NIH Public Access Policy May be Mandatory

A big development in the public access movement is the inclusion of language in the House and Senate bills for the 2008 NIH appropriations that would require the submission of research articles funded by NIH to PubMedCentral within 12 months after their appear in a journal.

This would make the current NIH policy mandatory and sets the submission deadline of no later than 12 months after publication. Publishers have already started experimenting with NIH on submitting author manuscripts directly to PubMedCentral on behalf of researchers.

This has been a long awaited change to the NIH Public Access Policy. The Public Access Working Group and the NLM Board of Regents recommended mandatory submission over a year ago due to very low submission rates. Numerous library and consumer groups have been advocating for this language to be include in the NIH 2007 appropriations and reauthorization bills.

Watch this blog for more information when the final bill is passed and NIH issues its new policies and procedures.

New HHMI Public Access Policy

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) just announced that it will require its scientists to publish their original research articles in scientific journals that allow the articles and supplementary materials to be made freely accessible in a public repository within six months of publication. This policy expands upon the current policy requiring HHMI investigators to share published research materials, databases, and software in a timely and useful manner.

The new policy applies to all manuscripts submitted on or after January 1, 2008 where an HHMI investigator is the major author. What's a major author? If the HHMI scientist is listed first or last on a paper, or is designated the corresponding author, than the HHMI investigator is considered the major author. However, HHMI strongly encourages all its investigators and collaborators, whether or not the major author, to comply with the public access policy.

For those in the biomedical sciences, PubMedCentral (PMC) developed by NIH and the National Library of Medicine (NLM) is the designated free digital archive. If the article is in a journal outside biological sciences, then deposit must be made in a comparable repository within 6 months.To help authors with this process, HHMI has entered an agreement with Wiley Publishers for uploading manuscripts to PubMedCentral, paying Wiley a fee for each upload. This goes into effect as of October 1. In addition, the American Society of Hematology, publisher of Blood, has extended its open access option to HHMI authors as of October 1, 2007.

Duke Goes Tobacco-Free

Effective July 4, 2007, all Duke Medicine property, grounds and parking areas will be tobacco-free. Several smoking cessation programs are available for Duke employees and spouses from Live for Life. Call 684-3136 and choose option 3 for more information.

Chat With a Librarian

Need help while you're in the Library? We are now offering our Instant Messenger reference service straight from the desktops of our Library computers!
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Duke Librarians at MLA

Many of the DUMCL librarians recently presented at the annual conference of the Medical Library Association in Philadelphia. See what we've been sharing with our colleages across the country.

KOOL Tools to help find books at Duke

LibX (www.libx.org)
LibX is a Firefox extension that installs a tool bar on the Firefox browser that lets you search the Duke catalog directly. It also lets you drag any word or words from a web page onto the tool bar to search the Duke catalog. Currently,55 academic and public libraries are offering LibX editions to their users, an additional 85 libraries (Duke is currently on this list) are testing editions.

BookBurro (bookburro.org)
Book Burro is a Web 2.0 extension for Firefox. When it senses you are looking at a page that contains a book, it will overlay a small panel which when opened lists prices at online bookstores such as Amazon, Buy, Half (and many more) and whether the book is available at a local library. You can choose which book sellers you want listed and designate libraries by a zip code. This is great if you find a book in Amazon and want to know if it is available at Duke or in your local library. Here's the results for the book The Last Well Person.

New! Check out our new books immediately!

Duke Medical Center Library has changed our new book circulation policy. No longer do you have to wait an entire week to check out our new books! As of Thursday, May 31, they can be checked out immediately for a two week loan period. Our previous policy was to hold them for a week before allowing circulation. New books can be found on the New Book Shelf near the Library Service Desk for two months, after which they will be added to the stacks. If you'd like to get a jumpstart, visit our Library on Thursday afternoons to see what's hot off the press. Also, check out our free book cart, which is stocked on Thursdays as well.