The ALCTS Continuing Resources Section (CRS) Education, Research, and Publications Forum took place at the 2018 ALA Midwinter Meeting on Saturday, February 10, and featured two presentations.
Diane Boehr, head of the Cataloging and Metadata Management Section at the National Library of Medicine (NLM), shared the results of a series of studies on the publication of National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded research in a presentation titled “PubMed Central — Publishing Trends of Journals Containing Articles by NIH-Funded Authors that are not Selected for the NLM Collection.” NLM conducted a study of the characteristics of journals containing articles from NIH-funded research that were not selected for the NLM collections from August 2015 to August 2016 and compared the results to a similar study done from 2008 to 2009, the first year of the public access requirement. The 2008–2009 study found that journals not acquired for the collection were generally outside the area of medicine. The 2015–2016 study found that while there are many more articles being published in journals classified as primarily medical, many of them were from publishers that do not follow best practices promoted by professional scholarly publishing organizations.
Robert Heaton, collection management librarian at Utah State University Libraries, spoke about the results of a 2016 survey on the types of tools being used to facilitate the complex workflows associated with troubleshooting access to electronic resources at midsize land-grant universities in a presentation titled “Factors in Staff Satisfaction with E-Resource Troubleshooting Tools.” The presentation highlighted the number of staff members, the time spent involved in troubleshooting, types of troubleshooting tools used at these institutions, the troubleshooting activities they are used for, how satisfied staff are with the tools in accomplishing those activities, and factors predicted to correlate with staff satisfaction with the tools.
