Access2Research

Here is an article from The Chronicle of Higher Education about the Acces2Research petition circulating from the White House's We the People public petition website. The petition is close to getting its required 25,000 signatures. When the number is received, the petition will go to the White House Chief of Staff for a response. The petition asks President Obama to mandate that eleven other federal agencies make their federally funded research results freely available to the public, similar to the NIH mandate that places its funded research resulting in scholarly, peer reviewed articles into PubMed Central.

RUK (Reed Elsevier): The Maturing Threat of Open Access

As University Libraries continue to reduce their journal acquisitions due to mandated library resources funding reductions, commercial publishers will face losing their primary customer base, and thus, their profit margins. This article features Elsevier publishing. University libraries are exploring the growing Open Access model as an alternative to license and subscription-based journal purchasing.

Translational Research Symposium

The Kansas City Area Life Sciences Institute is hosting its 2012 Research Symposium on Thursday, May 31: The Power of Collaboration in Translational Research. Please go here for more information.
Additionally, there is an article in The KC Star which gives a nice explanation of what Translational Research is written by an VP at the Kauffman Foundation.

Academic Senate at UCSF voted for OA

UCSF IMPLEMENTS POLICY TO MAKE RESEARCH PAPERS FREELY ACCESSIBLE TO PUBLIC

Health Sciences Campus Becomes Largest in Nation to Adopt Open-access Policy

The UCSF Academic Senate has voted to make electronic versions of current and future scientific articles freely available to the public, helping to reverse decades of practice on the part of medical and scientific journal publishers to restrict access to research results.

The unanimous vote of the faculty senate makes UCSF the largest scientific institution in the nation to adopt an open-access policy and among the first public universities to do so.

“Our primary motivation is to make our research available to anyone who is interested in it, whether they are members of the general public or scientists without costly subscriptions to journals,” said Richard A. Schneider, PhD, chair of the UCSF Academic Senate Committee on Library and Scholarly Communication, who spearheaded the initiative at UCSF. “The decision is a huge step forward in eliminating barriers to scientific research,” he said. “By opening the currently closed system, this policy will fuel innovation and discovery, and give the taxpaying public free access to oversee their investments in research.”

UCSF is the nation’s largest public recipient of funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), receiving 1,056 grants last year, valued at $532.8 million. Research from those and other grants leads to more than 4,500 scientific papers each year in highly regarded, peer-reviewed scientific journals, but the majority of those papers are only available to subscribers who pay ever-increasing fees to the journals. The 10-campus University of California (UC) system spends close to $40 million each year to buy access to journals.

Such restrictions and costs have been cited among the obstacles in translating scientific advances from laboratory research into improved clinical care.

The new policy requires UCSF faculty to make each of their articles freely available immediately through an open-access repository, and thus accessible to the public through search engines such as Google Scholar. Articles will be deposited in a UC repository, other national open-access repositories such as the NIH-sponsored PubMed Central, or published as open-access publications. They will then be available to be read, downloaded, mined, or distributed without barriers.

Schneider said hurdles do remain, including convincing commercial publishers to modify their exclusive publication contracts to accommodate such a policy. Some publishers already have demonstrated their willingness to do so, he said, but others, especially premier journals, have been less inclined to allow the system to change.

Under terms negotiated with the NIH, a major proponent of open access, some of the premier journals only allow open access in PubMed Central one year after publication; prior to that only the titles and summaries of articles are freely available. How such journals will handle the UCSF policy remains to be seen, Schneider said.

The UCSF policy gives the university a nonexclusive license to distribute any peer-reviewed articles that will also be published in scientific or medical journals. Researchers are able to “opt out” if they want to publish in a certain journal but find that the publisher is unwilling to comply with the UCSF policy. “The hope,” said Schneider, “is that faculty will think twice about where they publish, and choose to publish in journals that support the goals of the policy.”

Worldwide Open Access Movement

UC was at the forefront of the movement to open scientific papers to the public through its libraries, and generated the first major effort to create a policy of this kind in 2006. It was a complex policy, though, requiring faculty to “opt in,” and for a variety of reasons failed to garner enough faculty votes across the UC system, said Schneider. But since then, he said, the academic and economic climate has changed substantially in favor of the open access movement.

In the past few years, 141 universities worldwide, including Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have learned from UC’s initial missteps and have created very effective blanket policies similar to the one just passed at UCSF, Schneider said. Universities throughout Europe and Latin America also have pursued similar policies. Moreover, many funders have adopted open access policies for their grant recipients as a requirement for getting a research award, so faculty are now used to the practice of making their work freely available.

Last year, scientific, technical, and medical journals generated billions of dollars in profits for their publishers, and, for the largest publishers, profit margins were around 30 percent to 40 percent Schneider said. Yet, research papers are largely funded by taxpayers, submitted to the journals without compensation, and edited and reviewed on a volunteer basis by colleagues throughout the world. Due to the high fees incurred in subscribing to such journals, many universities and the general public have access only to an abstract on each paper, which includes a short description of the research and its results.

The UCSF vote was the result of a faculty-led initiative and makes UCSF the first campus in the UC system to implement such a policy. It has been developed in collaboration with other UC campuses and systemwide committees, especially the UC Committee on Library and Scholarly Communication, with the ultimate goal of implementing the policy across all ten UC campuses.

“This vote is very, very good news,” said Karen Butter, UCSF librarian and assistant vice chancellor. “I am delighted that UCSF will join leading institutions in changing the model of scientific communications, and that UCSF authors have chosen to take control of their scholarship, providing new audiences with incredible opportunities to translate UCSF’s remarkable research into improving health care.”

The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) is a leading university dedicated to promoting health worldwide through advanced biomedical research, graduate-level education in the life sciences and health professions, and excellence in patient care.

New Health Information Literacy Tool Available at Dykes Library

Dykes Library has been awarded a 1-year license for software called Health Literacy Advisor from Health Literacy Innovations, Inc. The MidContinental Region of the National Network of Libraries of Medicine awarded licenses to regional libraries. Described on the HLA website "[a]s a health literacy checker, the HLA streamlines the review and simplification process by allowing users to assess the health of their documents and then fix it using plain language principles."

Documents can be reviewed for readability level and the results stamped in the footer. The software will scan the document and highlight words that compromise the readability. It will then make recommendations for improvement.

The Health Literacy Advisor program will run for 1 year from the end of April 2012 through the end of April 2013. This project has been funded in whole or in part with Federal funds from the Department of Health and Human Services, National Institutes of Health, National Library of Medicine, under Contract No. HHS-N-276-2011-00006-C with the University of Utah Spencer S. Eccles Health Sciences Library.

For more information about how to access the software, contact Amy Ritterskamp at Dykes Library at 588-7168 or aritterskamp@kumc.edu

Experts.kumc.edu down for maintenance

Meet Our Experts, http://experts.kumc.edu, may be down periodically today for scheduled maintenance. We will try to minimize downtime and we apologize for any inconvenience.

Copyright - E-Reserves and Georgia State Univ legal case

Georgia State University was sued by publishers alleging copyright infringement on the use of material for E-Reserves. Duke University’s first Scholarly Communications Officer, Kevin Smith, JD, offers his review of this lawsuit. http://blogs.library.duke.edu/scholcomm/2012/05/12/the-gsu-decision-not-an-easy-road-for-anyone/ Also reported on by Inside Higher Ed

Henry Stewart Talks - May updates

Another new series has been added, Macrophage Heterogeneity and Function as well as a number of new talks in existing series such as Cells of the Innate Immune System Series and Good Laboratory Practice Series.

Library hours

Please be aware that after Friday, May 11th, the library's hours will be modified for 2 weeks due to the break time between spring and summer semesters.  Hours will be the following:

• Closed Saturdays and Sundays until June
• 8am - 5pm Monday through Friday
• Memorial Day, May 28th:  open 6pm - 11pm

Regular hours will resume Tuesday, May 29th.