Expertise in navigating the complex landscape of scholarly publishing, illustrating the impact of research, and strategies for making research more impactful.
NIH Public Access Policy
Library staff continued to help researchers comply with the NIH Public Access Policy, which focuses on openly sharing final, peer-reviewed journal manuscripts in the NIH PubMed Central digital archive. This included:
- Giving presentations
- Fielding questions
- Submitting articles on behalf of authors
- Providing assistance and troubleshooting
- Sharing guidance on proactive compliance
Staff also helped individuals and groups assess their rate of compliance with the policy and identify publications not in compliance. Beyond the NIH Public Access Policy, staff also provided support for more than 50 other public access policies, including from other government agencies and funding organizations.
Author analytics and evaluation reporting
Library staff provided guidance and reports for individuals, groups, departments, offices, institutes, centers and others.
Guidance topics included:
How to demonstrate expertise using publication data
Journal impact factor scores and benchmarking metrics
Institution and author name variations
Strategies for establishing online profiles
Completing tenure packets
Enhancing the impact of research efforts
Staff prepared evaluation reports containing:
Visual networks, graphs and tables including choropleth geographic maps of top authors in a field
Co-author network maps and word clouds displaying trends or areas of expertise
Publication
reports confirming acknowledgement of grant support
These services were requested by investigators at the medical school for a variety of purposes including:
- Grant applications and renewals
- Progress reports
- Departmental reports
- Departmental websites
- Recruiting
- Promotion and tenure
Open October
In collaboration with Washington University Libraries, Brown School Library and the Institute for Informatics, Becker Library hosted a month-long series of presentations called Open October, with the purpose of highlighting trends in open science, open data and open access publishing, and raising awareness among the campus community to the changes taking place in research and scientific communication.
The highlight of the month was a keynote address by Jessica Polka, PhD, executive director of ASAPbio. Dr. Polka’s presentation focused on preprints and their evolving role in the life sciences. Dr. Polka’s talk led to a stimulating question and answer session focused on the future of scientific publishing.
Transformative license agreements
During FY22, Becker Library and Washington University Libraries together announced a new transformative license agreement with Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press — a nonprofit publisher of leading research journals in molecular biology, genetics, and related fields. Titles for WashU author submission under the program include:
- Genes & Development
- Genome Research
- RNA
- Learning & Memory
- Molecular Case Studies
The agreement allows for a full waiver of Article Processing Charges (APCs) for a limited number of works published by Washington University corresponding authors under a Creative Commons CC-BY Version 4.0 Open Access license with the author retaining copyright.
This type of transformative publishing agreement is indicative of a trend among academic libraries, but also represents our commitment to leveraging our purchasing power with publishers to benefit our institutional authors.
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