Scholarly Communication in Translational Research:  Emerging Roles for Librarians

Kroth, Philip

Abstract

Despite unprecedented advances in communications and internet technologies, the vast majority of the world's biomedical literature is still not easily accessible to the vast majority of the world's medical practioners and even biomedical researchers. This is due in large part to the current system of scholarly communication that centers primarily on a pay-for-access model that keeps journal articles virtually locked behind a wall of escalating subscription prices. This """"""""crisis"""""""" in scholarly communication is compounded by the exponential growth rate of scientific discovery and number of journal articles disseminating important research results. At the same time, there has arguably been an over emphasis on bench science or a lack of emphasis on the science of communicating or """"""""translating"""""""" research results into practice in the community. The CTSA Program, an NIH Roadmap Initiative that aims to increase the emphasis on clinical and translational research, recognizes that to accomplish its goals, fundamental changes are required in how the research enterprise itself is structured. Despite its laudable goals, there is a conspicuous absence in the CTSA Program and the NIH Roadmap Initiatives of the importance of disseminating research results in venues most easily accessible to the community - open access venues. These venues provide immediate, free access to a body of literature for anyone with an Internet connection without any financial, legal or technical barriers. It is this limitation of the CTSA Program and other NIH Roadmap initiatives this application proposes to address. Our objective for this application is to convene a conference of medical librarians and other knowledge management professionals from CTSA-minded institutions to focus on exchanging current research and successful strategies for promoting greater utilization of open access publication venues by translational investigators. After the conference is completed, the attendees will be better equipped to advocate for the change necessary at their home institutions to increase the available support for and use of open access publication venues for clinical and translational research results dissemination. Funding of this conference grant application will result in accomplishment of the following specific aims: 1) Increase awareness of and participation in open access publication activities among translational investigators by providing a forum for medical librarians and knowledge management professionals from CTSA-minded institutions to exchange current knowledge, best practices, and the latest research on the promotion and institutional support strategies for open access publishing. 2) Improve the quality and number of expert open access support resources available to translational investigators such as copyright management, institutional repositories, and compliance with the NIH Public Access Policy at CTSA-minded institutions.

Public Health Relevance

Project Relevance: This project is relevant to public health because the conference this proposal will fund addresses a significant barrier to access to the biomedical literature by community-based providers of medical care, investigators at many medium and small sized research institutions, and the public at large. In order for public health to benefit from the accelerating rate of scientific discovery, the dissemination of this new knowledge to the broadest possible constituency is paramount. Increasing the proportion of biomedical journal articles published in open- access domains will go a long way towards making new discoveries freely available to the audience best able to put them to work for the public good.