A Renaissance of Resources Used for Clinical Searching: What’s the Impact of the NIH Public Access Policy and Open Access on Morning Report?

Objective: To evaluate the impact of open or public access publishing policies on clinician access in today’s open access environment, a citation analysis of resources used for Morning Report at an academic medical center Internal Medicine Department was performed. Descriptive statistics were also compiled to compare open access, hybrid and traditional journals. \ud \ud Methods: Librarians partnered with Internal Medicine Physicians and Chief Residents to retrieve articles for a Morning Report blog from October 2007 to January 2012. Clinical questions and corresponding physician-approved articles were posted to the blog, which was made available on both the library’s and residents’ Websites. Article references, entry dates, subject tags and clinical questions were downloaded to an EndNote library and exported to Microsoft Excel for this descriptive survey. Variables analyzed included indexing services, impact factors, currency at clinical use, publisher, author fees, open access (OA) and NIH Public Access Policy status. \ud \ud Conclusions: Clinical literature for Morning Report includes few government and OA resources indicating its applicability was rare in the clinical environment. Additionally, because a 12-month delay in public access to traditional journals is becoming normalized via the NIH Public Access Policy, up to 1/3 of the literature in this study could have been embargoed, suggesting a potential gap in the clinical environment.However, although this study’s timeframe included the first 4 years of the NIH Public Access Policy, very little of the research retrieved for clinical use in this study was funded by the NIH and thus was not impacted by the NIH Policy: 91% of the study set is subscription-based. Contrary to the purpose of the NIH Policy, this may reveal a trend toward decreasing literature access in many hospitals and clinical settings, where rising subscription costs(6) may limit resources. For clinical practice, is a renaissance in open access resources a realistic expectation? \u