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Disability Pride Month: Library Edition

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This month we celebrate Disability Pride Month, marking the anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) being signed into law by President George HW Bush on July 26, 1990.

Nearly 1 in 4 Americans live with some type of disability, and despite nearly 40 years since the ADA’s passage, many Americans with disabilities still live with significant barriers to living their lives to their fullest. Barriers can be physical, such lack of ramps, elevators, and ADA-compliant spaces. But they can also be less visible, including design and function of technology.

Accessible Library Resources

As library resources shifted to a predominantly digital format, the importance of these resources providing accessible and inclusive information for users of all abilities has become even more vital.

The Rehabilitation Act of 1978 defines and protects the same individuals as the ADA, but covers a different scope. In 1998, it was amended to include Section 508, which focused on the accessibility of electronic and information technology products and services that federal agencies buy, create and use.

Section 508 mandates that individuals with disabilities have access to information and services that is comparable to the access and use available to non-disabled individuals. It also provides guidelines to follow to ensure electronic resources are accessible, including making websites and apps accessible to assistive technologies (screen readers, alternative mouse and keyboard devices like motion trackers, magnification software, etc).

The Library Accessibility Alliance (LAA) is an organization made up of multiple library consortia across the country that advocates for improving library e-resource accessibility and shifting library culture to one that promotes justice and inclusion for people with disabilities. The group provides independent accessibility evaluations of library resources, training and toolkits for libraries and librarians, as well as specific licensing language for libraries to use or adapt to address concerns with electronic resources vendors.

LAA hosts a searchable database of independent evaluations of over 100 electronic resources.

ADA Compliance Tools

Vendors are recommended to provide documentation that shows how their hardware or software is accessible.

An Accessibility Conformance Report (ACR) is a document that explains how information and communication technology (ICT) products such as software, hardware, electronic content, and support documentation meet (conform to) the Revised 508 Standards for IT accessibility. Use the ACR to make specific statements in simple recommended language to demonstrate how the features and functional characteristics of your product meet the Section 508 standards.

There are multiple products and tools available to help create ACRs, including the VPAT.

Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT™)

Vendors that offer software, hardware or electronic content can voluntarily provide a VPAT™ that discloses how they support accessibility guidelines. The VPAT™ outlines the Revised Section 508 Standards for accessibility, and allows vendors to indicate their conformance with each standard. 

However, even if a vendor provides a VPAT™, it doesn’t guarantee that the vendor’s resource is actually Section 508 or ADA compliant.

W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)

WCAG are guidelines and criteria produced by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) to ensure that websites and electronic content are accessible to all. They provide quantitative means of evaluating websites for accessibility, and should be used by both developers and content creators.

There are currently two standards in use today: WCAG 2.0 and WCAG 2.1 which added additional criteria to address accessibility for mobile devices, people with low vision, and people with cognitive disabilities. 

Popular Biomedical Resources: ADA Compliance

If you are interested in learning more about different resources and their ADA compliance status, see the lists below which feature some of the MSK Library’s most popular resources.

Literature Databases

Citation Management tools

Clinical Databases

What are the Differences Between Google Scholar, OneSearch and Bibliographic Databases When Looking for Journal Articles?

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Bibliographic databases contain references to journal articles (as well as sometimes other formats such as book chapters, etc.) with metadata that may typically include a title, authors, publisher, publication date and place, pages, abstract, index terms, etc. Examples: PubMed, Embase, Web of Science, Scopus, and PsycINFO.

When you search bibliographic databases you are actually searching for metadata, so you can specify what “field” you want your search terms to be found in (eg. title, abstract, author, journal, etc.). Available full text is linked to references/bibliographic records but cannot be searched.

Advantages to Searching Bibliographic Databases

  • The ability to use database functionality to do the best quality search and retrieve the best results. Such functionality in biomedical databases includes advanced functionality such as subject heading (e.g. MeSH) mapping.
  • Searching only essential information (title, abstract, author supplied keywords, index terms/subject headings) when searching on a topic may be a safeguard against overwhelming a searcher with an abundance of results.

    Unlike in bibliographic databases, searching for journal articles via OneSearch (the library’s catalog found on our homepage) or Google Scholar involves searching the full text of journal articles.

    Searching OneSearch
  • OneSearch is a library catalog plus, available at many Libraries, including MSK Library, that allows finding journals and other serials, books, etc., and also databases, newspapers, dissertations, and other print and electronic media typically available in the library’s catalog.
  • It also is able to search the full-text content of e-journals and e-books (owned/subscribed to by the Library) such as journal articles and book chapters.
  • Advanced Search also allows keyword searching in the Title, Author or Subject fields alone, as well as searching in Any Field, which includes the full text of an article.
  • OneSearch relies on keywords and phrases (using quotations), but does not include any mapping or controlled vocabulary.


Searching Google Scholar

  • In Google Scholar you can find journal articles by searching within their full text.
  • Google Scholar includes multidisciplinary content (e.g. Medicine, Physics, Computer Science, Humanities)
  • The articles come from journals that Google Scholar has authority to search regardless of and well beyond any institutional subscription.
  • You have poor control of how you design and execute the search and view your search results (no proper search tools, no abundance of limits and sorting options typical to bibliographic databases).
  • As you are searching the whole “universe” of journals with Google Scholar search, you will find articles that your institution does and does not have access to. An older MSK Library blog post explains how to get access to the full text or request the full text.

Disadvantages of Searching OneSearch and Google Scholar

-The lack of advanced search functionality. While essential search functionality is available (better in OneSearch, worse in Google Scholar) it is still not as advanced as in major biomedical databases.

-Searching the full text in either OneSearch or Google Scholar may end up in the overwhelming number of search results because you are searching the full text of journal articles.

Takeaways and Recommendations

  • Using OneSearch or Google Scholar involves searching the full text of journal articles.
  • To find journal articles, use bibliographic databases as the first choice; use OneSearch and Google Scholar as complementary to using bibliographic journal literature databases.
  • Searching OneSearch and GoogleScholar are most effective when the content being searched is likely not found in the title or the abstract, and thus searching full-text is required.

Understand Open Access Publishing

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Scholarly publishing has been an integral part of scientific discovery and dissemination for the past several hundred years, however the 21st century has shifted that paradigm. In a time when there were only a handful of scientific journals, the process of publishing and dissemination was slow yet consistent; but it was also very gated, with male academics in their ivory towers deciding what was important and what was not important to be published. 

The dawn of the internet spurred a massive shift in how publishing fundamentally worked. Many of the major scientific journal publishers began to steadily increase their prices, and at the same time new journals began publishing exclusively online, which decreased their overhead costs of print, and began experimenting with the idea of open access. In turn, traditional peer-reviewed journals continued to increase their subscription rates, often making them prohibitively expensive for low-income countries, as well as small institutions and libraries. 

In the past quarter-century the growth of scientific journals has exploded, and in turn the number of articles published has grown exponentially. And while it opens the doors to many more researchers being able to get their research published, and the speed and depth of scientific discovery and dissemination has sped up significantly, this shift has left many in the scientific community unsure how to best proceed in this age of open access and unfortunately some get taken advantage of in their desire to publish.

The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) has written a very good overview of why OA matters and how it works. This initiative extends to textbooks and research data sets.

The Open Access Initiative

Open access is a publishing and distribution model that makes scholarly research literature—much of which is funded by taxpayers around the world—freely available to the public online, without restrictions. The Open Access Initiative formally began on February 14, 2002, after a conference in Budapest in December 2001 led to a public statement regarding the principles of open access to research literature. This became known as the Budapest Open Access Initiative.

On April 11, 2003 a group of researchers convened at Howard Hughes Medical Institute, with the goal of improving the access to scholarly literature by developing the logistics of how this material would be made available. The group formulated a definition of an open access journal as:

“one that grants free, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit, and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship.“

This meeting and their released public statement became known as the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing.

In October 2003 another group convened during a conference in Berlin to establish an international statement on open access and the availability of information and knowledge to the entire international scientific community. The statement from this Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities was published on October 22, 2003.

At a 2005 follow-up conference, the declaration was refined to two key principles: signatories should require researchers to deposit a copy of their work in an open access repository and encourage the publication of work in open access journals when available. Today these two concepts are often called “Green OA” and “Gold OA” respectively, and the two combined are referred to as an open-access mandate.

Together, these three statements (Budapest, Bethesda, and Berlin) are collectively known as the “BBB definition.” From these three, the entire open access movement has been formed and shaped into the entire open access publishing environment that we have today.

NIH Public Access Policy

The NIH Public Access Policy was implemented in 2008 to advance science and improve human health by providing free online access to full-text, peer-reviewed journal articles arising from taxpayer-funded research.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) requires every scientist who receives an NIH research grant and publishes the results in a peer-reviewed journal to deposit a digital copy of the article in its digital archive, PubMed Central (PMC). In turn, the NIH will make these articles freely available within one year of publication.

While NIH Public Access Policy essentially makes articles published even in non-open access journals available freely to the public, it is only required for articles that are funded using US-taxpayer money (any NIH grant, including P30 Core Grants). It also included up to a 12-month period with which it needed to be available. That will be changing, as a policy change announced in 2022 will require any research with federal grant funds to be available immediately without delay upon publication. This policy change will go into effect no later than December 31, 2025. 

How Do Open Access Journals Work?

Open access journals are journals whose articles are freely available worldwide without restrictions or embargo using a Creative Commons License granted by the authors. The primary difference between open access journals and closed access journals is how they are funded.

  • Closed access journals (traditional subscription-based journals such as NEJM, JAMA, etc.) are funded by their readers through individual and institutional subscriptions, as well as pay-per-view. Usually this means libraries are forced to foot the cost of ever-increasing subscriptions to continue to get access. 
  • Open access journals are freely accessible to the readers, but without subscription fees they need to find funding and make money through a different means. The primary means of funding open access journals is through author-paid article processing charges (APCs). Other journals may be funded through institutions, professional societies, and consortia and rely on volunteers to publish.
  • Hybrid journals are closed access journals that offer authors the option to make their work freely available after paying the journal a hefty fee. This hybrid model can be seen as “double dipping” by the publishers who are making money off of both their readers (subscriptions) and authors (processing fees), and is seen as controversial and in disagreement with the open access philosophy. 

Types of Open Access

Gold Open Access

Gold OA is the type of open access that is directly connected to “open access journals”.

  • The final publisher version is open access via the journal website without any embargo period.
  • The publication has a license intended to maximize reuse, such as CC-BY.
  • The author(s) may be subject to pay an additional article processing charge (APC) by the publisher.

Green Open Access

Green OA is the type of open access that harnesses self-archiving by the author to provide freely available access.

  • Authors can archive their paper in an full-text journal or subject repository or in their institutional repostory.
  • The version archived is usually the final author version as accepted for publication.
  • Preprints fall under Green OA.
  • There are no additional charges (APCs) to paid.
  • A publisher embargo period may apply (usually 12 months).

Platinum/Diamond OA

  • Journals that publish OA but do not charge the authors APCs
  • Usually funded by institutions, advertising, philanthropy, etc

Bronze OA

  • Journal free to read online but doesn’t have a license
  • Not generally sharable or reusable

Black OA

  • Illegal open access
  • Pirated versions of articles

Open Access Resources

MSK Library Information Guides

MSK Documentation for NIH Policy

Open Access Resources

NIH Public Access Resources