Submissions Jump Sharply Under New NIH Policy

PubMed Central Submissions Jump Sharply Under New NIH Policy In the months since passage of the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) mandatory public access policy in late December of 2007, the number of submissions to the National Library of Medicine’s (NLM) PubMed Central (PMC) repository, where authors are now required to deposit their NIH-funded research papers, has risen significantly. According to NIH statistics, submissions to PMC began steadily rising in December 2007, soon after it became clear a mandatory policy would be adopted in 2008. By the first month following passage of the new policy, January 2008, monthly submissions to PMC hit an all-time high of 1255, and have continued to increase significantly every month so far this year. In April 2008, when the policy officially took effect, submissions spiked even more sharply, rising from 1852 total submissions in March, to 2,765 in April and 2,593 in May. The April/May 2008 figures represent well over double the number of submissions for the same months in 2007 (1,198 PMC submissions in April ’07; 948 in May ’07). Although official figures for June have not yet been posted, the NIH’s Dr. David Lipman told the LJ Academic Newswire the submission totals were higher than May. It’s still too early to compute compliance rates, Lipman noted, but the early returns suggest a stunning turnaround. “Looking at the increase in submissions and the dramatic increase in journals signing PMC Publisher Participation agreements,” Lipman suggested a “reasonable projection” would be a compliance rate “around 55-60 percent.” Adoption of the “mandatory” NIH policy was spurred by abysmal compliance rates under the NIH’s first public access policy, adopted in 2005, which, after considerable pushback from publishers opposed to a deposit mandate, was scaled back to a voluntary policy at the 11th hour. In February, 2006, NIH reported to congress that compliance rates under the voluntary policy lagged around four percent. SPARC executive director Heather Joseph told the LJ Academic Newswire she expected PMC deposits to remain strong, and said the spike in submissions validated the work done by NIH and the policy’s supporters, including libraries, to educate NIH investigators about the policy, including workshops, podcasts, and an array of web resources. back to top ^

Should Publishers Have a Role—and an Interest—in Facilitating NIH Compliance? The backlash was so strong, it took less than a day for officials at the American Psychological Association (APA) to rescind a plan to charge a “$2500 fee” to facilitate compliance with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) public access policy. But while that short-lived plan was abruptly abandoned—APA now says it is “reexamining” its policy to “facilitate” NIH compliance—a lingering question remains: what role, if any, should publishers play in NIH compliance? Although the NIH policy regulates only grantees, publishers have become increasingly involved with facilitating submissions to PubMed Central (PMC) and other institutional repositories (IRs). On its web site the NIH lists hundreds of journals, offering services to aid compliance with funder-mandated public access policies like the NIH’s on behalf of authors. Among them are those from major publishers such as Elsevier, Wiley and the Nature Publishing Group (NPG), which recently announced it would offer a “free service” “to its authors “to deposit the accepted version of the author’s manuscript on acceptance, setting a public release date of six months post-publication.” But is compliance really so odious a task to archive a paper that publishers need to be involved? “No,” Open Access blogger Peter Suber told the LJ Academic Newswire. So why are many publishers taking on the burden of compliance? In a word, control. “The main reason why many publishers want to make deposits on behalf of authors is so that they can specify the embargo period,” Suber observed. NIH’s David Lipman acknowledged many publishers who permit authors to submit “author-final-manuscripts have indicated that they want minimum embargo of 12 months.” Could varying compliance services from publishers, meanwhile, be contributing to confusion among researchers, both over the right to deposit their works, or their obligations under the NIH mandate? In soliciting input on implementation of its policy this spring, NIH received 178 comments including one from Wyatt Hume, provost of the University of California (UC), who urged NIH to offer more concrete guidance on the “complex” relationship between funders, researchers, and publishers, citing the breadth of NIH-related services from publishers. Suber acknowledged Hume’s point, noting that there are many differing services from publishers because there are many “players with different interests.” Some publishers, he noted, such as the Public Library of Science, simply want all their articles in PMC. Others, he noted, “have nearly the opposite interest,” while some are in between, believing “that NIH-funded authors will gradually migrate to the journals which make their lives easier, and want to be among the winners rather than the losers from that migration.” Publisher involvement in facilitating NIH compliance, however, shouldn’t create confusion for authors, Suber maintained, especially not over their rights situation. “Authors sign funding contracts before they sign publishing contracts,” he explained. “When they eventually publish articles based on the funded research, they can only sign publishing contracts subject to the terms of their prior funding contracts.” Against this backdrop of increasing publisher involvement the APA briefly unveiled the most extreme publisher policy to date. While proposing to charge a deposit fee of $2500 per APA manuscript submitted to PMC, APA added no value, Suber noted, observing that NIH charges no fee for deposit, that submission is but a simple clerical process, and that APA didn’t even offer open access for the $2500 fee, still mandating a full 12-month embargo on submitted articles. Suber called it the “worst policy to date.” Although APA seemed to quickly get the message, rescinding the policy within hours of its posting, open access evangelist Stevan Harnad put blame for the fiasco on the NIH’s doorstep. Harnad maintained his oft-cited position that NIH’s requiring deposit in central repositories, like PMC, simply is not needed, and that simply mandating authors to deposit their work in their IRs is the most efficient way to go. “The simple way to avoid all of this needless confusion and complication is for both institutions and funders to mandate deposit directly in the author’s institutional IR,” he told LJAN. “Services like PMC can then harvest the metadata from there and link to the locus of the full-text in the IR…Immediate IR deposit mandates take the publisher out of the loop completely.” back to top ^

Google’s Knol; Highsmith sold; OverDrive’s Massive Digital Bookmobile Set To Roll I don’t know about you, but my head started to hurt today as I pondered the implications of Google’s now opened Knol, the web giant’s challenge to Wikipedia. “The web contains vast amounts of information, but not everything worth knowing is on the web. An enormous amount of information resides in people’s heads,” reads Google’s headache-inducing blog, announcing the launch. Google’s aim: harvest what’s in people’s heads—and sell advertising against it! User generated content, from answer sites like WikiAnswers to Encyclopaedia Brittanica’s recently announced Wiki-like effort, is becoming more and more popular. Given the kind of fun taggers have had with Wikipedia so far, I can only imagine what Google is in for… WilsonWeb. announced this week that it has been recognized with Serials Solutions KnowledgeWorks Certification. This assures libraries that its bibliographic metadata for WilsonWeb content is “accurately reflected within the Serials Solutions KnowledgeWorks knowledgebase.” In other news, Libraries Connect Ohio a collaborative of Ohio-based consortia has purchased access to H.W. Wilson’s database Biography Reference Bank. Covering bios of more than 550,000 people, it was named a Library Journal Best Reference Source… Blackwell has announced that Robin Champieux has been named director of sales and customer experience for North America. Champieux, who has an MLIS form Wayne State University, joined Blackwell in 2005 as part of the technical services unit. Before joining Blackwell she worked in the David Adamany Undergraduate Library at Wayne State University and interned with the National Library of Medicine… The University of Washington’s Foster School of Business has announced that Cambridge University Press will publish the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, beginning in 2009. The prestigious journal has a circulation of more than 3000 libraries. Under the new arrangement, the journal will go from four issues annually to six… W.W. Grainger Inc., a maintenance products distributor, has bought Highsmith Inc., provider of library equipment, furniture, and supplies. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed… Medialab’s AquaBrowser search and discovery platform, which now allows users to create “reviews and ratings and view personal tags.” Individuals can see their rating and an averaged “global community rating” based on all user input across participating libraries worldwide. Libraries also have the ability to monitor their statistics for how many tags, lists, ratings, and reviews are being created in their local system as well as globally. Two thumps up! Taking the e-message straight to the people, on August 10, OverDrive’s Digital Bookmobile will launch a coast-to-coast tour promoting digital downloads at public libraries. Visitors of all ages will “experience how to download digital audiobooks, ebooks, music, and video” via the bookmobile’s “virtual branch download web site.” It’s called a bookmobile—but it’s a 74-foot, 18-ton tractor-trailer is equipped with “broadband Internet-connected PCs, high-definition monitors, premium sound systems, and a variety of portable media players.” Nice ride! back to top ^

Submissions Sought for Library Journal’s Annual Architectural Issue If you have an academic building project completed between July 1, 2007, and June 30, 2008, make sure it is included in Library Journal’s annual December Architectural Issue. Projects can be submitted online or on paper. Academic project forms can be submitted or downloaded at www.libraryjournal.com/AcademicArch2008. The deadline is October 14, 2008. If you need more information, email Bette-Lee Fox at bl.fox@reedbusiness.com or call 646-746-6802. back to top ^

Best Sellers in Politics and Law, November 2007–present, as compiled by YBP Library Services
(13-digit ISBNs in brackets)

1. Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet
   Solove, Daniel J.
   Yale University Press
   2007. ISBN 0300124988 [9780300124989]. $24.00
   
   
2. Stem Cell Century: Law and Policy for a Breakthrough Technology
   Korobkin, Russell
   Yale University Press
   2008. ISBN 0300122926 [9780300122923]. $29.95
   
   
3. Opening the Floodgates: Why America Needs To Rethink Its Borders and Immigration Laws
   Johnson, Kevin R.
   New York University Press
   2007. ISBN 0814742866 [9780814742860]. $35.00
   
   
4. Equal Play: Title IX and Social Change
   Hogshead-Makar, Nancy
   Temple University Press
   2008. ISBN 1592133797 [9781592133796]. $84.50
   
   
5. Freedom for the Thought That We Hate: A Biography of the First Amendment
   Lewis, Anthony
   Basic Books
   2007. ISBN 0465039170 [9780465039173]. $25.00
   
   
6. We Shall Overcome: A History of Civil Rights and the Law
   Tsesis, Alexander
   Yale University Press
   2008. ISBN 0300118376 [9780300118377]. $35.00
   
   
7. Privacy at Risk: The New Government Surveillance and the Fourth Amendment
   Slobogin, Christopher
   University of Chicago Press
   2007. ISBN 0226762831 [9780226762838]. $37.50
   
   
8. Administration of Torture: A Documentary Record from Washington to Abu Ghraib And Beyond
   Jaffer, Jameel
   Columbia University Press
   2007. ISBN 0231140525 [9780231140522]. $29.95
   
   
9. Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution
   Holton, Woody
   Hill & Wang
   2007. ISBN 0809080613 [9780809080618]. $27.00
   
   
10. Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America
    Wilford, Hugh
    Harvard University Press
    2008. ISBN 0674026810 [9780674026810]. $27.95
    
    
11. Originalism, Federalism, and the American Constitutional Enterprise: A Historical Inquiry
    Purcell, Edward A.
    Yale University Press
    2007. ISBN 0300122039 [9780300122039]. $45.00
    
    
12. Next Justice: Repairing the Supreme Court Appointments Process
    Eisgruber, Christopher L.
    Princeton University Press
    2007. ISBN 0691134979 [9780691134970]. $27.95
    
    
13. Winners Without Losers: Why Americans Should Care More About Global Economic Policy
    Lincoln, Edward J.
    Cornell University
    2007. ISBN 0801446228 [9780801446221]. $27.95
    
    
14. Europeanization of the World: On the Origins of Human Rights and Democracy
    Headley, John M.
    Princeton University Press
    2008. ISBN 0691133123 [9780691133126]. $26.95
    
    
15. Weak Courts, Strong Rights: Judicial Review and Social Welfare Rights in Comparative Constitutional Law
    Tushnet, Mark V.
    Princeton University Press
    2008. ISBN 0691130922 [9780691130927]. $29.95
    
    
16. Global Political Islam
    Mandaville, Peter P.
    Routledge
    2007. ISBN 0415326079 [9780415326070]. $43.95
    
    
17. Conservative Ascendancy: How the GOP Right Made Political History
    Critchlow, Donald T.
    Harvard University Press
    2007. ISBN 0674026209 [9780674026209]. $27.95
    
    
18. Culture of Vengeance and the Fate of American Justice
    Aladjem, Terry Kenneth
    Cambridge University Press
    2008. ISBN 0521886244 [9780521886246]. $85.00
    
    
19. Mechanisms of Democracy: Institutional Design Writ Small
    Vermeule, Adrian
    Oxford University Press
    2007. ISBN 0195333462 [9780195333466]. $50.00
    
    
20. Evolution of the Judicial Opinion: Institutional and Individual Styles
    Popkin, William D.
    New York University Press
    2007. ISBN 0814767265 [9780814767269]. $45.00
    
    

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