Digital libraries

Developing e-resource licensing models for Academic Health Science Centres in England

Abstract: 

Introduction

An initial five Academic Health Science Centres (AHSCs) were officially designated by government in England in March 2009, as formal partnerships between a university and healthcare providers (1):

  • Cambridge University Health Partners
  • Imperial College AHSC
  • King's Health Partners
  • Manchester AHSC
  • UCL Partners.

Their aim is to deliver world-class research, education and patient care for the benefit of their local communities, then promote the application of their discoveries in the National Health Service (NHS) and across the world. Indeed, the centres were recognised as having the potential to compete globally, including with similar centres in the United States, Sweden and the Netherlands.

A report of a national review of NHS health library services in England identified that “there would be great advantages in the NHS and HE [Higher Education] working together on joint procurement” (2). Previous efforts to provide joint licensing of e-resources across the university-health service divide in England had met with varying degrees of success (3). However, one licensing model, as adopted by the London Medical Schools Group (LMSG), had produced benefits for the local constituencies over the previous decade. The consortium had been operating successfully for several years and had been reaching value-for-money agreements with a range of publishers over the provision of resources under beneficial licensing terms. The agreements in place had included full access to selected electronic resources for all HE members of the institutions as well as NHS users in 36 affiliated Trusts representing up to 56.7% of NHS staff in London. Access for users in both HE and the NHS was through their existing personal institutional or NHS ATHENS usernames and passwords, and no separate accounts had to be set up.

As anticipated by the author as early as November 2008 (4), with the links between the universities and affiliated NHS organisations becoming even stronger through AHSCs, the drive for LMSG-type licensing initiatives was unlikely to diminish. This was confirmed soon afterwards, at a meeting of key stakeholders in April 2009 convened by JISC Collections, the UK academic community e-content procurement and negotiation service. The London Medical Schools Group approach was identified as one that had produced results to date and it was suggested that the Academic Health Science Centres could be a model group in England. The role of JISC Collections to act as a neutral advisor and negotiator was also acknowledged. At a workshop with publishers in June 2010, the key objective of the AHSC representatives was presented, namely making research outputs available for the rapid translation of research findings into clinical practice and outcomes, and outline proposals were discussed. Following this, a year long pilot project was jointly established between JISC Collections, AHSCs and major STM publishers and database suppliers (5).

Objectives

As clearly specified at the outset of the project, the aim was to develop “sustainable models for enhanced provision of access to high quality e-content across NHS and academic staff” (5). Over the course of the project it was intended that all stakeholders would work together to review usage, administration, and licensing requirements arising from the pilot. It was anticipated that the pilot would contribute significantly towards the development of possible e-resource licensing models for Academic Health Science Centres in England.

Methods

Co-ordinated by JISC Collections, the proposal adopted for the pilot allowed the universities at the centre of the AHSCs to extend to their partner NHS organisations access to their subscribed content from Elsevier, Nature Publishing Group, Springer, Thomson Reuters and Wolters Kluwer Health. All five publishers granted this extended access at no additional cost for 2011 in the first instance.

Results

A series of challenges became obvious as the pilot developed:

  • Identifying the content to be made available
    • in some cases, only sub-sets of the academic subscribed content was made available to NHS users
    • acquiring a definitive list of the journal titles was sometimes problematic
  • Enabling access to the resources through NHS Athens
    • access to a first set of resources was enabled in December 2010; access to the last set was enabled in May 2011
  • Enabling access via the NHS Link Resolver
    • a variety of different complications arose when attempting to match publisher-enabled sets of resources against the NHS Link Resolver knowledge base
  • Deciding how to present the resources to users
    • not all pilot resources could be presented through the NHS Link Resolver (eg databases)
    • additionally signposting of resources using MyAthens was necessary
  • Sharing the knowledge so that all pilot participant sites could benefit
    • not all local NHS Athens and NHS Link Resolver administrators were sufficiently skilled in all aspects requiring attention
    • guides were produced, so that expertise could be shared over issues arising in implementation
  • Communicating with library site managers and NHS Athens and NHS Link Resolver administrators to ensure the pilot project would filter through to the end users
    • marketing and promotion ideas and template texts were shared, with a soft launch selected at first in the first half of 2011 and a more targeted promotion in August 2011 to coincide with a new cohort of doctors entering postgraduate training in the NHS
  • Communicating with other AHSC-like organisations over the scope of the pilot and potential prospects
    • the relevance of the pilot (for both publishers and the NHS and HE communities more widely) required an approach that could be easily adapted and adopted beyond the immediate AHSC set-up

Despite all the above challenges and efforts to overcome these, some sites were still showing 0 usage at the end of 2011. Given the start-up delays, the pilot was extended to the end of May 2012 with four out of the five publishers continuing to participate, so as to allow sufficient usage data to be collected.

A first analysis of comparative usage data and other findings was initially undertaken in December 2011 and then again in March 2012. As anticipated, levels of use by NHS staff were demonstrably low throughout, especially when compared to HE levels of use.

Discussion

The AHSC pilot has been well received, even though opportunities to promote it widely were restricted by start-up delays. Nonetheless, there have been indirect benefits as the pilot has raised the visibility of library services provision within the participating AHSC NHS Trusts. Importantly, publishers are recognising the imperative behind the AHSC library services’ preferences for joint licences and are tentatively beginning to explore how such licences may be offered.

Initial feedback indicates that at least some publishers may be prepared to enter into licence extension agreements on a revenue neutral basis provided a usage data threshold is set. It is understood that any model that emerges should be scalable to other joint university / healthcare provider arrangements, such as teaching hospitals in England and elsewhere in the United Kingdom.

The pilot raised some interesting considerations:

  • The academic institution at the centre of the AHSC would need to be fully engaged in the processes involved: licence extension would by definition need to be based on the existing licence of the academic institution.
  • Publishers would need to be prepared to undertake some customisation to ensure seamless access to their resources via the NHS link resolver: simply enabling access via NHS Athens would not be sufficient; indeed, access through all routes that users expect to access the resources would be key for take-up.
  • Library services supporting the AHSCs would also need to be prepared to take actions to establish seamless access for NHS users: workflows could be determined to implement access within an AHSC; once resources are enabled successfully, it is expected that no additional set-up should be required.

Specific findings from the AHSC pilot and possible implications for future e-resource licensing in England will be presented at the conference. Other work is also ongoing towards a national licensing agreement to enable access to research outputs and any progress in this area will also be reviewed.

References: 
  1.  Department of Health. NHS patients to benefit as top flight Academic Health Science Centres named [Internet]. News Release issued by COI News Distribution Service; 2009 March 9 12:53 [cited 2012 April 29]. Available from: http://www.wired-gov.net/wg/wg-news-1.nsf/0/12F26C3313D994838025757400470B87?OpenDocument
  2. Hill P. Report of a national review of NHS health library services in England: from knowledge to health in the 21st century [Internet]. NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement; 2008 March [cited 2012 April 29]. Available from: http://www.libraryservices.nhs.uk/document_uploads/NHS_Evidence/national_library_review_final_report_4feb_081.pdf
  3. Spink S, Urquhart C, Cox A, with HEA-ICS. Procurement of electronic content across the UK National Health Service and Higher Education sectors [Internet]. Report to JISC executive and LKDN executive; 2007 [cited 2012 April 29]. Aberystwyth: Department of Information Studies, Aberystwyth University. Available from: http://www.jisc-collections.ac.uk/Reports/Joint-NHSHE-procurement-report/
  4. Anagnostelis B. London models of joint procurement. Poster presented at Celebrating the NHS/HE Partnership Conference; 2008 November 26 [cited 2012 April 29]; London, UK; 2008. Available from: http://www.londonlinks.nhs.uk/events/celebrating-the-nhs-he-partnership
  5. Earney L. New pilot project looks to develop licensing models for Academic Health Science Centres [Internet]. News feed published 2011 February 28 [cited 2012 April 29]. Available from: http://www.jisc-collections.ac.uk/News/New-pilot-project-looks-to-develop-licensing-models-for-Academic-Health-Science-Centres/
Session: 
Session I. Library Management
Ref: 
I1
Type of presentation: 
Oral presentation

Metadata enrichment in a medical institutional repository for evaluation purpose

Abstract: 

Background

At the Medical Faculty Lausanne, the institutional repository plays a dual role. On one hand it is an OAI-PMH server, disseminating research results financed by public funds. On the other hand it is a directory of academic publications, which can be used to evaluate the Faculty scientific output.

Methods

In Lausanne, the assessment of published medical articles – at an individual or institutional level – relies on the collection for each reference of the following data :

  • the citation count as indicated by Thomson Reuters Web of Science (WoS),
  • the journal impact factors (IF) calculated by the Journal Citation Report (JCR),
  • the Research Production Unit (RPU), which is an IF normalized by research field.

However, other characteristics are also taken into account such as the type of article (original article, case report, review, etc.), the total number of authors per article and the author’s position (first, last, middle).

To gather all these data, three main resources have to be used and their information merged:

  1. PubMed: provides publications metadata and publication types categorization.
  2. Web of Science: provides citation counts and complete authors lists with affiliations.
  3. JCR: provides IF and journal subject categories used for the RPU normalization.

Bibliometric data and some publication metadata elements are collected from WoS because PubMed presents some shortcomings, starting with the lists of authors and the affiliations. For example, between 1983 and 1996, the number of authors was limited to 10 in Pubmed, then to 25. Since 2000, PubMed lists all the authors, but, surprisingly, only the institutional affiliation of the first author is mentioned.

The merging of information from these different sources requires the use of identifiers, web services and AJAX techniques. It is not an easy process, since bridges have to be built between the different databases. Three main identifiers (PMID for PubMed, UT for WoS and ISSN for JCR) play a major role in order to map information between the databases. These identifiers have to be collected and aggregated with the other metadata stored in the repository.

The Lausanne Medical Library has taken the responsibility to build and maintain the techniques and processes connecting the international databases with the repository and to deliver accurate bibliometric information to the faculty research evaluation unit on a regular basis.

Results

Using PubMed and WoS web service, an AJAX technique was developed to import metadata into the repository entry form, allowing researchers and librarians to fill the bibliographic fields by typing in one identifier only (either PMID, or DOI or UT). This kind of metadata import avoids input errors and waste of time.

Besides, the process allows the collection of some important international identifiers such a DOI and ISSN for every single reference. When the repository metadata are complete and accurate, then the harvesting of bibliometric data runs smoothly. For example, a web service can retrieve the WoS unique identifier (UT) and citation count just by processing a PMID or DOI. The opposite is not so easy, but a DOI can link to both UT and PMID. Afterwards, the IF and RPU elements are automatically assigned to the publication metadata using the journal ISSN. Very often, the ISSN versions provided by PubMed differ with the ISSN versions indicated by JCR. The librarians had to build a table mapping the ISSNs used in both databases. This table was created using the complete list of ISSNs provided by the international ISSN registration agency (www.issn.org).

Standard numbers are not always used in a standardized way in the international databases. A good monitoring of this kind of discrepancies is part of the data curation role the librarians can play.

Type of presentation: 
Poster

The Norwegian Electronic Health Library; open access, collaboration and sharing

Abstract: 

The Norwegian Knowledge Centre for Health Services and The Norwegian Electronic Health Library (www.Helsebiblioteket.no) aim to make quality assured health services research and health information freely available to all health professionals and the general population of Norway. Open access is set forth in the guidelines of our work.
Helsebiblioteket.no was established in 2006 and has been a great success in Norway.
 
Local librarians as ambassadors:
A Section for Medicine and Health (SMH) was formally established under the Norwegian Library Association in 1975. This section has been very vital and important for collaboration between librarians within the field of medicine and health, both in Norway and internationally. Helsebiblioteket.no has great advantage of the competence of SMH members working all over Norway in different health institutions. The librarians are important mediators of Helsebiblioteket.no. We make each other better. Quite recently Norwegian have gained access to most of the important medical resources on the national IP address, so the staff at Helsebiblioteket.no work for closer collaboration with our public libraries in Norway. With a new reform in health care, stressing the need of more collaboration between community and hospital care, this is important and natural.

Health education and promotion.
Dr. Peter Fredrik Hjort (1924-2011) was an outstanding practitioner, educator, researcher, creator of health policy and a proponent of medical ethics and quality of life for patients and their families.
We honored Peter F. Hjort through collecting and making the most of his publications available in www.Cristin.no (Current research information system in Norway), with links to full text in HeRA (Helsebiblioteket’s Research Archive) and other open archives by the end of 2011. This is much appreciated by health professionals.

MeSH translation to Norwegian.
Another important project, focusing on collaboration between libraries, health services and The Language Council of Norway, is the Norwegian translation of the "Medical Subject Headings" (MeSH). We have great support from NLM and Karolisnka Institute in Stockholm.

Type of presentation: 
Poster

Journals of the Health Sciences field in the Portal de Revistas da USP: an alternative Brazilian information resource

Abstract: 

Introduction

The Portal de Revistas da USP - Portal of Journals of the USP, is an electronic library that collects journals published under the responsibility of the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil. Launched in 2008 with 31 scientific journals, aiming to increase the visibility of those USP journals published in the national and international context, adopted the SciELO model of electronic publishing, a non-profit metapublisher launched in 1997 by Latin-American and Caribbean Center on Health Sciences Information - BIREME, the Pan American Health Organization - PAHO and the World Health Organization-WHO, in partnership with the Sao Paulo State Research Foundation - FAPESP, to provide easy and free access to the full text and to allow users to obtain indicators of scientific production, as reports of citations and co-authors [1]. The purpose of this work is show the current configuration of the Portal de Revistas da USP, highlighting the periodicals about Health, spreading an initiative as an alternative resource to scientific journals' visibility and to the free access for Health Community in Brazil.

Methods

The data about the journals were obtained from the Portal de Revistas da USP in its official website (http://portal.revistasusp.sibi.usp.br) , and it was consulted the current number of journals in total and by area, highlighting those about Health, verifying their configuration, including the indexing in Web of Science – WoS (by Thomson Reuters), Scopus (by Elsevier) and SciELO databases.

Results

Currently (Figue 1) the Portal de Revistas da USP has 62 scientific journals, and the website informs (April 27, 2012) that there are 2.592 journal issues, 31.610 articles with 650.341 citations, being 20 titles from the area of Health Sciences, that along with the Human Sciences (20 titles), each one performing 29% from total, following by the Applied Social Sciences, with 15 titles (21%), Biological Sciences, 6 titles (8%), Agricultural sciences with 4 titles (6%), Linguistics, Language and Arts with 3 titles (4%), and Exact & Earth Sciences, 2 titles (3%). SciELO database indexes the more than 20 Health Sciences journals (11 titles), followed by Scopus (8 titles) and finally, the WoS with 7 titles; while 7 Health Sciences journals are in all resources, 3 both in SciELO and Scopus, and 1 in SciELO and WoS. And 9 journals are not indexed in any of these sources yet.

Discussion and Conclusion

The Portal de Revistas da USP grew 50% in three years: in 2009 there were 31 scientific journals registered [2], and today there are 62. In Health Sciences, the number of indexed bonds increased from 15 in 2009 to 20 in 2012, a growth around 34%. It is an important evolution in the context of the publishing difficulties in non-English speaking countries. The adoption of the SciELO metapublisher increased the journals visibility, also allowing to obtain indicators of scientific production. Such initiatives should be encouraged and disseminated, focusing on alternatives to scientific literature excluded from mainstream science publishing.


Legend Figure: 
Figure 1: Areas covered and number of indexed journals by database
References: 

 

1. Meneghini R (2003). SciELO (Scientific Electronic Library on Line) project and the visibility of "Peripheral" scientific  literature. Quím. Nova 26 (2): 155-156. Available: http://www.scielo.br/pdf/qn/v26n2/14980.pdf . Accessed april 20, 2012.

2. Fausto S, Gamba C (2009). Setting initial benchmarks of the Portal de Revistas da USP: for a culture of assessment. In: Larsen B & Leta J. (eds). Proceedings of the 12th International Conference of the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics (ISSI), Rio de Janeiro: BIREME/PAHO/WHO , Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, vol 2, pp. 928-929. Available: http://eprints.rclis.org/bitstream/10760/15419/1/Final_Version_ISSI2009_CRC_poster259.pdf. Accessed april 25, 2012.

 

Type of presentation: 
Poster

Hydra's and 3D brains - the wonderful world of embedding repositories to institutional services and processes

Abstract: 

The extensive network of Institutional repositories (IRs) in the United Kingdom (UK) have received substantial investment from JISC, the UK’s expert on information and digital technologies for education and research.

This portfolio of six projects, JISC Repositories: Take-Up and Embedding (JISCrte) aim to improve institutional services that rely on the repository by enabling take-up of the lessons and benefits from the most successful repository applications, tools and good practice; and contribute to the progress of embedding repositories within academic life in the UK Higher Education (HE) environment.

The JISCrte project is part of the JISC Information Environment Programme 2009-11 and JISCrte will be completed in December 2011. Project findings and outcomes will be made available in Spring 2012.

The six projects involved include:

  • eNova (Visual Arts Data Service),
  • Hydra in Hull (University of Hull),
  • NECTAR (University of Northampton),
  • RADAR (Glasgow School of Art),
  • MIRAGE (Middlesex University), 
  • EXPLORER (De Montfort University).

In this paper we will explore the value of project outputs to the health and life science repository community and in particular MIRAGE, a subject repository of more than 100,000 medical images.

We will consider the challenges of content-based retrieval of 3D medical images (especially visualisation of 3D images) and providing repository users with the facility to upload their own query images (either by URL or from browsing their own image collection on their desktop).

Session: 
Session E. New technologies
Ref: 
E4
Type of presentation: 
Oral presentation