Keep abreast of new guidelines and evidence emerging on many diseases with DynaMed, which is available to the Tufts community via the Library website and as a mobile app.
For background reading and a glimpse of the future, try Richard Preston’s “The Ebola Wars” in The New Yorker.
“Facts About Ebola in the U.S. Infographic” from the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Below are DynaMed’s most recent updates on Ebola and its summary of the changes in the CDC guideline. Select its E-Newsletter tab to sign up for its email alerts, view the archive of EBM Focus, or register for CME credit for reading it.
Ebola Virus Disease
- Updated 2014 Oct 24 01:59:00 PM: case description of care for an Ebola patient in a biocontainment unit in Germany (N Engl J Med 2014 Oct 22)
- Updated 2014 Oct 22 10:57:00 AM: Government of Canada providing experimental vesiculars-stomatitis-virus based vaccine (VSV-EBOV) to the World Health Organization (Public Health Agency of Canada Fact Sheet)
- clinical features associated with 2014 West Africa outbreak of Ebola virus (N Engl J Med 2014 Oct 16)
Ebola: Updated CDC Guidelines
The world is presently experiencing the largest outbreak of Ebola virus disease (Ebola) in history. Over 9,000 persons have been infected in West Africa, resulting in over 4,500 deaths. Three cases have been diagnosed in the United States, two among nurses caring for the first patient.
Following the transmission of Ebola to healthcare workers, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have revised their guidelines on the use of personal protective equipment (PPE). New CDC guidance emphasizes:
- Rigorous and repeated training in performing all infection control procedures, specifically the donning and doffing of PPE, with demonstration of competency for all healthcare workers involved in the care of Ebola patients.
- No skin exposure when PPE is worn. New step-by-step instructions require full-body coverage, including use of a surgical hood with single use face shield, fluid-resistant gowns supplemented by waterproof aprons and boot covers, double gloves and either N95 respirator or powered air purifying respirator (PPAR). Use of facemasks and goggles are no longer considered adequate.
- Supervision by a trained observer to ensure that there is no breach in protocol when healthcare workers don or doff PPE.
Special thanks to Research & Instruction librarian Elizabeth Richardson for compiling this post!
Our final Open Access post for the week is a guest post from Judy Rabinowitz, one of our Research & Instruction librarians and a member of Tufts Scholarly Communications Team:
Open vs. Public Access: What’s the Difference?
The NIH Public Access Policy, the now well established mandate requiring scientists to submit manuscripts that arise from NIH funds into PMC, made “public access” a familiar phrase to many in the biomedical field. The White House memo drafted in February 2013, directing a similar charge to research supported by several other government agencies, including NSF, DOE, and the CDC, is poised to make “public access” even more of a household term. But why are these not just called open access policies? Where’s the distinction?
By SpiderWeb-MarketingSystems (Own work) [3.0CC-BY-SA-3.0 or GFDL] via Wikimedia Commons
Many times, “public access” and open access” are used interchangeably, but in fact there are important distinctions between them. It all boils down to the multiple definitions of the word “free.”
Free as in “gratis” - refers to free of charge
Free as in “libre” – refers to freedom of use
To put it simply, open access encompasses both definitions of free, being free of costs and also free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. Public access materials, on the other hand, while free of cost to read, do not necessarily have the same freedoms to use and reuse and therefore the “libre” definition may not apply.
Have more questions about open or public access? Just ask the Tufts Scholarly Communication Team
Once upon a time, librarians curated what were usually called “picture collections.” These were files (actual paper files!) filled with pictures clipped from other sources that the librarians knew could be reused in articles and publications- hence the origin of the term “clip art.” When an author was working to pull together a publication, he or she would mosey over to the library or archives and work with this curated picture collection.
Then the internet happened. The wealth of images available online has created a minefield of intellectual property and academic ethics issues. Just because you can view content online for free (whether it be photos on Flickr or a copy of someone’s thesis) does not mean you can download, remix, reuse, sell commercially, or do anything you want with it. Content creators have rights.
Creative Commons licenses are a component of the open access toolkit that allows authors and creators to share their content while maintaining some important essential and creative rights to their works. In other words, issuing work under a CC license gives you the ability to freely share your work, under terms that you dictate. This differs from the public domain, which dictates that nobody owns a piece of content, and is a matter for another blog post, another day.
There are six Creative Commons licenses, which offer differing levels of reuse permission (the most common restrictions involve changing or adapting images, and making money from the reuse of images). CC has a handy tool to help creators determine what sort of license they would like to use.
When it comes to finding images licensed under Creative Commons, there are several great resources to visit and tricks to use to find images for your posters, presentations, and publications.
I suggest starting with Flickr. After you execute a search you can limit your results to Creative Commons only, as well as images that allow commercial reuse and modifications:
Once you’ve done that, you can view the specific rights for any image by clicking the Rights link (this also tells you what you are allowed to do with an image):
Google Images allows a similar search limit. After you search, select your parameters under the “Usage Rights” menu:
With all Creative Commons works, you are expected to attribute the creator and source (at the very least), and CC has a great guide to Best Practices for Attribution.
This is just a quick introduction to Creative Commons resources. If you have any questions, please contact us at hhsl@tufts.edu. Even better, attend our upcoming Open Workshop on October 30 at noon, “But I Found it Online!” Proper Use and Attribution of Images for Papers, Posters, and Presentations.” Click here for more details and to register!
Here’s a guest post from our E-Resources and Serials Librarian, Jane Natches:
Have you thought about posting your published work to your own website or your institution’s open access repository but are concerned you will be in violation of the copyright agreement you signed with the publisher?
Copyright agreements can be intimidating but there is a tool that can help you begin to understand what rights you do have for archiving your works. SHERPA RoMEO is a database of publisher’s copyright policies presented in clear and understandable language. It is intended for use by the academic research community and is easily searchable by journal title, ISSN, or publisher name.
The trick to using SHERPA RoMEO is to first determine what version(s) of your work you currently retain because publishers often have different archiving rules based on versioning.
The pre-print is the final version of your article submitted for peer review / refereeing.
The post print is the version you submitted after addressing comments from the peer review / refereeing process.
The publisher’s version is the final post print dropped into the publisher’s layout. It often includes page numbers, logos, and print registration marks and is usually in PDF format.
You may be surprised by what your standard copyright agreement allows. Many well-known publishers allow the post print to be posted to an author’s personal website or an open access institutional repository without any embargo. Additional requirements tend to be fairly simple and often include acknowledging the published source and providing a link to either the journal home page or the article’s DOI (digital object identifier).
Give it a try and see what you find!
In our continued celebration of International Open Access Week, I would like to direct your attention to some of my favorite scholarly resources that just so happen to also be Open Access or promote Open Access.
In case you need a refresher, in his book Open Access, Peter Suber writes: “The basic idea of OA is simple: Make research literature available online without price barriers and without most permission barriers.” In a nutshell, OA materials are free to access, and you can download, copy, distribute, transmit, harvest, use web crawlers, etc. for free as well. Just give attribution to authors and creators and you’ll all set.
So, can it be any good if it’s free? You bet! OA publishers have banded together to police the landscape, ensuring adherence standards regarding peer review, licensing, and research integrity, and more.
Stay tuned all week as we give you more information about OA publishing, self-archiving, other free learning materials online, and more! But for now, enjoy some of our favorite scholarly resources in the OA community.
Affiliated with the Association of Research Libraries, the Scholarly Publication and Academic Resources Coalition is an international alliance of academic and research libraries working to create a more open system of scholarly communication. Includes excellent information about Article-Level Metrics, a new approach to quantifying the reach and impact of published research.
Established in 2002, the Directory of Open Access Journals works to collect and provide access to scholarly OA journals across international borders and disciplines.
With a publishing arm over ten years old, the Public Library of Science publishes seven peer-reviewed, OA journals. A paper published in a PLOS journal has recently received international attention when used as supporting material in a U.S. House of Representatives hearing about the spread of the Ebola virus.
Based in the UK, BioMed Central published 269 peer-reviewed Open Access journals, including a wide array of specialty titles in medicine.
http://biodiversitylibrary.org/
Finally, I have to mention the Biodiversity Heritage Library, a consortium of natural history and botanical libraries working to digitize biodiversity literature and make it available for open access. BHL is not a publisher, but works with libraries and publishers to make important historical and current scientific literature available free to anyone with an internet connection. Besides serving some of the rarest and most remarkable literature you will ever see online, my interest in the OA world stems directly from the 6 years I spent working with BHL.
This is just a small selection of resources in an ever-expanding OA world; feel free to comment if there are others you would like to share!
Image by Andrea Higginbotham , CC BY 2.0
This week, October 20-26th, is International Open Access Week. Here at the Tufts Libraries, we decided to take this opportunity to highlight the scholarly publishing related workshops we are hosting during the month of October. In particular, be sure not to miss…
Field Guide to Spotting Predatory Publishers
Wednesday, October 22, 2014 – noon to 1:00pm
Location: Sackler 510
Advice from the Experts: Inside Scientific Publishing
Wednesday, October 29, 2014 – 10:30 to 1:30pm
Location: Sackler 607 (pizza lunch included, so be sure to register)
“But I Found it Online!” Proper Use and Attribution of Images for Papers, Posters, and Presentations
Thursday, October 30, 2014 – 12:00pm to 1:00pm
Location: Sackler 510
Open Peer Review in STEM with Dr. Cesar Berrios-Otero, Outreach Director, Faculty of 1000 Research
Thursday, October 30, 2014 – 2:00pm to 3:00pm
Location: Tisch Library Austin Room, Medford Campus
Curious to find out more about open access? Check out the Tufts Scholarly Communication website and watch this space! We’ll be posting something Open Access-related each day this week.
Next week, from Sunday, October 19th through Saturday, October 25th, Hirsh Library will be running its semi-annual School Affiliation Survey. The idea behind it is that we want to know where our users are coming from, so that we can better serve their needs through proper allocation of resources. We would also like to know who is being under-served (or at least underrepresented), so we can find new ways to help all of the students, staff, and faculty here on the Boston Campus.
During the week, if you are in the library at 11am, 3pm, 6pm, or 9pm, you may be asked what school or office you are from. This is the only information we collect. We do not look for names or University status, just school. In fact, this is a screenshot of the entire screen our staff see when asking that question:
If you feel uncomfortable saying your school affiliation out loud, or if you don’t want to be bothered while working, that’s perfectly fine! You have a few options: you can either leave your Tufts ID out, or you can swing by either the 4th or 5th floor desks and grab a piece of paper to write your school on. That way, when the person taking this information comes by, they can just look at either the ID or the paper and move on. If you’re in a group study room with a group, you can write how many members of what schools are represented in the room, and tape it to the outside of the study room door (example: “5 Medical, 3 Dental, 1 Nutrition”).
Just please remember to take down any signs you put up, and to remove any IDs or papers you put on the desks by you.
If you have any questions or concerns at all, don’t hesitate to ask us! You can call us at 617-636-6706, e-mail us at hhslcirc@tufts.edu, visit our live chat on the Ask Us page, or even just swing by the desk on the 4th floor and chat to us in person.
Thank you for your assistance with this, and we look forward to a nice smooth Affiliation Week!
Are you new to the world of scientific publishing? Want to garner some advice on getting your work published? Join HHSL, OEA Faculty Development, and top journal publishers and editors for:
A panel of experts from Springer, Oxford, New England Journal of Medicine, and Elsevier will offer industry insight and answer your burning questions. This program is geared toward faculty, housestaff, and post-docs green to the world of scientific publishing.
The event will include a moderated panel and Q&A session, followed by lunch and informal discussion. For registration and the full schedule, please visit http://bit.ly/AdviceFromTheExperts .
ILLiad will be unavailable on Sunday October 12th from 6:00am – 10:00am due to a system upgrade. Please plan your work accordingly. We are sorry for the inconvenience. If you have any questions or comments please call 617-636-6705 or email hhsl@tufts.edu.
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