HCA Scholarly Articles

The following is a model open-access policy in the Harvard style—with a freely waivable rights-retaining license and a deposit requirement. This language is based on and informed by the policies voted by several Harvard faculties, as well as MIT, Stanford University School of Education, Duke University, and others. I have added some annotations explaining why the wording is chosen as it is. Extensive information about good practices for university open-access policies is provided in a widely endorsed guide from the Harvard Open Access Project (http://bit.ly/goodoa). We would greatly appreciate your help in assessing how institutions are using the model open-access policy and how it could be improved.

Creative Ideas in Technical Services Interest Group (CITSIG) is an interest group under the auspices of the American Library Association’s (ALA) CORE division, a nonprofit library organization. The group seeks to engage its membership through a variety of in-person and virtual mechanisms to identify new and creative approaches to technical services work. Interest Group Week, in March, is a virtual event. The ALA roundtable meetings have remained in-person events. Over the past year, CITSIG has sought to engage its members in a variety of ways.

This paper is about cellulose acetate microfilm from the British Library perspective. It traces how acetate microfilm became an issue for the British Library and describes cellulose acetate deterioration. This is followed by details of what has already been done about the situation and what action is planned for the future.

The Harvard Medical School Countway Library’s Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) Best Practices for Biomedical Research Data Management launched on Canvas in January 2018. This report analyzes student reported data and course generated analytics from January 2018, through July 8, 2020, for the course Best Practices for Biomedical Research Data Management. By comparing the findings from the enrollment period through March 8, 2020 (pre-pandemic) to the period through July 8, 2020 (during-pandemic), the main goal is to investigate potential shifts due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Harvard Medical School Countway Library’s Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) Best Practices for Biomedical Research Data Management launched on Canvas in January 2018. This report analyzes learner reported data and course generated analytics from March 2020 through June 2021 for the course. This analysis focuses on three subsets of participant data during the pandemic to understand global learner demographics and interest in biomedical research data management. Related preprint: 10.31219/osf.io/9qbg4

Antibiotic use is often blamed for increases in the prevalence of infections due to antibiotic-resistant bacteria. This paper clarifies the effects of antibiotic exposure on bacterial antibiotic resistance by developing models that describe the growth of competing bacterial strains whose antibiotic sensitivities differ. The analysis generalizes logistic growth models to include first-order growth parameters that are arbitrary functions of antibiotic levels. It derives closed-form solutions for population size, composition, and average antibiotic sensitivities as functions of antibiotic exposure. Strategies to minimize the bacterial population size are analyzed in the context of the model. These heuristic models explore in formal terms the population dynamics thought to underlie resistance development.