According to that bastion of information, Wikipedia, the "Occupy movement is an international protest movement against social and economic inequality…" Around 2000, the discourse surrounding scholarly communications issues turned towards public access, or the idea that research information and data from government funded studies should be available to all, free of charge. The National Library of Medicine founded PubMed Central (PMC), "a free full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature." The National Institutes of Health (NIH) instituted a public access policy requiring that articles resulting from publicly funded research were to be deposited in the PMC archive. To date, 2.4 million articles have been archived. PMC includes more than the required research articles; entire journals are deposited and their content made openly available. This is an emotionally and philosophically charged issue for government research funders, publishers, the public, and the library community. No matter where you stand on the issues, it is undeniable that the last six months have seen some incredible progress and press on this issue.

For example:

1. The Federal Research Public Access Act, or FRPAA, was introduced in both the House (H.R.4004) and Senate (S.2096) in early February. This would require that research manuscripts resulting from funding from around 11 departments/agencies beyond NIH (including NSF, DOE, and DOD) be made available to the public within six months of publication.
2. The withdrawal of the Research Works Act (RWA). Introduced by Representatives Issa and Maloney, the bill contained provisions to prohibit open access mandates which would have stymied the NIH public access policy. After major opposition and criticism by open science and open access advocates, the bill was withdrawn.
3. The Cost of Knowledge movement founded by mathematician Timothy Gowers to protest the publishing practices and access practices of Elsevier. After vowing never to publish papers or serve as a referee or editor for them, Gowers’s petition has attracted over 11,000 signatories.
4. In The Scientist, March 19, 2012, an opinion piece: "Opinion: Academic Publishing is Broken."
5. In The Economist, April 14, 2012, another piece entitled "Academic publishing: Open sesame."
6. And at Harvard on April 17, the Faculty Advisory Council sent a memo to all faculty members questioning the sustainability of journal pricing and advocating for other publishing options. The text of the memo is posted on the Harvard University web site.

Clearly, these issues are attracting great attention and gaining traction. This spring has seen more activity than any other time I can remember. Perhaps it is not "Occupy Schol Comm" but the "Schol Comm Spring?" What can, and should, we be doing on our campus? Send me your thoughts.

May is a month for anniversaries at the HS/HSL. May 3rd was the 266th anniversary of the birth of John Crawford, whose collection of 400 books was purchased in 1813 by faculty members of the UM Medical School for use by faculty and students. The Crawford Collection was the founding collection for what was to become the Health Sciences and Human Services Library.

May 4th is the first anniversary of the UM Digital Archive. We are currently working on digitizing the Crawford Collection. Visit the Archive to read an 1811 lecture by Dr. Crawford or a brief history of his life.

Would you like your work to be preserved with a permanent URL and be accessible across the Internet? If so, then help us build the Archive. If you have content that you would like to contribute or questions about the UM Digital Archive, please email us.

The New England Journal of Medicine has produced a 45-minute documentary exploring three stories of medical progress that have taken place over the course of the journal’s long history. The video profiles the rise of surgery, the story of leukemia, and the HIV/AIDS epidemic, while showing how research, clinical practice, and patient care have continually improved over the last 200 years.

We’ve added additional hours for you to reserve the Presentation Practice Studio. Technical assistance is available by request (except on Sundays).

The Presentation Practice Studio provides University of Maryland, Baltimore students, faculty and staff with the space and technology resources to practice, record, and develop presentations, and to refine public speaking skills. The soundproof studio has audio and video capture and editing capabilities.

The National Network of Libraries of Medicine Southeastern/Atlantic Region (SE/A), a department of the Health Sciences and Human Services Library (HS/HSL), has received a budget of $1,851,193 from the National Library of Medicine for the 2012-2013 fiscal year. SE/A is now distributing approximately $250K of those funds to more than 30 organizations. These funds enable hospitals, universities and community-based organizations to perform health information outreach to populations that range from those with low to no literacy to healthcare professionals.

Through educational programs, a document delivery network, and funding, the HS/HSL is able to make a considerable impact over a large geographic area that spans 10 states, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, and Washington, DC. In the 2011-2012 year SE/A gave 118 workshops and presentations to 2,290 attendees, and funded 70 outreach projects with $377K in grant money. Those outreach projects that had a training component gave 201 workshops or presentations that were attended by more than 5,500 participants.

Starting with 30 funded projects, SE/A is planning another effective year with focus on outreach to K-12 populations and community colleges, and a push to encourage researchers to use the results now stored in ClinicalTrials.gov. For more information on the program, visit the SE/A web site.

If you have ever tried to compile a researcher’s body of work, you know how difficult it can be. Since publishers use different naming conventions, an author may be listed as Stewart, R in one publication and Stewart RE in another. There is no easy way to be sure it’s the same person. The ORCID (Open Researcher & Contributor ID) program aims to solve this problem by creating a central registry of unique identifiers for researchers and a linking mechanism between ORCID and other author ID schemes. These identifiers can be linked to the researcher’s output to enhance the scientific discovery process and to improve the efficiency of funding and collaboration within the research community.

May 19, 2012 – August 12, 2012

Exceptions to Regular Hours:

Fall hours will begin on Monday, August 13, 2012

The HS/HSL will be offering a series of workshops free of charge to UM faculty, staff, and students; UMMC staff; and HS/HSL corporate members during the 2012 summer term. The summer workshops will cover a wide variety of topics. You can learn how to organize and manage citations for research papers with the Library’s RefWorks workshop, get an overview of the steps involved in the grant writing process in Grant Proposal Writing, or learn how to effectively search in the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed database. To see the full schedule and to register, visit the Workshops web page.

Can’t make one of our regularly scheduled workshops? If you request an On Demand Workshop, a librarian will cover the same material with you one-on-one, or with your group.

Electronic Preventive Services Selector, or ePSS, is a free point-of-care tool from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality that helps physicians, nurse practitioners, and health care teams determine the most important preventive screenings for their patients. ePSS uses evidence-based recommendations of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force and includes tools for implementing recommendations into practice. ePSS is available both as a web-based tool and as a free downloadable app for your mobile device.

Visit the HS/HSL’s Cool Tools guide where we introduce you to a new tool each month to help you find and organize information more efficiently.

We are profiling two new statistics websites that could help with your next grant proposal or community health project. You can try them out by clicking the links below. We’ve also added them to the HS/HSL Statistics guide on our website.

County Health Rankings & Roadmaps
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute have teamed up to assess the overall health of more than 3000 U.S. counties. Using a system that evaluates morbidity and mortality, health behaviors, clinical care, social/economic factors, and physical environment, each county was assigned a score and ranked among other counties – from healthiest to least healthy. The first set of rankings, released in April 2012, will allow public health professionals to identify what is working in the healthiest counties, and where intervention is needed in those that lag behind. The site promises an "annual check-up" of county health, with new rankings published each year.

The Rankings section of the site offers statistical data and interactive county maps for all 50 states. The Roadmaps component of the site offers links to action guides, funding opportunities, and national networks/partnerships for creating healthier communities.

Maryland Medicaid eHealth Statistics – Map Dashboards
Maryland Medicaid eHealth Statistics, an online resource created by the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and the University of Maryland Baltimore County’s Hilltop Institute, now features interactive Map Dashboards. The Map Dashboards feature allows you to view and compare selected Medicaid diagnosis data for the state as a whole, by individual counties, by age group, and as trends over time.

In the late nineteenth century, at a time when women were challenging traditional ideas about gender that excluded them from political and intellectual life, medical and scientific experts drew on notions of female weakness to justify inequality between the sexes. Artist and writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who was discouraged from pursuing a career to preserve her health, rejected these ideas in a terrifying short story titled "The Yellow Wall-Paper." The famous tale served as an indictment of the medical profession and the social conventions restricting women’s professional and creative opportunities.

This exhibition was developed and produced by the National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health. For more information about upcoming exhibits, visit the HS/HSL Weise Gallery web page.