The Scholar’s Space

An updated FAQ on the manuscript deposit policy has been released by the NIH. The new document answers some questions that arose since the announcement of the policy, and includes some new material, such as a screen shot detailing where in the PubMed record the manuscript ID number can be found.
FAQ

As Peter Suber notes at Open Access News (Statement from NIH Director Zerhouni), NIH’s director held a meeting on March 20 that turned out to be sort of a hand-holding kind of thing, or so it appears from reports about it (I wasn’t there). He basically reiterated his belief that this is a good thing, and that with input from the public, we’re all going to get through it just fine. The focus was on implementation issues, not on whether we should do this — that is over — but the comments received before the meeting, summarized at the meeting, indicate that people are still in the mode of thinking about it as something we have to advocate or attach, depending on our point of view.

This may be because proponents of the Public Access Mandate still can’t quite believe it passed, and opponents of the Mandate haven’t given up hope of somehow turning back the clock. We would all be well advised at this point, it would seem, to focus on implementation and thinking about how the *process* can be best managed.

The enactment becomes effective in just one week. Are your plans in place to facilitate your institution’s compliance? Do you have ideas about how the process can be accomplished most efficiently and effectively? Please do share!

With just under a month to go before we hit the April 7 NIH OA deadline, I hope your campus is scrambling to figure out what, if anything, it needs to do to be on board when the new law goes into effect. The big surprise for me at University of Texas at Austin, was that what had, for seems like forever, been a library OA evangelist’s job, suddenly, overnight, became a matter of institutional “compliance.” OMG. Compliance is not a nice word in libraryland these days (we’ve totally lost whatever control we ever thought we had over information, patrons, etc.). So we went into collaboration with our Office of Sponsored Projects, the folks who handle grant funding processes for all NIH grantees, and thankfully they were interested and capable of responding quickly. We’re on our way towards the deadline without too much trepidation. But still, we don’t exactly have time to celebrate the incredible step forward for open access that this represents. I think I’ll feel more like celebrating when we’ve seen how this works after a year or so.

Here’s what we’ve done:

1. Read the new policy
2. Read Michael Carroll’s excellent summary of institutional options
3. Figure out which one makes the most sense for your institution (we’re going with his number 3)
4. Dot the policy i’s and cross the policy t’s, if any (we are still working on this part, but this is a compliance issue — we don’t have the luxury of 36 months to get everyone on the campus to “buy in” to the idea this is a good thing)
5. Plan an informative briefing session for NIH grantees with materials that can be posted to OSP and Library websites
6. Email the grantees to tell them about the deadline (luckily, we actually have all their names because OSP is able to run neat reports about them)
7. Hope for the best.

I’m sure I’ve forgotten something. Oh, I’m writing a short article for the Center for Intellectual Property’s Newsletter about what I call the “do nothing” option, and why I think it’s not as attractive as it might appear at first blush. Look for it around first of April.

What’s your story? What are you doing to keep your institution out of NIH hot water?

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.

Please see the ATA press release below about “Mandate for Public Access to NIH-Funded Research Poised to Become Law.” 

This is a significant development for not only the public who will have access to taxpayer-funded research, but also for the higher education administrators and library staff who will be helping NIH-funded researchers deposit copies of their manuscripts into the NIH’s online database, PubMedCentral. 

We’ve blogged about PubMedCentral and services for NIH-funded researchers before, PubMed Central as an Open Access Resource, and New Services for Scholars’ Success, and I certainly look forward to seeing if the NIH Public Access Policy becomes mandatory. 

To become mandatory, the bill the House passed and the bill the Senate passed must be reconciled before being delivered to the President for signature.   

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Full U.S. Senate Approves Bill Containing Support for Access To Taxpayer-Funded Research Washington, D.C. October 24, 2007 - The U.S. Senate last night approved the FY2008 Labor, HHS, and Education Appropriations Bill (S.1710), including a provision that directs the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to strengthen its Public Access Policy by requiring rather than requesting participation by researchers. The bill will now be reconciled with the House Appropriations Bill, which contains a similar provision, in another step toward support for public access to publicly funded research becoming United States law.“Last night’s Senate action is a milestone victory for public access to taxpayer-funded research,” said Heather Joseph, Executive Director of SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, a founding member of the ATA). “This policy sets the stage for researchers, patients, and the general public to benefit in new and important ways from our collective investment in the critical biomedical research conducted by the NIH.”Under a mandatory policy, NIH-funded researchers will be required to deposit copies of eligible manuscripts into the National Library of Medicine’s online database, PubMed Central. Articles will be made publicly available no later than 12 months after publication in a peer-reviewed journal.