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.