International Open Access Week

The first International Open Access Week will take place October 19-23, 2009. The Open Access movement aims to promote free, online access to content that has traditionally been available on a subscription or fee basis. Many examples of open access journals can be found in the Directory of Open Access Journals, which currently tallies 4,371 journals world-wide. BioMed Central and the Public Library of Science (PLoS) are among the leading publishers that make scientific and medical literature freely available to the public.

The UNC Health Sciences Library has long been a strong supporter of Open Access, and a number of useful Open Access and Scholarly Communication resources can be found on the HSL web site. Beginning in April 2008, Congress mandated that National Institutes of Health-funded researchers must submit articles produced from such funding to PubMed Central no later than 12 months after publication in a peer-reviewed journal. To facilitate this process, HSL has prepared an NIH Public Access Policy Toolkit, and also manages a fund to support Open Access publishing fees.

On Monday, October 19, the UNC Libraries Scholarly Communication Committee will be sponsoring a panel on Perspectives on Open Access, which will feature Phil Edwards, UNC School of Information and Library Science; Kate McGraw, UNC Health Sciences Library; James Boyle, Duke Law School; and Kevin Smith, Duke Scholarly Communications Officer. The event will be held in Room 214, Davis Library, from 3:30-4:30pm, and is open to the public.

NIH and Wikipedia To Collaborate on Health Information

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Wikimedia Foundation have entered into a collaboration to improve the quality of health and scientific information in Wikipedia, the heavily-used online encyclopedia. On July 16, 2009, a Wikipedia Academy was held at the NIH's Bethesda campus to begin a dialogue about how to improve public knowledge about health and science. As Frank Schulenburg, head of public outreach for the Wikimedia Foundation, noted in the press releases of both NIH and the Wikipedia Foundation:

Wikipedia Academies are public outreach events, usually lasting one or two days, aimed at engaging academics and other subject-matter experts who are not familiar with wiki culture or online communities. In presentations and workshops, experienced Wikipedia authors teach the participants how to contribute to Wikipedia and orient the audience to Wikipedia’s structures and community policies.

John Burklow, NIH director for communications and public liaison, also observed:

NIH works to ensure that the information it provides on science and health is of the highest quality and reaches the widest audience. We look forward to this opportunity to collaborate with the Wikimedia Foundation and participate in a resource that is used by millions of people around the world.

Wikipedia is a rapidly growing free resource that presently contains over 13 million articles in over 250 languages. Average page views per hour total more than 14 million. One recent example of the tremendous popularity of Wikipedia for health information is the Wikipedia article on the 2009 flu pandemic. It originated on April 24, 2009 as a brief article of about 200 words, but has subsequently grown to over 20 printed pages of information and data. Flu-related articles garnered about 16,000 hits on April 23 but a week later approached 3 million hits (see the Wikimedia blog for further information).

The use of Wikipedia as an source of online health information was examined in an article entitled "Seeking Health Information Online: Does Wikipedia Matter?" published by the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. The authors, both Wikipedia contributors, concluded that "Wikipedia ranked among the first ten results in 71–85% of search engines and keywords tested," and that "Wikipedia surpassed MedlinePlus and NHS Direct Online (except for queries from the latter on Google UK), and ranked higher with quality articles."

UNC Alumnus Dr. Francis Collins Nominated to Head the National Institutes of Health

Dr. Francis S. Collins, a 1977 graduate of the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, was nominated on July 8, 2009 by President Barack Obama to head the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The White House press release is available online. Collins is a renowned physician and geneticist, who led the Human Genome Project while serving as Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at the NIH from 1993 to 2008.

On June 26, 2000, President Bill Clinton presided over a ceremony at which Dr. Collins and Dr. Craig Venter, the founder of Celera Genomics, a commercial concern that led a parallel gene-mapping effort, announced a draft of the human genome.

The NIH is comprised of 27 institutes and centers and is the primary federal agency supporting medical research. With an annual budget approaching $30 billion, the NIH funds almost 50,000 competitive grant projects led by over 325,000 researchers in its own laboratories and across the United States and the world.

The NIH traces its origins back to the one-room Hygienic Laboratory established by Dr. Joseph J. Kinyoun in 1887 in the Marine Hospital on Staten Island, New York. Dr. Kinyoun had trained under the great German bacteriologist Robert Koch, and used his Zeiss microscope to identify the cholera bacillus cultivated from patients, a technique which allowed the confirmation of clinical diagnoses.

Dr. Milton Rosenau served as the second director of the Hygienic Laboratory from 1899 to 1909, when he joined Harvard Medical School. In 1936, Rosenau became Director of the Division of Public Health at the University of North Carolina, and in 1939 he became Dean of UNC's School of Public Health. More information on Dr. Rosenau is available in an online exhibition at the UNC Health Sciences Library. Also available online are a finding aid to his papers and a research guide to public health at UNC.

For more information on the history of the NIH, see the following sections of the NIH web site:

Directors -- Legislative Chronology -- Chronology of Events -- Photo Gallery -- Office of NIH History -- Oral Histories -- Archives -- Online Exhibits -- Stetten Museum of Medical Research -- National Library of Medicine.

Also of interest is the Office of the Public Health Service Historian.

Pictured below is a Public Health Service laboratory with microscopes and glassware, circa 1899 (top). Dr. Ida A. Bengston is also pictured; a bacteriologist, she became in 1916 the first woman to be hired for the professional staff at the Public Health Service Hygienic Laboratory. Dr. Bengston researched the development of vaccines for spotted fever. Both images are from the NIH Photo Gallery.