[MUSIC PLAYING]
June the 4th, 1973 was much like any other summer's day in Peterborough. And Ralph Mellish, a file clerk at an insurance company, was on his way to work as usual when--
[MUSIC PLAYING]
--nothing happened.
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You are listening to WREK Atlanta. And this is Lost in the Stacks, the research library rock and roll radio show. I'm Charlie Bennett in the studio with-- it's just a ton of people. I'm not even going to name all of them. Each week on Lost in the Stacks, we pick a theme and then use it to create a mix of music and library talk. Whichever you tune in for, we hope you dig it.
Today's show is called "Didn't You Get the Memo Part 2-- Open Access and the National Science Foundation."
I really wanted it to be "Electric Boogaloo."
We've done that already. Oh, boy. The NSF is one of the big funding agencies. And open access is a big deal these days. So what happened?
Well, the question is what didn't happen? Or what was supposed to happen?
So back in 2022, we had a show about a memo issued by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, or, as those in the know call it, OSTP. This memo was an order mandating that federally funded research be open and public.
Sounds good.
[LAUGHS]
Yeah, but if you thought that a Federal open access mandate meant that federal research just became automatically open, well, we've got another memo for you.
Yeah. There's going to be just a streak of cynicism to this whole show.
Probably.
Our guests are co-authors of a soon-to-be-published study which investigated just how open those publications turned out to be.
And if you'll indulge, I've got a quick side note about the music today.
I don't know if we have time for it, Fred.
Today, April 19, WREK is playing all women artists all day. This show is no exception. The themes of today's songs are about obfuscation, hiding things, and optimistically hoping for big changes. And since it is spring and a time for optimism--
Optimism.
--let's start with a track called "Spring is Coming with a Strawberry in the Mouth" by Caroline Polachek right here on Lost in the Stacks. [CAROLINE POLACHEK, "SPRING IS COMING WITH A STRAWBERRY IN THE MOUTH"] (SINGING) Dear Louise There are so many things I want
[INAUDIBLE]
That was "Spring is Coming with a Strawberry in the Mouth" by Caroline Polachek. This is Lost in the Stacks. And today's show is called "Didn't You Get the Memo Part 2-- Open Access and the National Science Foundation."
Our guests today are research collaborators on that very topic-- open access, National Science Foundation. Our first guest is Kim Powell, the research impact informationist at Emory University Libraries. Hello, Kim.
Hello. Happy to be here.
And Jennifer Townes, the open access librarian, also at Emory University Libraries. Welcome back to the show, Jenny.
Thanks, Fred. I'm glad to be back.
This is your first time in the actual studio, too, isn't it?
First time in the studio. Yes.
Right. We've had remote interviews before. Full disclosure, I was lucky enough to work with both of our guests on this research. We wrote a paper together currently called "Open but Hidden-- Open Access Gaps in the National Science Foundation Public Access Repository." Doesn't that make you want to know more, Charlie?
So Fred did the humble brag of lucky enough to work with you all, and he is, but also, I'm going to jump to the end of our segment interview questions and say, did Fred get this started? Was it him saying, Jenny, is this worthwhile that actually made the whole thing happen?
Yeah, 100%.
Fred burying the lede.
Hey, well, let's talk to Jenny and Kim first.
Absolutely. OK. Back to the appropriate beginning. So what were you all trying to figure out when you engaged with this topic? I'm going to start with Kim because I think the look on your face says you're ready to go on this one.
Sure. So I'm with the Health Sciences Center. I specifically serve the Emory University School of Medicine, Nursing and Public Health. So I tend to be much more focused with NIH compliance and public access compliance. And so we track that among our Emory researchers and authors is how good compliance is over there, but when Jenny introduced me to Fred about this looking into NSF compliance, that was really new to me.
So we were trying to figure out-- it's complicated for authors to know what to do and how to do it. And publishers have a stake in it. And there's copyright and legal ramifications around certain things. So we were just interested to figure out what it looked like on the NIH side-- or sorry, on the NSF side.
Yeah, NIH being something else that you have to deal with.
I'm sorry?
I'm sorry-- NIH also is just one of those many--
Yes.
--triple letter organizations out there that are trying to--
Yeah, lots of acronyms. CHARLIE BENNETT: --assess us every time.
Yeah, National Institutes of Health. And yeah, they have their compliance act. Well, I'll say they have it together, but it's been well documented. They've had a lot of time to get their processes straight.
Yeah NIH has been enforcing their public access compliance by withholding funds from authors who don't comply. So you can't get your next grant, and you won't get the release of your progress reports if you're not showing compliance. So they've been doing that for-- enforcing for about 5 years, but it's been a policy for about 10. So NSF didn't start their compliance mandates until 2016, so much more recently.
And they started that due to the OSTP memo.
Yes, in direct response to the OSTP memos. CHARLIE BENNETT: What's in the memo? Is there a way to summarize that? Because not everybody who's listening is steeped in copyright like you all. So how do you explain that memo? JENNIFER TOWNES: So this is Jenny. And part of my job at Emory University is to explain that memo to other librarians and to faculty.
And the most important thing about the Nelson memo, which is the most recent one, is that there are no more embargoes on federally funded research. And what that means is once you publish your research, a publisher may not place an embargo, which means it's usually about 12 months where that research is kept behind a subscription access or a paywall. That research will be made publicly available from the moment that it is published. And that's a big change from the Nelson memo.
I'm sorry, that's a big change from the previous OSTP memo, which provided that everything will be made publicly available, but publishers were allowed to limit things to at least 12 months before things were made openly available to everyone. So that's the main point is that there are no more embargoes. Another main point is that there should be unique identifiers for each researcher who is an author on the publication. And those are usually something like an ORCID ID.
The researchers out in the audience will understand what that means, but essentially, a persistent, unique identifier for each of the authors and for the article itself.
So the OSTP memo of 2022-- it built on one from 2013. The 2013 one said, all these federal agencies that have high funding budgets, NSF being one of those-- the research resulting from that needs to be open after a one-year embargo. 2022, embargoes are eliminated.
Yeah.
And the question that we wanted to know was, that 2013 memo, after that was put into effect-- did it actually work?
And I feel worried about the answer to that because your article is called "Open but Hidden." We're almost at the end of the segment, but can you sum up "Open but Hidden"? Why is that the title of the article?
Well, when you go to one of the repositories-- NIH has their own repository, NSF has a repository where they keep all of these articles-- you should be able to simply go there and click. One should be able to just be able to open this research up with one or two clicks. Currently, though-- do you want to tell us, Kim?
So yeah, the jumping to the end, only about 45%-- only about 45% of articles that are listed in the NSF repository can you access with a click. You either have to know some special navigation, know some special terminology. We as librarians struggled to find that terminology initially. So we can walk you through it now, but it was not obvious to us when we started the project. So that's the open but hidden. It is indeed publicly accessible, but you've got to know some tricks.
CHARLIE BENNETT: The cynicism meter is getting higher and higher as we go.
This is Lost in the Stacks. And we'll be back with more from Jenny and Kim about Federal Open Access Mandate compliance after a music set.
File this set under Q11B26.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
"They Don't Know" by Kirsty Maccoll, written when she was just 16. Man, I didn't do anything when I was 16. Before that, "Hiding" by Florence and the Machine. Those are songs about things that are hidden and should be in plain sight.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
This is Lost in the Stacks. And today's show is called "Didn't You Get the Memo Part 2-- Open Access in the National Science Foundation." We are speaking with Kim Powell and Jennifer Townes of Emory University. So I have the next question. So I'm curious about the collaborative process of writing the article. Can you guys speak a little on that?
Sure. So we divided up our tasks. Kim is the Excel expert. And she had a wonderful graduate student assist us with the analyzing the raw data. So that was extraordinarily helpful. And Fred and I helped with the actual writing up of everything that had gone into this research. It helped that we presented it as a poster first. And that gave us a really good abstract or introduction to how we were going to structure this paper.
I'm really impressed that you had a research assistant. I've never written an article with a research assistant.
So the research impact informationist at Emory university, I run a lot of publication analytics for our deans, our centers, our grant renewals, our faculty assessments. So I do have a graduate assistant that helps me just sort through-- is this our Alex Smith? Is this our Dr. Patel, Dr. Lee? Just trying to figure out-- is this ours? Is this Georgia Tech's? Is this Morehouse's? So just doing those publication profiles.
I keep getting emails from ResearchGate asking me to identify authors of things. Was this the right Amit?
Ignore those.
Yeah, I never-- I've got to unsubscribe. You all are pretty accomplished article writers. You've been doing this for a while. Does it feel weird to do this meta research, writing about articles and publishing them, or does it feel the work that you always are doing?
Let me also just put it in a little bit of context. We didn't look at every author that had published something that was funded by NSF. We were looking specifically at Georgia Tech and Emory authors to keep it into a manageable scope because we didn't know what we were getting into. And we didn't want the beast to run away with us, although Kim is such a master of spreadsheets and numbers analysis that she probably could have handled anything, I think, that Jenny and I threw at her.
But yeah, we only looked from the time that that 2013 memo went into effect. For the NSF, even though the memo came out in 2013, the actual effectiveness of that memo was January 2016. So we looked at Georgia Tech and Emory authors that had been funded since then and had published since then to see if the articles actually ended up open access like they were supposed to.
So one more caveat to that is we looked based on what was available in the public access repository.
Yes.
So we were people that had already tried to comply by generating a record in the open in the public access compliance repository. So if researchers, through no fault of their own and with total respect, realized that it was not an enforced thing-- compliance was not something they absolutely had to do and they didn't even try to make a record-- they're not included in our research. Our research is only, could we access what had a record in the repository from our two institutions?
And when you were talking about clicks, did you all end up just looking for these articles and seeing what your personal experience was of trying to get to them?
Yeah, so that's actually how we discovered the hidden bit because we were finding 50%, 60% of the articles that had records in the public access repository didn't have full text in the repository. So we Googled them.
[LAUGHTER]
Like good librarians do.
Right, right. So it's like, let me see if I can find-- and we found some articles on people's Google drives that they had just opened, but then we also were starting to find publisher sites do have-- through the Chorus Initiative, publishers are allowing these public access versions to be available, but only on their site. So there wasn't actually a paper, a PDF, as is required by the NSF policies. There wasn't actually a PDF in the repository at all.
And we only stumbled across that by Googling.
Do you all have a diagnosis of why it just seems so casual, haphazard, or just incomplete, even though there's an official memo from the government trying to explain what you should be doing?
Well, there are a lot of moving parts. We're talking about a ton of data, many, many different files, and lots of different people to corral into doing one thing the same way over and over. And we've found that when your policies perhaps contradict each other in different iterations, whether it's on the website, or maybe the file naming convention is not being--
Are you being diplomatic when you say "perhaps"?
Perhaps.
[LAUGHTER]
When you have very rigorous standards and one set of policies, and like the NIH, when you withhold funding until certain things are done, then it becomes easy when these things are not in place. Then you get something that is like herding cats. You simply cannot find the thing that you are supposed to be able to find in the place that you are supposed to be able to find it.
Kim mentioned something called the Chorus Initiative. And that's publishers-- commercial publishers, society publishers-- publish these academic articles. And they got together. And without getting into what Chorus is, they got together as a group, called it Chorus, and said, hey, NSF and other federal agencies, if you let us put that open version out there, you don't have to deal with it. I'm paraphrasing a lot, but that's essentially what has happened. And so NSF understandably-- great.
One less thing that we have to worry about. And so the free version required by NSF ends up on the publisher site hidden or obscured, I guess we could say. CHARLIE BENNETT: Open but hidden. Open but hidden.
All right. We're right at the end of the segment. And I just want to toss a question in that we'll probably get back to on the other side, but do you all feel like you have to herd the cats? Do you feel like your responsibility, looking at this, is that, oh, now, I have to get out there, and I have to start explaining to people, and waving the stick, as opposed to the publisher's carrot?
I think something about understanding open access instruction is something that librarians have naturally taken on ourselves. The NSF policy indicates that it's the author's responsibility to be in compliance-- or it's the author's responsibility to submit the records, but that it's the institution's responsibility to monitor compliance. And again, just from my perspective on the health sciences side, the NIH-- that, at Emory University, has fallen to the libraries to monitor compliance.
We have the compliance monitor accesses. So it's not unexpected that libraries end up taking that compliance role of, where are research or publications, and are they meeting the correct guidelines. Your office of sponsored programs, your grants office, at least at Emory-- they have a big stake in when things get withheld, but a lot of times they refer those authors back to the library to figure out compliance. So it's natural the library takes on elements of that.
I don't think we're very good police, but we'll talk about that in the--
We should not be very good police.
[LAUGHS] You are listening to Lost in the Stacks. And we'll talk more with Kim Powell and Jennifer Townes of the Emory University Libraries on the left side of the hour.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Hi, I'm Cicely Lewis, I'm a school librarian, and I love, love, love listening to podcasts. And you're listening to Lost in the Stacks on WREK Atlanta.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Today's show is called "Didn't You Get the Memo Part 2," implying, of course, that there was a Part 1. And Part 1 was an interview with Katharine Dunn of MIT. So Fred, we're getting back to your culpability here.
OK.
What was the actual moment in that interview that sparked this whole research endeavor?
Through the magic of studio audio, I have it right here. CHARLIE BENNETT: I knew you would. This is from episode 533 in September of 2022. And there was about a minute of that conversation where we talked about why government agencies haven't figured out compliance. And specifically, I asked Katharine if she noticed if things that should be open and available online weren't actually open and available. And I remember it like it was yesterday.
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KATHARINE DUNN: And then in 2019, I found an email that I sent out to the group saying, hey, guys, here's some news about federal funders. And it's not great. And the news was that the Government Accounting Office had written a report saying 11 agencies haven't yet figured out compliance. Seven agencies have-- so it's just, I don't even know if everybody's figured out compliance on the first memo yet. I guess I'm not sure.
I think there are definitely some gaps, even when papers are reported to, say, the NSF, and it and the record shows up in there. And really, to technically comply with this OSTP memo, after a 12-month embargo, the author's manuscript version-- that's supposed to be available in this NSF repository. I don't know if you found this, Katharine, but I've gone to look for papers in there. And the manuscript version is not there. It just links to the publisher paywall version.
Oh, boy. I've lost the thread, frankly. Just from talking to you and because of the new memo, I went back and started looking. I was like, oh, yeah. I used to really try to look to see if things are showing up there. And they weren't, but then I stopped doing it after a while.
[LAUGHS]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
And so that's when and how this whole thing got started.
Look at you, all misty-eyed.
Aw.
Scrape off the nostalgia, Fred. File this set under GV1493.H276.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[LITTLE ANN, "WHO ARE YOU TRYING TO FOOL"] You can't fool me No, you can't fool me
"Who Are You Trying to Fool" by Little Ann, and before that, "He's Got a Secret" by the Bangles. And we started with "Mystery Curtain" by Spread Joy. Those are songs about seeing through obfuscation and misdirection.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
This is Lost in the Stacks. And our guests are Kim Powell and Jennifer Townes of Emory University Libraries talking about their work and Fred's work researching whether Federal open access mandates are successful. And I was really struck, during the previous conversation, that you were dealing with a moving target with this research. So what was that like? At some point, you had to stop and start working on the article, but things change. So talk about that.
Yeah, things change all the time. In the middle of creating, actually, our poster presentation, we discovered that our numbers were not completely accurate anymore because-- what was it-- the American Institute of Physics had redesigned their website. And all of a sudden, a huge portion of the articles that we were not able to find previously were now all of a sudden available. So that was very nice to see.
And even though we had to rearrange our research and change our numbers, it was nice to see those things actually become publicly available in an easy-to-get-to manner. And hopefully, that will be the trend moving forward.
We would hope, but yeah, we've already established that this is a show for-- if it's not cynicism, it's cynicism-adjacent, for me, anyway. [LAUGHS] So one of the things that I look towards as far as the future of how this is going to lay out is that bit of information that Kim shared in the previous segment that we are only looking at the authors that actually chose to make sure that they were in compliance with this mandate.
And still, after all that, it was still difficult to find the free version of the article. Another step to this research-- I'm not committing to that yet, but another step for somebody to do-- is to find out what total funding NSF provided that resulted in freely available, I should say, articles, not just the ones that ended up in the NSF repository.
I can cut that "not" out and replay this as, I'm fully committed to doing that research.
Oh, man. OK. CHARLIE BENNETT: Yeah, you're stuck. In the podcast version, I'm committed. OK.
Is that a path for future research? I'm now talking to our guest. What's the next step here? Do you feel complete, or can this just expand? Is there another piece of it that you want to delve into?
I think there's lots of room for expansion-- yes, as Fred mentioned, knowing how many researchers are funded that didn't make it through the process of trying to deposit something and getting a record in the repository. Also, with the 2022 memo, the public access mandate is open to all federal institutions and federal funding institutions now, not just the big spenders, like NIH and NSF, which were required under the 2013 memo.
So I think that really expands it to different disciplines and different disciplines that might not have had to deal with this as long.
She's talking about the humanities.
[LAUGHS]
Yeah.
And more of the social sciences. NIH, which is, again, what I'm more familiar with, doesn't fund a lot of the social sciences. And so they haven't had to deal with those sorts of mandates in the same way. NSF obviously does fund a bit more, but there's going to be other agencies that are now having to grapple with this. Where do you put it? You have to build a repository.
So the NSF repository-- they're actually using the Department of Energy's backend, whereas the NIH built out PubMed Central-- entirely new thing. So the agencies are going to have to figure out where they're going to put it, who's going to combine, what does the infrastructure of that repository allow, and what the compliance monitoring for those infrastructures allow. So I think there's a lot of directions to take it. It's only going to get bigger.
So we're at the end of the segment, but I want to go real, real big, real vague, almost. Is this just because we are not in the habit of doing this that it's so loose, and amorphous, and not complete? Or is there a reason why it's hard to get stuff into publicly available repositories out there in the world?
I think it's a little of both. The researchers are having to learn how to do it. So throughout your graduate training, you're having to learn things that your PI, or your advisor didn't necessarily have to do. So there's definitely a barrier there. And then there's-- also, some of the publishers are actively trying to thwart or sidestep these mandates.
And then you're relying on the federal government and the capacity that they have to put the instruction and try to bring these two parties-- the researcher and the publisher-- together in some sort of agreement. So there's three big parties moving in different directions in their own interests.
I've moved from cynicism to despair, Fred.
Oh, you're after my own black heart. CHARLIE BENNETT: Our guests today were Kim Powell, research impact informationist, and Jennifer Townes, open access librarian of the Emory University Libraries, speaking to us about their research with Fred into open access compliance for research papers funded by the NSF. Thanks so much for being in the studio today.
Thanks so much for having us.
Thank you.
File this set under Z286.O63.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[HEIDI BERRY, "WILL IT ALL CHANGE"]
"Will It All Change" by Heidi Berry, and before that, "Tracks and Tunnels" by The Softies, songs by women about something that women wonder all the time.
Whoa, hey.
If and when things will change. CHARLIE BENNETT: Getting political.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Today's show was called "Didn't You Get the Memo Part 2, the Electric Boogaloo." No. "Open Access and the National Science Foundation." OK. I'm feeling goofy. I was talking into Marlee's announcement and all that because there's cake. Fred, why is there cake?
Sugar rush?
Sort of. Just the smell of sugar. Why is there cake in the studio today, Fred?
OK. I, along with my daughters, Ruby and Violet-- we made some cupcakes in celebration of Lost in the Stacks episode 599, which today is. Hooray.
599.
Yay.
Yeah.
That's a lot.
Yeah. Halfway to 1,198.
Goodness.
[LAUGHS]
Well, one of my goals in my performance evaluation was I want us to get to 1,000.
Oh, man. Yeah. Well-- CHARLIE BENNETT: And when we do, I'm just going to burn it all down. Oh, gosh. Maybe cupcakes instead.
You can have a full cake that day.
Oh, Alex says we could have a full cake that day. OK, you know what? You've changed my mind. OK.
[LAUGHTER]
I know that this was supposed to be 600, and I'm really sorry that I changed the schedule, but it had to happen.
Right. Yeah. This was originally going to be a celebration for a nice even number.
I won't throw any other member of the show under the bus on this one. So why don't you just roll the credits, and let's get out of here.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
MARLEE GIVENS: Lost in the Stacks is a collaboration between WREK Atlanta and the Georgia Tech Library, written and produced by Charlie Bennett, Fred Rascoe, and Marlee Givens, and Alex McGee.
Legal counsel, and a carrot, and a stick were provided by the Burrus Intellectual Property Law Group in Atlanta, Georgia.
Special thanks to Kim and Jennifer for being on the show. And thanks, as always, to each and every one of you for listening.
You can find us online at lostinthestacks.org. And you can subscribe to our podcast pretty much anywhere you get your audio fix.
Next week, for episode 600, which these cakes were meant for, a returning guest talks to us about engagement and inclusion in the library.
All right, it's time for our last song today. The OSTP memos are overall a good thing for scholarly publishing, right? Despite some compliance road bumps, agencies like the NSF are bringing open scientific research to the public.
Fred, you need to sound more convinced.
So thank you, NSF. And I mean it, genuinely. And in the spirit of making progress, let's close with a song about everyone working together to improve society. This is "Rock Society" by Shonen Knife right here on Lost in the Stacks. Have a great weekend, everybody.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[SHONEN KNIFE, "ROCK SOCIETY"]