Medical Journals Backfiles Digitisation Project & open access

Head e-strategy Wellcome Library, Wellcome Trust [email protected]

Overview of presentation  An overview of the Medical Journals Backfiles Digitisation Project – With demonstration of some of its more innovative features  A look at the Wellcome Trust’s position on open access highlighting: – Policy position – Why the Trust supports OA – What the Trust is doing to realise is OA objectives

Medical Journals Backfiles Digitisation Project: aims  To create a create a critical mass of digital content freely available on the Web, based on the complete backfiles of a number of historically significant medical journals.

 To develop this project in partnership with others  To create a “value added” digitisation product – OCR processing - to facilitate full-text searching. – XML PubMed citation. – Faithful replication.

– Innovative linking

Medical Journals Backfiles Digitisation Project: rationale  The Wellcome Library exists as a resource to provide access to the documentary record of medicine.  The online archive will support teaching and learning in the history of medicine.

 The project will create a permanent and secure archive an objective that meshes with the Library’s mission.

 Proposal is in accord with the JISC and Wellcome Trust’s position on the desirability of open access to the scientific literature.

Target audiences  The research, teaching and clinical communities in the UK and overseas.

 Data already showing the massive use that is being made of the archive.

–

Medical History

- total archive 6293 articles; August 05 some 45,000 articles downloaded; 31,000 in September.

–

Biochemical Journal

- Between Oct 05-Jan 06, over 975,000 full-text articles downloaded

Identifying journals for digitisation: process  Digitisation is a relatively expensive activity - need a methodology to pick the “best” journals  In selecting candidate titles the Library adopted the following methodology: – ISI impact factor/total number of cites/cited half life – Historical importance – Inclusion in Brandon Hill list of key medical journals – Balanced collection - ensuring it complemented titles already being digitised by NLM – Budgetary envelope

What titles have agreed to participate in this project?

 To date 17 journals have agreed to participate  Mix of commercial, academic and not-for-profit publishers  Mix of American and British titles, dating from the early 19th century. Examples include: – Annals of Surgery (1885 - ) – Biochemical Journal (1916 -) – BMJ (1857 -) – Journal of Physiology (1866-) – Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine (1809-)

Publisher participation: requirements  Publisher has to grant permission to digitise the paper backfiles.  Publisher has to agree to deposit new content (volumes/issues) in PMC in an agreed (XML) format.

Note: – This project does NOT seek any copyright assignment of the journal content.

– This project does NOT seek to interfere with any of the publishers own revenue-generating opportunities for current issues of the journal. A “moving wall” can be maintained between the current issues being available to subscribers and current issues being available at PMC.

The PMC archive - key features  Freely accessible  Ability to browse by title/issue  Search by author/title/date etc + free text searching  Viewing options - pdf, page browse etc  Valued added functions: – Integrated with PubMed – Dynamic references, and links to related papers – Online corrections – Programmatic context-sensitive links

Live demonstration  Value-added features – Images – References & Cited by – Online corrections – Programmatic context sensitive links

MJBDP - link to open access  This project provides a unique opportunity to open up access to medical history, as recorded in the pages of historically significant medical journals.

 It demonstrates the value of “joined-up”, partnership projects.

 This initiative fits in with the Trust’s Strategic Plan (in terms of providing resources to contribute to a long term and vibrant research environment) and is in accord with the Trust’s position on the desirability of

open access

to the scientific literature.

Why open access matters to us Research funded by WT Live search the problem still persists

OA at the Wellcome: policy  From October 1 2005, it became a condition of funding that a copy of any

original research paper

published in a peer-reviewed journal must be deposited into PubMed Central (PMC).

– Books, conference proceedings, editorials, reviews are NOT covered by this policy  From October 1 2006, the condition to deposit in PMC will become mandatory to all grant holders, irrespective of award date.

 The Trust will provide

additional

funding to cover the costs relating to article-processing charges levied by publishers who support this model.

Why we support open access to the research literature -1  To improve the quality of of research by maximising access to the research outputs – The Human Genome Project demonstrates the value of making research outputs publicly available – We prefer immediate access to the research we fund (and insist on this when we pay the OA fee) but can live with a 6 month embargo  To enable greater integration between the research literature and its underlying research data – Example – link with HomoloGene, chemical compounds, structure datasets

Why we support open access to the research literature - 2  Evaluation purposes - is our funding making a difference?

– Funder attribution: WT papers in PubMed – Long-term preservation – All articles in PMC are marked-up in XML - future-proofing the record of medicine  Accessible under “one roof” – PubMed is the default search tool for biomedical researchers – All PMC articles linked to the PubMed citation - seamless searching

Costs (1)  Number of publishers (OUP, Springer, Blackwell) are introducing hybrid OA model, and others are considering this.

– Trust study suggested an average article cost for high quality journal was $1950 (£1,115) – Mary Waltham/JISC study reported that in order to cover the average online only costs for a 10 page article and deliver the average surplus these 13 journals delivered to their societies, the OA fee per article for 2004 would need to be set at £1,166.

Costs (2)  Trust estimates that providing OA to all the research papers it helps fund will cost between 1%-2% of its annual research budget.

– 4000 original research papers. 4000 x £1210 (average OA cost) the total cost to the Trust would be £4.84 million; just over 1% of our annual research budget. – Trust is rarely the sole funder of a research team. More than 80% of papers that acknowledge our support also acknowledge the support of one or more other funders.

UK PubMed Central [UKPMC]  Aim is to create a UK version of PMC – a stable, permanent, and free to access archive of the full text peer-reviewed research publications that arise from research funded by the UKPMC Implementation Group – A UK-hosted mirror of PMC – A manuscript submission and tracking system (with authenticated login)  Partners in the UKPMC project are: – Government funded: MRC, BBSRC, Department of Health, Chief Scientist Office (Scottish Executive), JISC – Charities: ARC, CRUK, BHF, AMRC

Other activities  Working with SHERPA to create a database of Wellcome-compliant publisher-archiving policies  “Publishers Panel” established – Wellcome Trust and ALPSP, STM Association, PA  Further dialogue with publishers and grantholders  Further dialogue with other funding bodies

Conclusion  Publication costs - should be seen as research costs  In the future (near?) I believe that a combination of open access publishing and the establishment of OA repositories (e.g. PMC/UKPMC)

will

change the way biomedical research is disseminated.

 Both the backfiles project and open access initiatives improve access to research papers - which, in turn, will help researchers to make the discoveries we need to improve health.