Abstract
Signed into law in January 2008, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy went into effect March 19, 2009. This law has the potential to affect significantly the activities of librarians, researchers, and publishers. In an effort to assess the impact, Joseph Thomas of East Carolina University studied how academic libraries are responding to the new mandate and whether the librarians perceived a correlation between their activities in response to the mandate and the growth of institutional repositories.
INTRODUCTION
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) fosters advances in science by extensively funding research using tax-based grants. Scientific advances facilitate improvements in human health in direct relationship to the accessibility of the research. Now due to a legal requirement outlined on the NIH Public Access website, scientists who receive NIH funding must submit final peer-reviewed manuscripts to the digital archive PubMed Central upon acceptance for publication and subsequently provide free access to findings within twelve months of publication.Footnote 1 Many publishers have demonstrated that they are cognizant of their legal responsibilities by actively publicizing their compliance with the policy on their Web pages and/or submitting manuscripts on behalf of authors. According to the NIH, publishers of 620 journals submit manuscripts on behalf of the author.Footnote 2 Authors not publishing in titles included on the list are responsible for their own submissions.
Librarian Joseph Thomas designed and conducted a survey to determine how academic librarians are engaging their communities on scholarly communication issues, to identify which issues have received the greatest amount of attention, and to gauge how effective librarians believe their efforts have been thus far. His research also explored librarians' responses to the NIH Public Access Policy, commonly referred to as the NIH mandate, and any perceived impacts on the presence and growth of institutional repositories attributable to this mandate.
RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
A short survey of twenty-five questions was constructed and e-mail invitations to participate were posted to five library-related discussion lists: ERIL-L, Liblicense-L, ACQNET-L, COLLDV-L, and SCHOLCOMM.Footnote 3 The researcher reviewed websites of one-hundred Association of Research Libraries member libraries across the country and fifty-two academic libraries in North Carolina for content relevant to the research questions. In addition, he directly contacted librarians from several of the institutions for further discussion of specific activities listed on their websites.
RESULTS
Fifty-four survey responses contained usable data. Sixty percent of those responses came from librarians working in research universities, primarily in central or medical libraries. About a third of each of the respondents self-identified as reference/liaison librarians or administrators. Others included collection development librarians and scholarly communication officers.
Specific methods used to promote awareness of scholarly communication issues with campus constituents and the number of respondents who indicated using those methods are shown in . Very high research universities and medical schools led the way with the greatest number of activities. Respondents indicated that no single outreach method is more effective than any other, and most indicated that they use a combination of activities.
TABLE 1 Methods Used to Promote Awareness of Scholarly Communication Issues
Librarians who engage in scholarly communication outreach activities tend to rely heavily on their websites, targeted faculty workshops, and e‐mails to the faculty. In descending order of priority, the most addressed topics are copyright management, open-access opportunities to view research, complying with the NIH mandate, price inflation of serials and electronic resources, open-access publishing opportunities, institutional repository education and instruction, and legislative advocacy. Websites frequently address most of the topics with a few notable exceptions. Not publicized on websites are promotion of legislative advocacy or serials and electronic resources price inflation. Overall, informational activities designed to promote and foster awareness of legislative advocacy trail far behind the other topics. According to Thomas, it would be interesting to study the reluctance that librarians seem to exhibit with respect to legislative advocacy. Survey respondents also indicated that they do the least amount of scholarly communication educational outreach for university administrators.
More than half of the respondents rated outreach to individual faculty as effective or very effective. A similar percentage rated outreach to groups or administrators as effective. By contrast, respondents deemed campus-wide events less effective followed by websites, librarians-only committees, and posted promotional materials.
The next section of the survey asked respondents to describe how their library engages the campus on the NIH mandate and whether or not they have a Web page that addresses the new policy. Fewer than half of the schools that responded, twenty-six, had websites for the policy, with 85 percent of those having a general scholarly communication page. Eighty-five percent of those same schools also engaged in outreach to both individual faculty members and to groups or administrators. Only three of the twenty-six relied exclusively on their websites for outreach. Comments from three of the respondents indicated working with their office of sponsored programs and another mentioned using LibGuides. Overall, the universities with the greatest amounts of research production and/or medical schools offer the largest variety of activities and engagement of campus constituents. This might be an indication of the importance of NIH grants in those particular institutions; however, this study did not include calculations of NIH grants received.
The survey contained a section asking respondents to indicate what information about the NIH mandate they most frequently shared with their audiences. Information regarding complying with the NIH mandate took precedence over all other information offered on websites, although copyright management information topped the list of topics for all scholarly communication activities in general. In summary, the most consistent method for relaying information about scholarly communication issues is using a website. Even so, workshops for faculty remain a significant method for reaching faculty about NIH policy compliance, copyright management, institutional repositories, and open-access topics. Respondents noted workshops as an educational forum for the library community on these topics. That suggests that librarians are aware of the need to stay current on these issues. University administrators are more likely to be informed about serials and electronic resources price inflation than other campus constituents are and less likely to be informed about other subjects such as how to deposit manuscripts into open-access repositories. Once again, sharing information about legislative advocacy comes in at the bottom. Finally, librarians are hesitant to judge the effectiveness of their outreach efforts regarding the NIH mandate. At the same time there is no clear consensus on what methods are ineffective.
The final piece of this study was to determine the status of institutional repositories in the libraries surveyed and whether or not the NIH mandate has had a significant impact on the growth of those repositories. Out of all fifty-four respondents, less than half currently have or will have within a year an institutional repository that includes faculty-authored articles. Three respondents indicated that they were unsure of whether or not their institutions have repositories. Ten of the twenty-four respondents with an institutional repository indicated widely ranging amounts of growth in the past year from 300 percent to 25 percent or less.
Thomas analyzed the survey responses to determine whether reported institutional repository growth can be associated with the NIH mandate. Thirty-three respondents reported that they could not answer the question or that there was no association. According to the responses of two of the participants, some growth in their institutional repositories is attributable to the NIH mandate. The subsequent survey question asked for criteria used to determine the association between the NIH mandate and materials deposited in an institutional repository. Two respondents indicated that the author must indicate NIH status on submission to the institutional repository and one respondent indicated that the library deposits to PubMed on behalf of their authors. Four of the respondents routinely compared their faculty PubMed submissions to institutional repository submissions. According to the responses to this survey, growth in institutional repositories does not appear to be attributable to the NIH mandate.
SUMMARY
This study reveals some interesting opportunities for librarians with regard to scholarly communication issues. Librarians can and should be encouraged to create opportunities to work with their offices of sponsored research as well as university administrators. They are also in a good position to promote alternative publishing models, particularly open-access models. Contrary to what librarians may assume, faculty authors do not need librarian assistance to submit their manuscripts in compliance with the NIH mandate. They and their institutions would potentially benefit from librarian assistance in depositing their NIH manuscripts in their respective institutional repositories. It is also reasonable to conclude that librarians can do more outreach to administrators. Finally, librarians continue to exhibit reluctance to engage in legislative advocacy and this may represent missed opportunities to work collaboratively to ensure greater access to published research.
SELECTED WEBSITES CONSULTED
Duke University Libraries. “Scholarly Communications @ Duke.” http://library.duke.edu/blogs/scholcomm/ (accessed January 3, 2010). | |||||
Duke University Medical Center Library. “NIH Public Access Policy.” http://www.mclibrary.duke.edu/nihpolicy (accessed January 3, 2010). | |||||
Georgia Tech Library and Information Center. “Information About: Open Access and Scholarly Communication.” http://www.library.gatech.edu/scholarlycommunication (accessed January 3, 2010). | |||||
Princeton University Library. “NIH Public Access Policy.” http://libguides.princeton.edu/nih_public_access_policy (accessed January 3, 2010). | |||||
UCI Libraries. “Scholarly Communication and Management Program.” University of California, Irvine. http://www.lib.uci.edu/about/projects/scamp/scholarly-communication-and-management-program.html (accessed January 3, 2010). | |||||
University of Iowa Libraries. “NIH Public Access Policy.” http://guides.lib.uiowa.edu/nihpublicaccess (accessed January 3, 2010). | |||||
University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries. “NIH Public Access Policy Mandate.” http://guides.library.umass.edu/NIHPubPol (accessed January 3, 2010). | |||||
University of Wisconsin–Madison Libraries. “Scholarly Communication and Publishing.” http://www.library.wisc.edu/scp/ (accessed January 3, 2010). | |||||
Warren, Scott. “National Institute of Health Public Access Policy Guidelines.” Syracuse University Library. http://researchguides.library.syr.edu/nih (accessed January 3, 2010). | |||||
Washington University Libraries and Bernard Becker Medical Library. “Scholarly Communications.” Washington University in St. Louis. http://scholarlycommunications.wustl.edu (accessed January 3, 2010). | |||||
FURTHER READING
Albanese, Andrew. “NIH Mandate Seems To Work.” Library Journal 133, no. 14 (September 2008): 15. | |||||
Carroll, Michael W. Complying with the NIH Public Access Policy: Copyright Considerations and Options. Washington, DC: SPARC, 2008. http://www.arl.org/sparc/advocacy/nih/copyright.shtml (accessed July 8, 2009). | |||||
Okerson, Ann. “‘The Law is the True Embodiment of Everything that's Excellent’: Mandates—A view from the United States.” Serials 22, no. 1 (March 2009): 12–18. | |||||
Smith, Kevin L. “Managing Copyright for NIH Public Access: Strategies to Ensure Compliance.” ARL: A Bimonthly Report on Research Library Issues & Actions no. 258 (June 2008): 1–5. | |||||
Notes
1. National Institutes of Health, “The Omnibus Appropriations Act of 2009 Makes the NIH Public Access Policy Permanent,” March 19, 2009, http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-09-071.html (accessed July 13, 2009).
2. National Institutes of Health, “Information about Journals and the NIH Public Access Policy,” National Institutes of Health Public Access Policy, http://publicaccess.nih.gov/submit_process_journals.htm (accessed July 6, 2009).
3. Survey instrument available upon request from the author: [email protected]