Featured Speaker: Facilitating OA Transformation through Publisher Engagement: The UC Experience

Libraries across the globe have been pursuing open access for decades, but until recently, progress has continued to be painfully slow. Transformative open access agreements with publishers have begun to change this, as institutions in Europe and increasingly in the US as well are now negotiating open access agreements with major publishers. By transitioning major journal license expenditures from ‘read access’ to support open access publishing, we can begin to achieve open access at scale, supporting our authors in all of the journals in which they choose to publish. This talk will discuss UC’s experience in negotiating transformative open access agreements with existing publishers, including how native OA publishers can be integrated into this model to create a truly level playing field across all publishers

Is a Gold Open Access World Viable for Research Universities?

Open access is at the heart of a seismic shift in scholarly publishing. In particular, gold open access (OA) has expanded at an accelerated pace, increasing in market share every year. In the gold OA model, financial viability shifts from the demand to the supply side, with article processing charges (APCs) a common scenario. Ideally, this model would be sustainable for academic research institutions, in that it would cost them cumulatively no more to pay APCs than they pay now in the traditional subscription model. APC-driven gold OA has financial and other implications for libraries, institutions, and authors. In the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded Pay It Forward project, we examined the viability of gold OA by looking at institutional costs, faculty and graduate student opinions, and various models for gold OA. The Pay It Forward research teams gathered a variety of qualitative and quantitative data from publishers, research libraries, and faculty and students including current APC charges, current subscription charges, journal publication costs, opinions and behavior of graduate students and faculty members regarding publishing, reading, and OA

Data Expeditions: Mining Data for Effective Decision-Making

Beyond library budgets and content usage reports, libraries and consortia are searching, sorting, managing, and hunting for deep data that allows them to understand their environments and represent themselves and their patrons more effectively in these changing and complicated times. But data challenges exist at every turn. Finding data, which is often housed in a variety of disparate sources, is the first challenge but it is immediately followed by measuring, adapting, and distilling data down to the most important factors. Libraries and consortia spend many person hours gathering data from scratch and then deriving information and knowledge from that data to make informed, evidence-based decisions.In this session, we will hear from leading library experts about their scholarly publishing data hunting expeditions and the innovative ways they access and utilize deep data to inform their discussions and decisions and support their activities

Language Shift and Maintenance of Ga in Accra

The situation whereby a speech community uses its language in fewer domains relating to other languages or even loses proficiency entirely in its language in favor of other languages as a consequence of urbanization is a widespread social phenomenon that affects several millions of speech communities all over the world.  Some studies have been made, especially, from Western perspectives, in order to get a good understanding of this social phenomenon so that predictions can be made as regards the future status of languages, especially, subordinate languages in communities with dominants languages. The paper investigates into whether or not the Accra speech community, a highly multilingual city, is shifting from the use of Ga to other languages or is maintaining the use of Ga. The major findings of the study are that language shift situations exist more in non-typical Ga areas while language maintenance is observed in mainstream Ga communities. Some factors responsible for these linguistic phenomena results are highlighted. The results of this study led to the recognition of the need for the Gas to cultivate positive attitude towards their language in domains beyond their homes and the need for adequate language planning in order to assure of maintenance of the native language. Keywords: language shift, language maintenance, speech communities, multilingual. DOI: 10.7176/JEP/10-15-11 Publication date:May 31st 201

Understanding the Socioeconomic Impact of Progressive Diseases in the Geriatric Population

The purpose of this to study is to discuss the economic repercussions that progressive diseases, such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, have on the geriatric population. This research brings to light the economic cost of these progressive diseases, as well as the importance of fostering positive social interactions within the geriatric population

Cost-effectiveness of biennial screening for diabetes related retinopathy in people with type 1 and type 2 diabetes compared to annual screening

Objective: Examine the health and economic impact of extending screening intervals in people with Type 2 diabetes (T2DM) and Type 1 diabetes (T1DM) without diabetes related retinopathy (DR).Setting: Diabetic Eye Screening Wales (DESW)Study design: Retrospective observational study with cost utility analysis (CUA) and Decremental Cost Effectiveness Ratios (DCER) study.Intervention: Biennial screening versus usual care (annual screening). Inputs: Anonymised data from DESW were linked to primary care data for people with two prior screening events with no DR. Transition probabilities for progression to DR were estimated based on a subset of 26,812 and 1,232 people with T2DM and T1DM, respectively. DCER above £20,000 per QALY was considered cost-effective.Results: The base case analysis DCER results of £71,243 and £23,446 per QALY for T2DM and T1DM respectively at a 3.5% discount rate and £56,822 and £14,221 respectively when discounted at 1.5% . Diabetes management represented by the mean HbA1c was 7.5% for those with T2DM and 8.7% for T1DM.Sensitivity analysis: Extending screening to biennial based on HbA1c, being the strongest predictor of progression of DR, at three levels of HbA1c 6.5%, 8.0% and 9.5% lost one QALY saving the NHS £106,075; £58,653 and £31,626 respectively for T2DM and £94,696, £37,646 and £11,089 respectively for T1DM. In addition, extending screening to biennial based on duration of diabetes >6 years for T2DM per QALY lost, saving the NHS £54,106 and for 6-12 and >12 years for T1DM saving £83,856, £23,446 and £13,340 respectively. Conclusions: Base case and sensitivity analyses indicates biennial screening to be cost-effective for T2DM irrespective of HbA1c and duration of diabetes. However, the uncertainty around the DCER indicates that annual screening should be maintained for those with T1DM especially when the HbA1c exceeds 80 mmol/mol (9.5%) and duration of diabetes is greater than 12 years