policy; this includes articles not only authored/co-authored by the investigator, but any papers stemming from his or her award
• As of Jan. 14, 313 journals deposit articles into PMC on behalf of authors, so if papers are published in these journals, no further action is needed
• Non-compliance is "not a factor in the evaluation of grant applications," but "may delay or prevent awarding of funds"
• Articles submitted to PMC that stem from research funded by multiple awards only need to be archived once, as more than one award funding number can be attached to the record
• NIH revised the estimated number of articles published annually stemming from NIH-funded research to 80,000 articles

If you have any questions, please contact Molly Keener at 716-4203 or mkeener [at] wfubmc.edu

NIH mandate date: April 7

The NIH announced today that the revised public access policy mandating archiving in PMC goes into effect April 7, 2008, *MUCH* sooner than I (and likely many others) had hoped for. The official release can be found here, and Peter Suber’s blog announcement – how I learned of it – can be found here.

More information will be coming, but for now I’m heading home to enjoy a feast of crow with a big grin on my face!

Mandate victory for NIH

On December 26, 2007, President Bush signed into law the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2008 (H.R. 2764), which includes a provision (Division G, Title II, General Provisions, Section 218) directing the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to strengthen its previously voluntary Public Access Policy from a request to a requirement. Here is what the law stipulates:

The Director of the National Institutes of Health shall require that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication: Provided, That the NIH shall implement the public access policy in a manner consistent with copyright law.

This means that all articles accepted for publication in scholarly journals that stem from research funded in whole or in part by awards from the NIH must be archived in PubMed Central (PMC)—approximately 65,000 peer-reviewed articles annually. Although there are several hundred journals automatically archived in PMC by publishers, the responsibility for ensuring deposit falls on the authors themselves. Fortunately, Carpenter Library links to several tools to help authors – or those persons designed to make PMC submissions on their behalf – navigate the publishing and depositing process.

Although this is the first instance of the U.S. Government mandating free public accessibility to research funded by a major agency, this is not the first mandate on the scene. The NIH mandate joins company with another 20 funder, 11 institutional and 3 departmental mandates, including those from the Wellcome Trust, 6 of 7 UK Research Councils, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

For further analysis of the NIH mandate victory, see the January issue of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter, and Gavin Baker’s response and predictions.

It will likely be some time before the NIH issues the new policy; in the meantime you can familiarize yourself with the deposit process by complying with the voluntary Public Access Policy. If you have questions or concerns, or would like to request a group presentation on the current Public Access Policy and PubMed Central, contact Molly Keener at 716-4203 or mkeener [at] wfubmc.edu.

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.