The Scholar’s Space

Here’s our plan!

Those of us who are proponents of open access (OA) are celebrating the passage of the bill that makes the NIH mandate the law of the land now, but as I mentioned earlier this week, it’s time to start thinking about how to take advantage of this opportunity to offer services to our library patrons who have NIH-funded research to post. Here at the UT Libraries, we’ve been working on a little initiative to enable our School of Nursing faculty to get their research papers posted, in anticipation of the mandate. So far we have an outline of a training module (based on my own experiences with posting faculty papers to PubMed Central (PMC)), and the School of Nursing is willing to work with us to test out this module and institute a service for the faculty. We want it to be as easy for the faculty as possible, to encourage posting, but we did learn that there are several little hurdles you have to help faculty jump over.

For example, there’s the problem of which form of research paper the publisher permits you to post. The easiest thing would be to post a pdf of the published paper. Most faculty have these handy. But so far, more of the publishers I have needed to research want researchers to post the post-peer-reviewed manuscript, with a link to the original published article, if it’s available publicly. That will work fine going forward because we can design a process that obtains these from faculty as they are submitted to publishers, but for articles that were published more than a few years ago, faculty might not have those versions anymore.

Another hurdle is finding the OA policy of publishers who are not yet listed with Sherpa’s RoMEO site, and contacting them, and getting a response, and documenting the response, and being sure that it’s specific enough (indicating the version that can be posted, any embargo period, etc.). Of course, part of the idea with offering this as a service is that someone who is doing this for a group of faculty will develop expertise after a while, will see the same publishers come up again and again, will know what the policies are, will know what to ask faculty to supply. Expecting every faculty member to figure it out for themselves for 1 or 2 papers a year (you forget anything you do that infrequently, at least I do) is not the most efficient way to achieve a high posting rate. And a high posting rate is what we should be aiming for.

Here’s our training module, as it exists in its rough form. We’re still tweaking it and we have yet to try it out at the School of Nursing. Once we do that, I’m sure it will need further refining. I’ll keep you posted.

Steps for submitting a faculty author’s published article to PubMed Central

1. Assumptions: manuscripts or requests to post manuscripts come to the person responsible for submitting them without effort on that person’s part (i.e., it should be part of the process that faculty submit manuscripts to administrative PMC processing at the same time they submit them to their publishers).

2. Obtaining the correct form of document; format modifications; adding required publisher statements:

a. From an initial request by faculty to submit one or more documents (all instructions will assume a single document from this point), identify the journal name.

b. Search the Sherpa RoMEO database to determine the journal and/or publisher’s policy regarding posting of articles to public repositories, including but not limited to form of acceptable submission, required statements that must be added to articles, possible specification of where author may archive document.

Possible sub-modules: on the use of Sherpa RoMEO; interpretation of results; other resources of information on the journal or publisher is not available in Sherpa RoMEO; instructions for those who ask for and obtain permission from publisher directly (document the scope of the permission; specify form of submission)

c. Inform the faculty author about the form of submission that the publisher will accept and obtain a conforming document. At the same time, request that faculty author identify the grant that supported the research reported in the article, by grant number (you will need this later).

The most common forms of acceptable submission are the peer-reviewed manuscript or publisher’s pdf. Most articles include information about the grants that supported the research at the end of the article.

d. Review the document to identify possible formatting problems.

Poster must check with author about whether observed problems actually are items needing to be changed, or perhaps unusual formatting conventions in a particular field; let faculty author decide who should make changes, poster or faculty author.

e. After conferring with author, secure correction of formatting problems; add any statements required by the publisher (such as links to the original published document if available online) and save revised document as version 2; use a name that is descriptive, including primary author’s name.

Many publishers require a statement that the open access archival copy is or is not the final form of the publication; often they want a link to the published online version. Sherpa RoMEO typically links to the publisher’s website where these statements are located.

f. If changes were made or publisher required statements added, send revised submission to faculty author for review, identifying in the email transmittal message exactly what changes were made and where. Alternatively, make the changes using “track changes,” save that copy as “redlined version” and make a clean copy, accepting all changes, as clean version; send both versions back to faculty member for review and approval of changes.

g. Continue with the review/make changes/review process until faculty member approves the form of the submission.

3. Submit the document to PubMed Central. Check out the online tutorial that covers all steps in the submission process.

4. Changes after submitting the document: If the faculty author requests additional changes to the document after it has been submitted to PubMed Central, based on his/her review of the PMC-generated pdf: PMC sends the author an email telling author that the pdf is ready for review. If the author wants to make any changes, he or she indicates that to PMC by responding to the email message that PMC sends author alerting author that the pdf is available for review. Responding to that email will tell PMC that it needs to give the poster the ability to make the requested changes to the submitted manuscript and re-create the pdf.

5. PubMed Central creates html version and posts final documents:

a. Upon final approval of the pdf by author, PMC will create an html version, and seek author approval by email once more.

b. Upon final approval of the html by author, PMC will post the documents (pdf and html) and notify the author when the documents are publicly posted.

Here is an example of a manuscript Dr. Sharon Brown worked with me to submit to PMC: Dosage Effects of Diabetes Self-Management Education for Mexican-Americans: The Starr County Border Health Initiative.

As I understand it, the OA mandate was still in it, so I’m supposing that it’s now *official.* We have OA for NIH funded research projects. Ladies and Gentlemen, dust off you plans for implementing deposit services and get going!

Library Journal is reporting that the provision in the HHS appropriations bill requiring that NIH-funded research papers be deposited in PubMed Central has emerged unscathed from committees.

I’m taking the liberty of not composing a post for Scholar’s Space and simply entering one I made for LibraryLink, because of the subject’s importance:

The director of the Rockefeller University Press and the editors of the <em>Journal of Cell Biology</em> and the <em>Journal of Experimental Medicine</em> have published an editorial “Show me the data” in the JCB, recounting their efforts to analyze Impact Factor (IF) data relating to their publications, and to those of other journals publishing in the same field. The authors say, in effect, that the numbers don’t add up. They also express their frustration and disappointment. Since the IF is a very big deal in some places at least, and since some serious decisions  have been based on that data, a report of this nature is reason for concern. People resentful or suspicious of the decisions relying on IF information were sometimes dismissed as sore losers or cranks, who couldn’t accept what were termed the objective and quantifiable facts of IF analysis. Now, maybe not so much. We shall see what we shall see.
Show me

Well, it’s official: We have launched our documentary blog for our public domain and orphan works project, free*the*books. We invite you to view and post comments! Our new blog is focused on research by the University of Texas Libraries about international copyright laws that control the use and distribution of digitized books online.

As a Google Library Partner, UT Libraries will digitize over a million books from its rich collections within the next six years. Digitization of 800,000 books in the Benson Latin American Collection began in June of this year followed by this companion project to develop an authoritative process for determining the copyright status of books published in various Latin American countries and to identify foreign works in the public domain.

We have found little guidance to help us reliably identify which of our books are already in the public domain so we are piloting a project to develop new tools for ourselves and for anyone who wants to tackle these difficult public domain problems. We will document our process, our progress and our results on the blog’s pages along with links to web resources we find useful.

The initial pages of the blog include online resources to determine critical author birth and death data, prototypes of legal evidence tables and draft guidelines by which books, wherever published, may be determined to be in the public domain

We will be adding features, more pages and new posts to the blog on a regular basis and from time to time will also have guest contributors to add variety and fresh perspectives. We invite suggestions and comments from other Google Library Partners and anyone undertaking similar or related projects.

Email us at freethebooks@gmail.com or IM us at our Meebo widget in the sidebar of the blog. We are here; we are building an evidence base and we are looking for virtual partners!

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has some thoughts  about university presses and their role in the future of academic discourse and scholarly publication. In a double issue of the Association’s newsletter, entitled University Publication in a Digital Age  this topic is discussed from several angles by contributors who are familiar with the scene, and who make some interesting recommendations about what should be done to transition scholarly publication in digital format into the Academy. Some of this is heady wine indeed, and Dr. D. Schulenburger’s comments are useful as prophylaxis.

ARL
 

For large parts of the West’s intellectual history, things worked the other way round: it was important to translate from Arabic into Latin, and then into the growing vernaculars of Europe. Much of what we know about the science and math of Classical Antiquity came via the scholars and writers of the Golden Age of Islamic Science, who first translated the works of Aristotle,  Plato, the mathematicians and engineers of Hellenistic civilization into Arabic. These were subsequently re-translated by European scholars.  An organization called Kalima (the Word), based in Abu Dhabi, is sponsoring an energetic program of translation into Arabic of books written in Western languages. Books on scientific topics are important in Kalima’s focus. Some classic works, such as Newton’s Principia Mathematica are on the list, but books by modern authors such as Freeman Dyson, Stephan Jay Gould, Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking are also scheduled. It’s a big job and it require some serious resources.
Kalima

Roy Tennant of UC Berkekey’s Library gleans important items from the professional press, summarizes their contents and passes the list on to  interested readers via his Current Cites newsletter. The latest issue of CC is particularly rich in materials that Scholars’ Space readers will want to consult.  The Library of Congress has released for comment a draft of the report of its Working Group on the Future of Bibliograhic Control. There is also a link to some interesting articles on the Functional Requirements for the Bibliographic Record (FRBR), which has been setting dove cotes atwitter in recent months, as well as to some studies on folksonomies and on who uses Institutional Repositories and who doesn’t. The folksonomy thing is the basis behind the tagging systems used on social networks such as de.li.ci.ous. I was hoping for one good summary article to clue me in, and I have have found it.  FRBR  has lot of promise, especially in an environment based on electronic networks. Some of it seems pretty blue-sky, but,  we should aim high.

http://lists.webjunction.org/currentcites/2007/cc07.18.11.html

Charles Bailey supplied this comment, which corrects some errors of fact in the original posting.  I’m attaching his message to the original text.  I thank Mr. Bailey for his attentive reading and I apologize for the mistakes:

Thanks for the posting about Current Cites. Two clarifications. Roy is now Senior Program Officer, RLG Programs, OCLC Programs and Research. Current Cites is written by a team of librarians (http://lists.webjunction.org/currentcites/team.html), including Roy (who is also the editor).

As I have mentioned before, I’ve been working on a project about the status of blogs as scholarship. I have completed the “self-study” where I blogged the draft of a copyright paper at Mass Digitization,  journaled the experience, and tracked it statistically using Google Analytics. Now I’m now posting, in sections, the draft of the paper that describes the literature on blogs as scholarship, ideas for further research in the area, and the design, results and a discussion of my Mass Digitization experience. I’m blogging this draft at Lifelong learning, my research blog. I just posted the 4th section today. I estimate there might be about 8 - 10 sections. An earlier draft (about 2 drafts back) of the entire paper is posted at the Copyright Crash Course. I’ll post the final there as well.

The next step will be a survey of legal bloggers — 29 questions that grew out of my reading of the literature and my blogging experience. I’ll write up those results later next spring.

This has been a really fun project. I so enjoyed reading the blogs that were discussing whether blogs are scholarship. The same themes were circulating in the blogosphere as emerged in the literature (journals and law reviews). But it was all mere, well, very well informed, but nonetheless, opinion. Not much in the way of systematic observation. There are some really interesting assumptions, values and beliefs embedded in the discussion as well — what is the nature of information; who decides what scholarship is; who will gain and who will lose power if traditional forms of scholarship lose prominence? And the whole discussion takes place against the backdrop of the tremendous shifts occurring within scholarly publishing. A very interesting time to be a Scholarly Communications Advisor, and student studying scholarly communication!