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. 2006 Jul;94(3):279–283.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Policy on Enhancing Public Access: tracking institutional contribution rates

Philip J Kroth 1, Erinn E Aspinall 1, Holly E Phillips 1
PMCID: PMC1525307  PMID: 16888660

INTRODUCTION

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) enacted its Policy on Enhancing Public Access to Archived Publications Resulting from NIH-Funded Research on May 2, 2005 [1, 2]. The policy requests that authors of peer-reviewed publications resulting from NIH-funded research voluntarily submit a copy of their final manuscript to the National Library of Medicine (NLM) for archiving in PubMed Central (PMC), the NLM's open access electronic repository for life sciences journals.

Because compliance with the policy is voluntary, its success depends on investigators' awareness of the policy and their willingness to contribute their work to PMC. Librarians wishing to promote the NIH policy need a tool to help determine an institution's contribution rate to PMC so they can direct local awareness training and library support for the policy. This paper presents an adaptable institutional contribution rate (ICR) formula using NLM's PubMed database.

METHODS

Using the NIH policy as a guideline, 5 variables have been identified for tracking an institution's contribution rate to PMC: (1) NIH-funding, (2) publication types, (3) date restrictions, (4) institution, and (5) PMC inclusion. These 5 variables compose a two-part PubMed query, PE and PD. Query PE retrieves citations for articles eligible for deposition into PMC from an institution during a defined time period by accounting for the first 4 variables. Query PD is designed to retrieve citations for articles deposited into PMC from that same institution during that same time period. Query PD includes the first 4 variables from PE plus a 5th variable that retrieves citations of articles found in PMC. The ICR (RPMC) is determined by dividing the results of query PD by the results of query PE and multiplying that result by 100.

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The PubMed queries used for the ICR formula are shown in Table 1 and are available electronically in the University of New Mexico's (UNM's) repository, DSpaceUNM [3].

Table 1 PubMed queries for University of New Mexico's contribution rate formula [3]

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The ICR formula queries PE and PD were designed and tested by the authors, with further review by two health sciences librarians with over fifty years combined in search experience. PubMed was selected for the ICR formula query development, because (1) all citations of manuscripts submitted to PMC are searchable in PubMed, whether or not they are published in a MEDLINE-indexed journal [4]; (2) PubMed subsets necessary for the ICR formula queries are unique to PubMed; and (3) PubMed's free access enables any librarian to adapt the ICR formula for local use. To further ensure quality, the deputy chief of the bibliographic services division at NLM analyzed the queries. This feedback resulted in query modification to reflect the PubMed quality control process, the PubMed search algorithms, and the intricacies of the PubMed Affiliation field. Table 2 details the query design, limitations, and search strings for each of the five variables represented in the ICR formula.

Table 2 PubMed search string development

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RESULTS

UNM's contribution rate for the period between May 2, 2005, and January 6, 2006, was 5.4%, as calculated from the 5 citations retrieved by query PD and the 93 citations retrieved by query PE. The 5 citations retrieved by query PD were all from journal titles included in PMC. Nationally, the ICR formula calculates a contribution rate of 7.6% for the same time period. The national rate was calculated by removing the institutional variable from queries PD and PE.

DISCUSSION

The ICR formula is a useful tool for measurement and planning; however, it has several limitations (Table 2). One limitation relates to the NIH policy's option to delay public availability of deposited articles for up to a year from the publication date [1]. As a result, the ICR queries cannot account for author-delayed articles. This lag-time issue could be addressed by including citations of delayed articles in PubMed before the release of the full text. Another limitation reflects PubMed's standard of tagging citations as receiving NIH funding only if the funding is indicated in the article [5]. This issue could be addressed locally by librarians who can present recommendations to authors, including acknowledgement of funding in publications, as they promote the NIH policy. Another solution could be for editorial boards to require acknowledgement of funding in articles accepted for publication.

The PubMed Affiliation field's inclusion of first author information only and lack of controlled vocabulary for institutional names create two additional limitations for the ICR queries. The exclusion of subsequent authors in the PubMed Affiliation field hampers monitoring institutional contribution to PMC, especially with the increase in cross-institutional collaboration. Likewise, without a controlled vocabulary for the Affiliation field, the Institutional variable search string (Table 2) cannot easily accommodate all published naming variations. To address these concerns, NLM may want to consider expanding the Affiliation field to include information on all authors, and institutions may want to establish a standard naming convention for use by authors when publishing.

One additional limitation of the ICR queries reflects the overlap between the articles included in the more than 180 PMC journal titles and the articles eligible for inclusion in PMC in accordance with the NIH policy [6, 7]. The PMC Inclusion variable search string (Table 2) is designed to detect the total number of articles deposited into PMC regardless of whether they were deposited by NIH-funded authors or if the articles were deposited as part of a PMC journal title. While this search string is not able to distinguish how an article was deposited into PMC, the authors believe it is the destination that matters rather than the route the article takes to get there. Choosing to publish in a PMC journal is another option for authors writing about NIH-funded work who want to comply with the NIH policy. For these reasons, the PubMed PMC [SB] subset has been used rather than the Author Manuscript [SB] subset, because Author Manuscript [SB] only retrieves citations for articles in PMC deposited by NIH-funded authors [4]. These limitations affect the accuracy of the PubMed queries that make up the ICR formula. However, consultation with local and national experts has optimized the queries so that they account for the most important limitations. With some modification, these queries can be used by librarians to calculate their institution's contribution rate to PMC.

CONCLUSION

The benefits of PMC and the NIH policy are numerous and have been well documented [8–12]. These benefits, in combination with the current crisis in scholarly communication [13–17], suggest a need for educating NIH-funded authors on the value of participating in the NIH policy [18–22]. As Nicholas has pointed out, the community of researchers has a significant knowledge deficit with regard to open access issues [23].

Libraries have the opportunity to reduce this knowledge deficit and facilitate a higher contribution rate to PMC. Because contribution to PMC is voluntary, it is paramount that librarians help educate faculty and researchers about the crisis in scholarly communication and the ways choice of publication venue can have a significant impact on how this crisis plays out in the future. Fostering participation in the NIH public access policy is a good first step. Because many authors will be unfamiliar with the PMC submission process, the NIH policy, or even the concept of open access, they will likely have many questions. Again, librarians are well equipped to help authors successfully navigate the publication process in the open access era.

These efforts will require a proactive approach by librarians to engage researcher-authors early on in the publication process. Success will require a campaign at multiple levels and venues throughout an institution. The institutional contribution rate formula is one tool libraries can use to evaluate the success of a PMC promotional campaign. Future work is needed in this area to determine the specific promotional activities that are most effective.

Acknowledgments

We thank Christee King, AHIP, print resources and acquisitions coordinator, and Dick Carr, AHIP, reference and user support services coordinator at the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Library and Informatics Center, and Lou Wave Snyder Knecht, deputy chief, Bibliographic Services Division, Library Operations, at the National Library of Medicine for their help with this paper.

Contributor Information

Philip J. Kroth, Email: pkroth@salud.unm.edu.

Erinn E. Aspinall, Email: easpinall@salud.unm.edu.

Holly E. Phillips, Email: hphillips@salud.unm.edu.

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