News & Notices

With the publication of NOT-OD-12-160, the National Institutes of Health notified grant recipients that they will begin enforcing their public access policy in Spring, 2013 coincident with the final implementation of the use of the Research Performance Progress Report (RPRR) for SNAP and Fellowship awards. The NIH open access policy, announced in 2008, does not limit the journals in which award recipients publish their results, but does require that awardees to submit final peer-reviewed manuscripts that arise from NIH funds to the digital archive PubMedCentral upon acceptance for publication, to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official publication date.

Effective Spring 2013, NIH will delay processing of non-competing continuation awards if publications arising from that award are not in compliance with the NIH public access policy. This past Summer, NIH enhanced My NCBI, which is the tool through which researchers process their publications to be in compliance with the open access policy, adding features and streamlining functionality to make it easier to use.

Researchers submitting progress reports using the RPPR will find that its publication section is automatically populated with the PD/PIs publications from My NCBI and s/he needs only to check off the publications that are associated with that particular progress report. Grantees submitting paper 2590 progress reports will need to provide a My NCBI-generated PDF list of publications as part of their progress report.

Open access is certainly a buzz word in science circles today. The goal of open access proponents generally is to ensure that access to scientific literature is broadly available at low or no cost. We hear it from funding agencies like the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as well as the United Kingdom’s Research Councils, Ireland,  Australia, and the European Commission is moving to improve open access. Major non-governmental sponsors such as the Wellcome Trust, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and the Max Planck Society have incorporated open access policies into their funding policies and these three organizations have joined together to form a new open access journal – eLife. eLife joins the ranks of PLOS, publisher of several open access journals, and others. The Directory of Open Access Journals is one resource for finding open access journals.

2012 marked the sixth year of Open Access Week. The Budapest Open Access Initiative celebrated its tenth anniversary this year. And, the Berlin 10 Open Access Conference was held in Stellenbosch, South Africa.

In March 2012, the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), reported for the Obama administration to congress on Interagency Public Access Coordination – A Report to Congress on the Coordination of Policies Related to the Dissemination and Long-Term Stewardship of the Results of Federally Funded Scientific Research. OSTP notes in its report that since the inception of the NIH open access policy in 2008, over 260,000 papers have been submitted and are publicly available via PubMed Central, which contains over 2.4 million articles overall. Compliance with NIH’s open access policy stands at approximately 75%. Linking compliance with its open access policy to non-competing continuation awards should increase the compliance rate significantly. The National Science foundation (NSF) has taken an alternative approval to ensuring that research outcomes are available to the public in a timely manner by implementing a Project Outcomes Report (POR) requirement. The POR is a report written by the principal investigator of NSF-funded research specifically for public consumption. These reports are made available through Research.gov.

The Department of Energy (DOE) provides access to technical reports resulting from research at national laboratories as well as grantees via portals such as the DOE Information Bridge, which hosts nearly 300,000 reports. DOE also provides access to meta-data on roughly 10,000 scholarly publications annually, about 15% of which are fully available via public access. DOE also manages Science.gov, which provides access to 50 databases and over 200 million pages of R&D information across 14 federal agencies  including NIH’s PubMed, AGRICOLA and other important resources.

Clearly the tide of open access to publicly funded research data is still rising. NIH is taking its next step to move toward full compliance with its open access policy and governments, foundations and publishers around the world working to support the broad goals of the open access movement.

Research Administrators Can Easily Access Congressional Bills and Other Information

The Library of Congress launched the Congress.gov website on September 19, 2012. Congress.gov is designed to provide free public access to legislative information. Technically, the Congress.gov website is in beta release currently, and contains House and Senate bills from 2001 to the present, profiles of all members of congress from 1973 to the present and selected member profiles from 1947 to through 1972. As Congress.gov matures, it will eventually replace Thomas.gov, created in 1995 to make federal legislative information available to the public.

Congress.gov is built using modern web technology that, among other advantages, fully supports accessing the site from desktop or laptop computers, tablets or smartphones with the results being displayed in device-friendly formats.

Research administrators often need information on pending or passed legislation to fully carry our duties. Presently, for example, the DATA Act is a hot topic and Congress.gov makes finding and reading that legislation easy by simply searching on that term “DATA Act” and then perusing the results or narrowing the list down until only the Senate and House bills are displayed.

The Thomas website was launched rapidly in response to the 104^th Congress request to provide public access. Due to the limitations of Thomas, alternatives such as GovTrack.us have appeared to improve access to congressional information, track bills, hearings, committee meetings, and provide access to voting and other information on representatives and senators.

As pointed out by the Sunlight Foundation in its recognition of the Congress.gov website going live, there remains at least one significant gap between oft requested features and those provided by the new site: bulk access to the underlying data in a computer-readable format. This need has been noted for many years and was articulated recently in a report co-authored by staff at the Sunlight Foundation, GovTrack.us and Cornell University’s Legal Information Institute. This report was developed in response to a statement made by House leadership that endorsed bulk public access.

While blogs such as this one strive to alert research administrators to developing issues that merit their attention and provide basic information, ask questions and offer opinions, they are not always sufficient substitutes for reviewing the actual legislation, and that’s where Congress.gov will come in handy for all of us.

No one ever expected that the across-the-board, draconian funding cuts identified as “sequestration” to be implemented. However, that’s just what will happen on January 2, 2013 unless the essentially dysfunctional US political system manages to get its collective act in gear to stop it.

Sequestration was proposed as a solution that was so drastic that it would force our leaders to come up with an effective solution to reduce the budget with less unwelcome impact while reducing the US budget deficit by $1.2 trillion. The White House released its required report to Congress on the potential impact should an alternative not be developed and sequestration be implemented. From the White House report, “no amount of planning can mitigate the effect of these cuts. Sequestration is a blunt and indiscriminate instrument.”

Some 1,200 budgets would be affected touching many important defense and non-defense programs. As summarized by Sarah Kliff on the Washington Post WonkBlog:

A quick reminder of what each of these categories encompasses:
    •    Non-exempt defense discretionary funding sees a 9.4 percent spending reduction. This covers things, such as keeping military bases open, paying salaries and research and development.
    •    Non-exempt mandatory defense spending sees the biggest cut of 10 percent.
    •    Non-exempt, non-defense discretionary funding gets cut by 8.2 percent. This includes anything that Congress has to authorize each year, so programs like Head Start and AIDS assistance.
    •    Non-exempt, non-defense mandatory programs see a 7.6 percent reduction. There’s not, however, much left to cut in this category because the large mandatory programs were largely shielded from the cuts. More on that right below.
    •    Medicare is, well, Medicare – the health insurance program for America’s seniors. The sequester specifically limited Medicare cuts to 2 percent of the program’s budget.
Keep in mind, certain programs are exempt from the sequester completely. Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program and Social Security, for example, do not get touched at all. And within the programs listed above, there are specific, smaller programs that get carved out as untouchable too.
Federal research programs at NIH, NSF, NASA, Dept. of Energy, NOAA, EPA, and others fall under the non-defense discretionary funding group and would be cut by 8.2%. David Malakoff provides a summary of the impact on science funding programs from the report at Science Insider.
There remains time for this situation to be resolved, but it will certainly not happen until after the November elections and then, a lame duck Congress will have to tackle the issue. Prepare for a bumpy ride.

NIH Announced  81 awards – 10 Pioneer awards, 51 New Innovator awards, and 20 Transformative Research awards – with total funding of approximately $155 million in 2012. These High Risk-High Reward program awards are given to allow talented investigators to pursue visionary science that has the potential to transform their area of science and speed the translation of research into improved health.

Congratulations to all of the 2012 recipients (the full list is available here). I want to particular note that a number of these awards were made to scientists at institutions using InfoEd Global’s research administration management software including Proposal Development and Proposal Tracking including:

Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston, MA
Columbia University, New York City, NY
Dana Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, MA
Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA
Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York City, NY
Northwestern University, Evanston, IL
Rockefeller University, New York City, NY
Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute, La Jolla, CA
University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, AL
University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, IL
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA
Yale University, New Haven, CT

Following up on recommendations from the Finch Report, the UK government will spread￡10 million among 30 institutions receiving funding through the Research Councils and UK higher education funding councils to assist those institutions in transitioning to the open access funding model. Funds will be used for policy development and cover the costs of article processing charges (APC).

The UK Research Councils announced that they will provide block grants to support payment of APCs and expect that institutions will establish their own sources of support for APCs moving forward.

The Golden Goose Awards are intended to recognize investigators who have pursued what might have appeared at the time to be research topics of questionable value but have yielded valuable results. The name for the awards – Golden Goose – is a direct response to the Golden Fleece Awards given by the late Senator William Proxmire, which he awarded to researchers with funding to pursue studies he considered to be a waste of taxpayer money.

The real purpose of these awards is to recognize the value of serendipity in research – that pursuing questions that may seem odd can yield significant results. The investigators responsible for the discovery of green fluorescent protein used heavily in molecular biology research, inventing the Laser, and development of a new kind of bone graft are the first Golden Goose Award recipients viagra ohne rezept in berlin.