Health Sciences Category

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The importance of open access medical literature, by James Amos, MD

James Amos, MD, Department of Psychiatry at The University of Iowa, continues our celebration of Open Access Week with a guest post on the importance of free access to medical articles for patients and their families.

The importance of open access medical literature

James Amos, MD

As a consulting psychiatrist, I teach medical students and residents, I really appreciate open access medical literature. We have a weekly case conference called Clinical Problems in Consultation Psychiatry, a practical way to teach the Practice-Based Learning & Improvement Core Competency.

This helps develop the habit of reflecting on and analyzing one’s practice performance; locating and applying scientific evidence to  the care of patients; critically appraising the medical literature; using the computer to support learning and patient care, and facilitating the education of other health care professionals.

Recurring topics are delirium and dementia. Our recommendations for patients, families, and colleagues depend on free, easy access to studies and reviews.

A poignant reminder was a recent CNN article about a man struggling to cope with early state Alzheimer’s disease. He said, “All we really are is our thoughts…” Ironically, mindfulness research tells us the opposite might be true. A paper in the Directory of Open Access Journals reviews the growing research literature on the role of mindfulness in moderating the suffering of those with dementia [1].

  1. Marciniak, R., et al. (2014). “Effect of meditation on cognitive functions in context of aging and neurodegenerative diseases.” Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience 8.
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Another take on Altmetrics

Check out this blog post on altmetrics by David Colquhoun, a London-based scientist, and Andrew Plested, a Berlin-based scientist: Why you should ignore altmetrics and other bibliometric nightmares. Scroll down the page to see responses, which are equally interesting.

BMJ Group recently ran a shortened version on their blog.

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Publishing Agreements, Nature, and Moral Rights of Authorship

Nature Publishing Group

Nature Publishing Group

Nature Publishing Group (NPG), a prestigious journal publisher for the Environmental, Life, and Physical sciences, has been receiving attention for language included in the publishing contracts they require authors to sign once a research paper has been accepted. Kevin Smith, the director of the Office of Copyright and Scholarly Communication at Duke University, noticed that, in addition signing away the economic rights to their articles, authors are asked to waive their “moral rights” to their work. From the license:

“The Author(s) hereby waive or agree not to assert (where such waiver is not possible at law) any and all moral rights they may now or in the future hold in connection with the Contribution and the  supplementary Information.” [NPG License to Publish, Clause 7]

Mr. Smith argues that this clause threatens the core scholarly principle of an author to be attributed to her work. NPG has responded to this by clarifying their reasoning for the clause: “The “moral rights” language included in our license to publish is there to ensure that the journal and its publisher are free to publish formal corrections or retractions of articles where the integrity of the scientific record may be compromised by the disagreement of authors.” While retractions are not uncommon in scientific literature, it is unclear why licenses to publish do not explicitly assert a right to correct or remove fraudulent or erroneous research findings.

As the creator of an original work, you have the right to make sure that your publishing agreements reflect your best interests. For assistance with publishing agreements, contact your department’s librarian or read more about retaining your Author’s Rights.

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Appropriations Bill Expands Open Access to Federally Funded Research

President Obama signed the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2014 last Friday (1/17/2014) to fund the activities of the federal government for the 2014 fiscal year. The $1.1 trillion dollar budget includes the requirement that federal agencies providing $100 million or more in annual research funding to make the resulting peer-reviewed research papers publicly available within 12 months of publication. This provision is an expansion of the Open Access policy of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to cover agencies within the purview of the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education. Here is an excerpt of the bill that details this provision:

Sec. 527. Each Federal agency, or in the case of an agency with multiple bureaus, each bureau (or operating division) funded under this Act that has research and development expenditures in excess of $100,000,000 per year shall develop a Federal research public access policy that provides for—

(1) the submission to the agency, agency bureau, or designated entity acting on behalf of the agency, a machine-readable version of the author’s final peer-reviewed manuscripts that have been accepted for publication in peer-reviewed journals describing research supported, in whole or in part, from funding by the Federal Government;

(2) free online public access to such final peer-reviewed manuscripts or published versions not later than 12 months after the official date of publication; and

(3) compliance with all relevant copyright laws.

Like the NIH Public Access Policy, this will require recipients of federal research funding to deposit their final research papers to an Open Access repository like PubMed Central or Iowa Research Online. Details of specific public access policies have yet to be released.

[Washington Post | SPARC]

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Publish in PeerJ for Free Until 2014

PeerJ Logo. License: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. Available: https://peerj.com/about/press/

PeerJ Logo. License: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. Available: https://peerj.com/about/press/

PeerJ will publish any accepted article that was submitted for review before January 1st, 2014. PeerJ is an open access publisher of peer-reviewed articles in the biological and medical sciences [full list of subject areas]. From the statement:

[a]s we approach the end of our first calendar year of publication, we want to open up the PeerJ experience to as many researchers as possible. By doing so, we also want researchers like you to experience the benefits that our ‘end-to-end process’ provides (i.e. the close integration of PeerJ PrePrints with PeerJ).

As a result, we are pleased to announce that from now through the end of 2013, any article that is submitted to PeerJ PrePrints (including any articles which have already been submitted there) can go on to be published in PeerJ (the journal) entirely for free (assuming it passes peer review and assuming you initiate the PeerJ submission process before Jan 1st 2014)*.

As we celebrate the 10 year anniversary of the Berlin Declaration (one of the seminal moments in the history of Open Access), we want to make sure that researchers realize that Open Access publishing has evolved, and we want as many as possible to experience what it has become!

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Note: * For the sake of clarification, your preprint must be posted to PeerJ PrePrints before the associated PeerJ submission is editorially Accepted, or before Jan 1st 2014 (whichever comes first). Ideally, of course, you should submit the PrePrint first, and then submit the same article to PeerJ. Your resulting PeerJ submission must be initiated before Jan 1st 2014
Normally, PeerJ operates on a membership model, where authors pay a one-time fee to publish in the journal. Any interested University of Iowa authors are encouraged to apply for the Open Access Fund to have the membership fee covered.
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On the “Open Access Sting” Published in Science

Earlier this month, Science published a news article (“Who’s Afraid of Peer Review?”) by John Bohannon, a reporter and Harvard University biologist, that investigates the quality of the peer-review process at some fee-charging, Open Access journals in the life sciences. Bohannon submitted a credible, yet “hopelessly flawed” scientific article on cancer research to 304 relevant, fee-charging Open Access journals, 158 of which accepted it for publication It is worth noting that journals from the Public Library of Science, BioMed Central, and Hindawi, the three biggest Open Access publishers, rejected the paper outright.

The news of this study sparked spirituous debate in the blogosphere and the popular media (especially in the comments sections), oftentimes confounding its implications on the future of science, open access, and peer-review. As we approach Open Access Week (Oct. 21-27), it is important to consider what this article means in the broader context of scholarly communication.

“The takeaway shouldn’t be that Open Access is broken and not worth trying. Open Access is great and everyone believes that. It’s just a question of how to implement it.” – John Bohannon on NPR.

While Bohannon’s article uncovers problems in academic publishing, it is not clear that any of the problems are specific to Open Access. Bohannon specifically studied a subset of Open Access journals (many of which were known to be problematic) as a response to his colleague’s experience with a publishing scam, in which a fraudulent scientific journal collected publication fees from the author without performing any legitimate peer-review. Given the scope of this question and the nature of the fake research paper, the findings represent less than 4% of Open Access journals, of which less than 2% accepted the bogus paper (figures according to the Directory of Open Access Journals). Because the article did not study subscription based-journals, non-fee charging journals, non-English journals, and non-life sciences journals, it cannot be concluded that the problem is unique to Open Access.

One major effect of Bohannon’s work is the fascinating discussion on Open Access and peer-review that emerged in the wake of his article. Michael Eisen, a UC-Berkeley Biologist and co-founder of the Public Library of Science, suggests that the problem Bohannon’s study reveals is in the antiquated and opaque standards of the peer-review process. Peter Suber, Director of the Harvard Office of Scholarly Communication, reminds us that Open Access is not just about publishing; to tie this news to Open Access is to ignore the far more popular Open Access archiving option (such as depositing work in Iowa Research Online or PubMed Central) which is compliant with most traditional publishing agreements. Not interested in reading other blogs? Take a listen to this Science Live Chat with John Bohannon on the response to his study.

News like this reminds us that changes in the scholarly publishing system can be far more nuanced than expected and that it is important to continue these discussions as members of the scholarly community.

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eLife Editor Wins Nobel Prize for Cellular Research

eLife

Image: eLifesciences.org

The 2013 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine was awarded to James E. Rothman, Thomas C. Sudhof and Randy W. Schekman for their research on cell transport systems. This work has strengthened the medical community’s understanding of neurological diseases, diabetes, and immunological disorders. Schekman, a Cell Biologist at the University of California at Berkeley, is a prominent support of Open Access publishing and is the Editor-in-Chief at eLife, an innovative Open Access journal in the biomedical sciences. eLife joins The Public Library of Science and PeerJ in offering a cutting-edge Open Access publishing platform for prestigious scientists to share their work, data, and rich media. eLife is currently free to publish (no author-side fees). For more information, please visit the journal’s website or watch the video.

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Support for PeerJ Memberships via Open Access Fund

PeerJ Logo. License: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. Available: https://peerj.com/about/press/

PeerJ Logo. License: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. Available: https://peerj.com/about/press/

Calling all Biological and Medical scientists! The University Libraries is pleased to begin supporting PeerJ memberships for all interested University of Iowa faculty and researchers through the Open Access Fund. The University Libraries and the Office of the Provost established the Open Access Fund to pay the processing fees related to open access publishing.

Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.Peter Suber

PeerJ is an Open Access publisher of scholarly articles in the biological and medical sciences [full list of subject areas]. Rather than charging a per-article fee for making an article Open Access, PeerJ charges a one-time membership fee for authors [Breakdown of membership types]. All interested UI faculty, graduate students, and research should contact Michael Wright for more information about setting up a PeerJ membership.

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MSNBC’s Morning Joe Discusses Big Data, Open Access, and Cancer Research

Kathy Giusti, co-founder of the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation (MMRF), was featured on MSNBC’s Morning Joe this week to talk about how the open sharing of data can improve cancer research. The MMRF recently launched the MMRF Research Gateway to serve as an open access portal for data on Multiple Myeloma, a common form of blood cancer. The goal is to make the data openly available so that progress in cancer treatment can be accelerated. The MMRF Research Gateway requires registration, however non-profit academic, private, and governmental users can access the data free of charge. Watch the clip.

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PeerJ Survey Shows High Author Satisfaction

PeerJ Logo. License: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. Available: https://peerj.com/about/press/

PeerJ Logo. License: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. Available: https://peerj.com/about/press/

The results of a survey of authors who submitted their research to PeerJ for publication were released today. The survey measures the satisfaction of authors from the first six-months of the journal’s publishing operations. With a 51% response rate, the results looks promising. Some highlights:

  • 92% of authors report having a “good experience” or better with publishing in PeerJ
  • 83% of authors intend to submit their future research, with 17% reporting “maybe,” depending on the subject appropriateness for the journal
  • 94% of authors would recommend PeerJ to a colleague

PeerJ is a peer-reviewed, open access publisher of research articles in the biological, medical, and health sciences. Operating on an author membership model, as opposed to article-processing fee model, member authors can submit articles for publishing after paying a one-time membership fee. For authors interested in soliciting feedback on works-in-progress, there is also a free PrePrints option.  [Read the announcement]