research

How Has the NIH Public Access Policy Affected You?

Heather Joseph at SPARC writes, “It’s hard to believe, but April 7, 2011 will mark the 3rd Anniversary of the implementation of the policy opening up access to articles reporting on the results of NIH-funded research.” (Read more about the NIH Public Access Policy here.) SPARC is gathering stories from authors as well as readers about how having wider access to taxpayer-funded research has affected them. Joseph continues:
The policy has shown tremendous signs of success. PubMed Central now contains more than 2 million full text articles reporting on the latest NIH-funded research, and nearly a half million individuals access these articles each day. With this new wealth of information now available, we’d like to know what your experience has been with it. Specifically, we’d like to hear: 1. How have you been using the database? 2. Have you used the articles to help inform yourself about new developments in a specific area? 3. Has the availability of these articles through PubMed Central helped you advance your research in ways that would not have occurred if they were not available? 4. Have articles that you have authored appeared in PubMed Central as a result of the policy? 5. Have you been contacted by other researchers who have found your work in the database, or vice versa? 6. Have you taken any of the articles to your doctor or other health care provider? 7. Has your healthcare provider used this database as a resource? (if you don’t know, please ask her/him!) 8. Has the availability of the articles in PMC had an impact on how you (or anyone in your community) manage your health care? We’ve heard from people who have used the latest research in various ways, and the stories are extremely powerful. If you have one, please share it! It will help us to not only ensure that PubMed Central remains open as an important public resource, but also to make the case to open up additional publicly funded databases from HHS and other federal agencies as well.
If you’d like to contribute your story about PubMed Central and the NIH Public Access Policy, you can e-mail Heather Joseph directly at heather@arl.org. (Source: http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/issues/nih/nih_action/callforstories.shtml)

March Madness at Snell!

March Madness: Helpful Hints for a Successful Semester Spring break has come and gone and now students are gearing up for their own March Madness—that final stretch of the semester when the weeks race by and then, BAM, papers are due and final exams have arrived. Ready or not, it’s time to start getting research together for whatever projects you may have and Snell Library is here to help you find what you need. Check out the hints below to learn how Snell can help you get the wheels in motion: Ask a Librarian! Seriously—they know their stuff about digging up the research you need and not to brag, but I think our staff here at Snell is pretty exceptional. And really easy to get in touch with! You can meet them at the reference desk on the library’s second floor or you can email, text, and chat with librarians online. Group projects. Love ’em or hate ’em, they’re a fact of life for many students. The first floor (especially the Cyber Café) is a great place to meet up and divvy up assignments. You can also book a group study room right on the library website. Finding Books and Articles. Sometimes that obscure book about realist perspective on the development of the dessert banana just isn’t available here on campus. Fortunately, interlibrary loan can help you get the things you need. You can also apply for a Boston Library Consortium card if you want to go raid BU’s bookshelves yourself. But remember, the card takes up to a day to process and it can take a little time for an article to be scanned and uploaded for you from another library. Start thinking about the research you need now so you can bang out that paper come April. Collecting citations. Creating a bibliography has never been easier. Northeastern provides a subscription to EndNote (ideal for grad students) and Refworks.com (perfect for undergraduates and researchers looking to share sources). Check out this post by Amanda to get started. Wireless Printing. You’ve burned the midnight oil, your paper is done, and you’re ready to print. Thanks to new software that you can download from myneu.com, you can send documents straight to the library’s printers from your own laptop. This can be especially helpful when you’re printing out a paper five minutes before it’s due. Not that any of us students do that… Phew! Well, I hope this list helps you out. Take it easy on those late night cups of coffee and stay tuned to Snippets for more hints on how to take advantage of everything our libraries have to offer. Good luck with the rest of your spring semester!

Announcing BioMedCentral Institutional Membership

The Northeastern University Libraries are pleased to announce a new institutional membership in BioMedCentral, effective March 1, 2011. Northeastern joins over 350 institutions worldwide who support BioMedCentral, an online publisher with a pioneering policy of providing free and open access to the peer-reviewed research papers they publish. All research articles published in BioMedCentral’s 213 biomedical and clinical journals are freely and universally accessible online with no barriers to access. And authors keep the copyright to their articles, allowing them to freely reuse and redistribute their research in print and online. Northeastern’s institutional membership helps sustain this publishing model through direct support of BioMedCentral as well as providing to its affiliated authors a 15% discount on the article processing fee paid upon acceptance of their submitted articles. As well as securing Open Access to research, publishing in BioMedCentral’s journals brings many additional benefits, including: • Immediate publication upon acceptance • No extra charge for extensive datasets, comprehensive methods, color figures, and video footage • The ability to track how many people have viewed a paper on BioMedCentral’s website • A large number of journals to choose from, covering all subjects in biology and medicine with different levels of selectivity For more information about BioMedCentral, visit http://www.biomedcentral.com/. For more information about Northeastern’s BioMedCentral membership and how it can benefit you, please contact me at h.corbett@neu.edu.

“Profiling” a Popular Honors Project in IRis

From time to time, I like to feature an object in IRis, our digital archive of research and scholarship at Northeastern, that’s been getting a lot of hits. I get a weekly report e-mailed to me of the most frequently accessed content in IRis, and there’s one honors project that’s been appearing near the top of that weekly list for quite a while now. “Profiling Pros and Cons: An Evaluation of Contemporary Criminal Profiling Methods” was submitted by Theresa M. Young in fulfillment of the Honors Program’s Junior/Senior Project requirement in 2006. In the past year, it’s been accessed 546 times, making it the second most-accessed document in IRis! We use Google Analytics to track usage of both the library website and IRis, and there’s a lot of fascinating information to be found in those metrics. For example, almost 81% of visitors found Theresa’s project through Google searches; the most commonly searched phrase that brought them to her project was “criminal profiling pros and cons,” where it’s the top result. Although the majority of visitors came from the United States, people in a total of 18 countries accessed Theresa’s project. I found it particularly noteworthy that of the 5 visits from Iraq, 3 of them came via the Department of Defense. Is Theresa’s research having an impact on criminal justice in Iraq? Regardless of how it’s being used, the popularity and relevance of her work, both in the US and around the world, is undeniable. (After graduating from Northeastern in 2006, Theresa Young went on to law school at the University of Richmond. While there, she served as Executive Editor of the Richmond Journal of Law and the Public Interest.)

Publishing Workshop with Gordon Hutner, Editor of American Literary History

Students in the humanities should consider attending this event on Thursday, January 27th. Even if you’re not an English major or grad student, if you’re considering a career in research and publishing in the humanities, I recommend hearing what Dr. Hutner will share about what goes into publishing a scholarly journal! Here are the full details of the event, from the NU calendar: 440 Egan Research Center Thursday, January 27, 2011, 12 – 1:15pm Professor Gordon Hutner, a distinguished scholar of American literature and founding editor of the journal American Literary History, will be conducting a publication workshop to discuss how to publish work in a journal such as ALH. This is an incredible opportunity for students to meet an important figure in the field and to receive an inside view of the publication process. Prof. Hutner will also deliver a talk the same afternoon as part of the Barrs Lecture Series. The talk is titled “The 21st Century American Novel: A History” and will be held at 5:30 p.m. in 340 Egan. Please plan to attend both of these events, and come prepared for lively and valuable discussions. Type of Event: Workshop/Training Audience: Faculty/Staff, Students, Public Cost: None Sponsor: Department of English, Co-Sponsored by the Humanities Center Contact Name: Department of English Contact Phone: 617-373-4540 Contact Email: m.daigle@neu.edu More info: www.english.neu.edu