1. Open Access and the Health Professions
October 22, 2014
Musselman Library, Gettysburg College
It’s International Open Access Week! We thought this would be a great time to talk with students about how open access affects their research now and, perhaps more importantly, their access to research after graduation.
You have access to a lot of scholarly and medical journals now... Hopefully everything you need to complete your coursework. But what happens after you graduate and enter a health profession? Will you be able to access the information you need to make informed decisions on the job? If you are a physician working in a practice that is affiliated with a hospital or university, you probably will. But what if you are a dentist? Or a vet? Or are working in another part of the world with less access to published information? How will you keep up to date with current research and treatments?

2. Open Access Explained
Open access will help you stay connected to the published research, whether or not you have an institutional affiliation and access to expensive journal subscriptions. So what exactly is Open Access?
(Watch video: )
You use a handful of free, open access tools all the time – can you name some? (Google, Google Scholar, PubMed) But you also use a lot of expensive, proprietary tools all the time – can you name some? (other databases, subscription journals). It can be hard to understand how these fit together even though you probably use them seamlessly every day. Hopefully tonight will help you see the bigger picture a little better.
The video talked about journal price increases. As students, you may not have any idea how much libraries pay for journal subscriptions. Any ideas?

3. What do journals really cost?
Here are some average journal costs organized by discipline. (Let’s assume they meant the HEALTH sciences and not the HEATH sciences, which sound extraordinarily specialized.) This is from the Library Journal Periodicals Price Survey for 2014.
What about journal costs here at Musselman Library? Do we have data?
Source: Bosch, S., & Henderson, K. (2014). Steps down the evolutionary road. Library Journal, 139(7),
Bosch, S., & Henderson, K. (2014). Steps down the evolutionary road. Library Journal, 139(7),

4. $2,223 for 2014
Price data is actually incredibly complicated to gather. There are only a few journals we subscribe to as standalone titles; most come in a subscription bundle so you don’t have price by title. The HS journals we have individual price data for actually aren’t that high... This may be because we don’t have individual subscriptions to the most specialized medical journals. Here are a couple titles.
$1,345 for 2014

5. NIH Public Access Policy
So journals can be expensive, especially in the sciences. The medical community has not accepted this lying down. The NIH Public Access Policy is one point of resistance.
As HS students, you may have heard of the NIH Public Access Policy. This is a major driver of OA in the health professions. What exactly is it?
Source:

6. NIH Public Access Policy
To advance science and improve human health, NIH makes the peer-reviewed articles it funds publicly available on PubMed Central.
The NIH public access policy requires scientists to submit final peer-reviewed journal manuscripts that arise from NIH funds to PubMed Central immediately upon acceptance for publication. 
Here I’ve blown up the relevant language from the screenshot on the previous slide. This is what the NIH Public Access Policy is all about, in plain English. The basic idea is that if we the U.S. taxpayers fund it, we the U.S. taxpayers should be able to access it without paying again. This was passed by legislative act in But what is this PubMed Central?
From PMC website ( ):
PMC Overview
PubMed Central® (PMC) is a free archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM). In keeping with NLM’s legislative mandate to collect and preserve the biomedical literature, PMC serves as a digital counterpart to NLM’s extensive print journal collection. Launched in February 2000, PMC was developed and is managed by NLM’s National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI).
Free Access: A Core Principle of PMC
As an archive, PMC is designed to provide permanent access to all of its content, even as technology evolves and current digital literature formats potentially become obsolete. NLM believes that the best way to ensure the accessibility and viability of digital material over time is through consistent and active use of the archive. For this reason, free access to all of its journal literature is a core principle of PMC.
Please note, however, that free access does not mean that there is no copyright protection. As described on our copyright page publishers and individual authors continue to hold copyright on the material in PMC and users must abide by the terms defined by the copyright holder.

7. Let’s take a step backwards
Let’s take a step backwards. Before we talk about PubMed Central, let’s review PubMed. Who has heard of PubMed?
PubMed is a discovery tool – it describes a body of published literature that exists in the world. You’ve probably used it to do research for class assignments.
PubMed Central is an access tool – it helps you access the fulltext content of the published literature.
Some of the articles described in PubMed are fulltext in PMC, but not all. When you search for articles in PubMed and then connect to fulltext, you are able to access the fulltext EITHER because our library subscribes to it OR because of the NIH Public Access Policy.
I wanted to mention PubMed Central because HS students are always familiar with PubMed, but PMC is a little more mysterious. It’s an important piece of the open access puzzle - but only one piece.

8. Finding OA publications in the Health Sciences
PubMed Central
Digital Commons Network
Institutional repositories of authors
Institutional repositories are collections of open access materials associated with an institution. OA Journals are not the only way to make scholarship open! Sometimes, even if the article is in a closed journal, you can find a version of it in an IR.

9. Gettysburg students and faculty.
What is Gettysburg College doing to promote and support open access?
The Cupola is our open access repository containing scholarship produced by
Gettysburg students and faculty.
cupola.gettysburg.edu

10. Let’s take a closer look!
That’s enough background information for now. Hopefully we’ve given you a taste of why OA is important in the health sciences. To dig in a little, we’d like you to look at specific journal article publications.
Instructions:
Work in pairs.
Use a computer in 014 or your own device. Go to There you will find a list of articles to investigate. PICK ONE.
Use the tools listed on the website to investigate your journal article. Record answers on the handout.
Regroup here in 15 minutes.
Image source:
libguides.gettysburg.edu/health/oa

11. This work was created by Janelle Wertzberger for an Open Access Week presentation at Gettysburg College in October 2014.
It is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike 4.0 International license:
I hope this exercise has prompted you to think about what happens to your information access once you graduate from Gettysburg, and how the costs of information access affect people working in other contexts – at institutions without as many resources as we enjoy, or in other parts of the world.
I also invite you to consider what happens to your own work as you become authors. Think about who should read them and how they will access them. Can you choose an open access option? Ask questions before signing contracts!