After doing a slow burn about a significant library science teaching article  from the BMJ-owned Postgraduate Medical Journal and probably never getting it in PubMedCentral,  I found my way back to the main page of BMJ and saw, I thought, something to credit as accellerating open access:

“The BMJ (Impact Factor 13.66) provides open access to peer reviewed research as part of its commitment to readers and authors. We make all BMJ research articles freely available online, with no word limit, and send them directly to PubMed Central (the National Library of Medicine’s full text archive).”

Having just left PubMedCentral  with no satisfaction, I decided to go back and check out this promise.  Arriving at the BMJ page in PubMedCentral,  it did not appear that there were any articles beyond 2008.

Then I returned to the BMJ Research page and tried to guess where all the 2009-2010 research article had gone.  I looked at a featured current article on laparoscopic bariatric surgery, and it was there and free, as promised.  Good.  I also found it in PubMed, with a link back to BMJ.  

So here is an idea of what should be found on the BMJ web site or with a link-back in PubMed, courtesy of the current issue:

So  I have to question whether BMJ’s current articles are going into PubMed Central, if I cannot find anyting since 2008 in PubMed Central.   I welcome a BMJ explanation of what’s going on….

The Big Think site brought this video to my attention.  As this is a teaching blog, I think it is worth watching, if you are unfamiliar with this notion of who pays and what are the most sustainable models of open access.  

Panelists: Mike Rossner, Executive Director of the Rockefeller University Press; Ivy Anderson, Director of Collection Development and Management at the California Digital Library; and Bettina Goerner, Manager, Open Access for Springer.Date: March 9, 2010 Sponsor: Columbia University Scholarly Communication Program

The 2nd annual Conference on Open Access Scholarly Publishing (COASP) is taking place this week,  August 22-24, at the President Hotel, Prague, Czech Republic

One of the most eagerly expected presentations was given on August 23rd, the First results of the SOAP Project (large PDF, be patient).  There is also a SlideShare version of the presentation.

Recently I was asked in a blog post comment whether taxpayer-sponsored research combined with paying an additional out-of-pocket open access fee to an OA publisher amounts to a double-burden on taxpayers.

Good question.  Here’s how I would reply. There is already funding support precedent for either:

• Using part of the original NIH grant for page charges or open access fee (part of the first taxpayer subsidy)
• Seeking an institutional subsidy for non-NIH open access author fees.

Perhaps a public university’s institutional subsidy could be seen as a second taxpayer burden;  For a university such as UC Berkeley, it really seems a deliberate decision to adopt the value of making the research immediately and perpetually open and accessible.

There is an alternative.  It already exists.  There is a top-ranked,  NIH-published scientific journal, Environmental Health Perspectives, that presents the government as an open access publisher in the immediate and open distribution of public health information.  As part of its mission, EHP seeks to disseminate critical environmental health information as broadly as possible.

In 2003, EHP became a peer-reviewed research and news open-access journal. All news and research articles published in EHP since 1972 are available free online. EHP is committed to promoting the discussion and exchange of information internationally and even publishes a Chinese language edition. EHP also is committed to its Science Education Program.

Sometimes the soft firewall I try to keep between this blog and daily life at a top-tier academic medical center library just breaks down.

One of my favorite scientist teachers down the hall turned to me when her favorite librarian wasn’t available.  She was preparing a lecture for this fall’s new class of medical students and had found the perfect New England Journal of Medicine article to support her future lecture on genomic medicine, particularly the images.  I explained what most librarians have known for about five years: The New England Journal of Medicine created a  download service for images restricted to individual subscribers–though readers at institutional subscription sites could still download images for teaching by opening  each image separately and saving  it. At the time it seemed typical of publishers that want and need to provide extra services and benefits to retain their individual subscriber base…along with a don’t ask, don’t tell back-door way for institutional medical educators to continue to love NEJM images for teaching.

Well, as of a few weeks ago, we new have the NEW NEJM.   Medical educators may be stomping on their Red Sox caps all over the world, because even with institutional access, downloading a set of images for an article will cost either $15 or a bit more if you pony up for a personal subscription. Chi-Ching$.

Well, no real surprise, as publishers struggle to find revenue in competition with the growing open access movement and changes in federal law requiring NIH-mandated public access for NIH-sponsored research.

As I sat with my scientist teacher friend to commiserate, we scrolled down to the bottom of the article in question. It was not really original research, but  rather an inspiring review article by some of the top scientists and administrators at NIH.  To the NEJM’s credit, the article was free and available.   But those gorgeous images I can’t show you would cost a medical educator an individual subscription or $15. Not to mention the AP Biology teachers at hundreds of high schools across the globe.  The credit for the article read:

Seems like the credit for these images in part or in whole belongs to us tax payers, based on the contributions of the National Human Genome Research Institute.  So I encouraged my faculty friend to write to Dr. Feero.

There is still the issue of the NEJM feeding federally sponsored images into their revenue  machine…the new NEJM. It’s not the money that is the big issue.  It is the teaching of future scientists and physicians.  Can’t the NEW NEJM distinguish public images?

At first this blog from iMedPub or oMedPub (take your pick, they seem to be used interchangeably) seemed attractive, at first glance,  and also seemed to be highlighting promising articles from a new open access publisher.

My skepticism began to grow as I conducted an excruciating search for a real person behind “a social publishing house which has been developing services for the international medical community since 1997.”   There was consistent use of a social networking ID representing  iMedPub or oMedPub, but it was not obvious where the list of real staff lived. The blue eyes of those stock photo physicians began to look too blue.

There were only a few articles for the few journals this publisher launched, none indexed in PubMed yet.  At some point  I found the author instructions that eventually mentioned the very reasonable $200 U.S. author fee.  There were editors for these fledgling journals.  There were also some discussions of hybrid open access publishing models that compared unfavorably in the personal economic sense with iMedPub or oMedPub‘s very reasonable $200 U.S. author fee for all the benefits of open access.  The authorship and much of the interlocking websites seems to be aiming at a Spanish-language audience.  There is a social networking site Medicalia.org, an “exclusive next generation social networking service for Medical Students, Residents and Doctors.”  More of those stock photos with very brown eyes.

The numbers attached to the Medicalia.org social networking units seemed anemic.  Well, maybe they are just the new physician social network on the block.

Finally, I went down to a couple of the journal table of contents.   The first, Archives of Medicine, turned out to be a hybrid journal, and when I clicked on an article about low back pain in several Mexican communities, I was asked for a payment of $40 for the privilege of reading it. Whoops.

I tried another journal table of contents that seemed to be open access. the Archives of Clinical Microbiology and an article on listeria bacteria.  Well, if I wanted to download or print this open access article, I would first have to log in with my Facebook ID, leading me to conclude that they were harvesting my identity for their own advertising purpose.

Is iMedPub or oMedPub a predator, or is it just a way of doing the business of medicine for the Spanish-speaking world? I finally clicked on an “About iMedPub” link from an info button and found some names associated with editing:

Maybe something is just lost in translation, but I am obviously not impressed.

On July 29th, Allan Adler, Vice President of government and legal affairs at the Association of American Publishers (AAP), told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform’s Information Policy, Census, and National Archives Subcommittee that FRPAA would seriously threaten the scholarly publishing industry:

“Publishers strongly believe that American taxpayers are entitled to the research they’ve paid for. As taxpayers ourselves collectively and individually, everyone in this room has paid for government‐funded research, and the data and summary reports that result from this research. But taxpayers have not paid for the private sector, peer‐reviewed journal articles reporting on that research.”

I suppose Mr. Adler is attempting to represent the traditional role of publishers that produce print and electronic journals with independent editorial oversight and marketing, most of which reach a public or private readership via a private or institutional subscription.

The problem with making such a one-size-fits-all statement is that it misses the point that both state universities and public libraries that subscribe to either print or electronic journals are using public taxation resources in their budget to provide shared public access to biomedical journal articles, via institutional journal subscriptions or aggregated article service providers.   Taxpayers are paying again.

Additionally, at nearly every non-public academic medical center, including my own employer,  where I regularly assist consumers looking for health information, costly subscription license agreements allow on-site journal access to visitors, providing public access to consumers seeking current information on health care research.

Public libraries and schools send their consumers or students to health sciences libraries for access to emerging health information.  A public librarian’s first thought is not whether their local medical center library is public or private.

The Alliance for Taxpayer Access, a coalition of patient groups, physicians, researchers, educational institutions, publishers, and health promotion organizations,  has a growing list of institutional members, which also includes the Association of Academic Health Sciences Libraries (AAHSL).

Academic health sciences libraries understand the serials crisis and the issue of taxpayer access.  Individual researchers drop their personal subscriptions to journals and depend on shared library-subscribed access.  AAHSL provides relevant links to allow libraries to understand the issues of open access.  Taxpayers are paying once for NIH research…and many libraries are paying again.

I saw the announcement on resourceshelf.com about The University of Ottawa Press decision to launch a new open access collection of 36 UOP books will be available free to the online community in the University of Ottawa’s institutional repository, uO Research,  including both French and English-language in-print titles in the arts, humanities and social sciences.  Curious about the representation of biomedicine in uO Research, I took a look at the repository.

Developed in collaboration with the University of Ottawa Library, this open access collection uses customizable DSpace opensource software, leveraging a mature product with over 900 implementation sites around the world.  One of the standard attributes of a DSpace repository is the ability to define “communities” with tagging to encourage the displaying and browsing of similar items under a department or theme.  It was easy to see that uO Research has been initially organized around academic division faculty, the Library, the University of Ottawa Press, and their electronic thesis repository collection.

I found the Faculté de médecine // Faculty of Medicine community collection to be a small but promising collection of institutional productivity, combining classic search and discovery:  full text searching,  specialized collection links, and new deposits labeled as news:

There is no limitation to the variety of potential communities, but the management of potential growth depends on articulating and adhering to policy.

I was particularly impressed by the description of  library and  academic partnership  with an emphasis that all stateholders understand and agree to the policies and procedures, available  in this clear and unambiguous format and with a clear contact person (throughout the site).

This statement is an excellent policy model for academic institutions in their own planning phase for the green variety of open access.

On July 29th, Allan Adler, Vice President of government and legal affairs at the Association of American Publishers (AAP), told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform’s Information Policy, Census, and National Archives Subcommittee that FRPAA would seriously threaten the scholarly publishing industry:

“Publishers strongly believe that American taxpayers are entitled to the research they’ve paid for. As taxpayers ourselves collectively and individually, everyone in this room has paid for government‐fundedresearch, and the data and summary reports that result from this research. But taxpayers have not paid for the private sector, peer‐reviewed journal articles reporting on that research.”   Ouch! I will address this in a different blog post.

He added, “For over a century, non-profit and commercial publishers have served as the government’s partner in fueling scientific discovery and innovation. The presumption now that taxpayers should have free access to peer-reviewed journal articles seriously discounts the considerable contributions of our industry and highly skilled workforce of some 50,000, who are driving the US knowledge economy and supporting our leadership in science.”

On August 2nd, In Discovery, rediscovery, and open access: Part 1, Peter Suber, Berkman Fellow at Harvard University, Senior Researcher at SPARC, the Open Access Project Director at Public Knowledge, and Research Professor of Philosophy at Earlham College. has another perspective:

“The NIH research budget is more than the GDP of 140 nations.  When taxpayers devote that kind of money to research, they can maximize the return on their investment by ensuring that the results are available to all who can build on them.  In addition, the cost of an NIH-funded research project can be hundreds or even thousands of times greater than the cost of publication.  To allow its results to be held hostage by publishers is the same mistake on a different scale as spending billions on a Large Hadron Collider and locking up the results in toll-access publications.”

He also said, “Leaving access barriers any higher than necessary means slowing the process of inquiry and wasting more effort and resources than necessary.”

So there are the opposite ends.  Some librarians and publishers are looking for a middle way to expand access, like the American Physical Society that I blogged about earlier this week, which is at least offering to put free access to their scholarly journals into public libraries in a nod to taxpayers.

I really encourage my readership to read the testimony from the FRPAA hearing.  In a democracy, the will of the majority becomes more important than the personalities.  I applaud the House subcommittee for putting the prepared testimony on the web for public digestion, as well as archive the webcast:

Opening Statement of Subcommittee Chairman Wm. Lacy Clay (available from the webcast)

Prepared Testimony of Mr. Allan Adler

Prepared Testimony of Dr. Steven Breckler

Prepared Testimony of Professor Ralph Oman

Prepared Testimony of Dr. Richard Roberts

Prepared Testimony of Ms. Sharon Terry

Prepared Testimony of Mr. Elliott Maxwell

Prepared Testimony of Dr. Sophia Colamarino

Prepared Testimony of Dr. David Shulenburger

Prepared Testimony of Ms. Catherine Nancarrow

Additional Document 1 Submitted by Ms. Nancarrow

Additional Document 2 Submitted by Ms. Nancarrow

Additional Document 3 Submitted by Ms. Nancarrow

Prepared Testimony of Dr. David Lipman

Evidence 2010 will bring together international experts from the areas of education, EBM resource development, implementation, health economics and commissioning. Register now at the Early Bird rate and make savings. August 6th is the early-bird deadline.

This 2 day conference will be aimed at:

• Commissioners of evidence-based services
• Those involved in assessing the cost effectiveness of clinical interventions and services
• Developers of evidence-based resources
• Teachers and methodologists
• Those involved in implementation of evidence including front-line healthcare professionals

On the first day of Evidence 2010, there will be a debate of interest to fans of the open future:

Debate: The future of medical publishing in healthcare

Fiona Godlee  Editor in Chief, British Medical Journal

Bill Summerskill  Executive Editor, The Lancet

David Tovey Editor in Chief, The Cochrane Library

Tom Jefferson Scientific Editor PLOs ONE

Register now at the Early Bird rate and make savings.