How to find and evaluate reliable evidence-based health information

As I write this I am sitting in my newly set up home office and doing my part to help “flatten the curve” of covid-19. I began my career at the Herzl Family Medicine Clinic at the Jewish General Hospital and have been working for 15 years to help patients and caregivers as well as health professionals find and evaluate health information.

There is so much misinformation out there! Now more than ever we are inundated with all sorts of health information and advice, some more trustworthy than others. You may be feeling overwhelmed, and not sure even where to begin looking for information let alone how to assess whether it is true or false. You may have other health issues that have not been put on hold because of a pandemic and are finding it harder than ever to access the information you need.

Today I am proud to share with you an amazing resource that was born out of years of hard work and the passion and love of an amazing team.

The Online Health Information Aid website is finally here!

Search for, evaluate and use reliable online health information

The website:

  • provides tips and resources on searching, evaluating, and using online health information;
  • aims to improve skills and confidence in finding trustworthy health information online, enabling positive outcomes while reducing negative ones;
  • was developed based on research evidence and co-designed with users;
  • ultimately, supports lifelong learning and empowers people to participate in their own health care.

For Covid-19 specific information, our Medical Library colleagues at the University of British Columbia have produced an excellent and comprehensive resource guide on all aspects of the current coronavirus pandemic for the public, patients, and health professionals.

IMPORTANT: Neither of these resources should replace the directives of McGill University, nor should they be taken as medical advice. If you need to speak to a health professional for advice, call 1-877-644-4545 or 811. For more information about McGill’s response to the pandemic consult https://www.mcgill.ca/coronavirus.

Please share both resources widely and feel free to re-post this message to social media or email it to your friends and family.

Take care of yourselves and please know that the Schulich team is working hard to make sure you are supported during this stressful time. For information about library resources and services during this period visit our home page, use our chat service or reach out to your liaison librarian.

Francesca Frati, BFA, MLIS
Assistant librarian
Liaison for the McGill Ingram School of Nursing and Affiliated Health Institution Libraries.

This past week the University of California didn’t renew its contract with one of the biggest publishers of research articles in the world

McGill Library’s Scholarly Communications Librarian, Jessica Lange, explains…

 

Why?

University of California was negotiating for two things:

  1. Access to Elsevier content
  2. The right for University of California researchers who publish with Elsevier, to make their work open access immediately.

What happened?

According to U C, Elsevier wanted to charge UC authors “large publishing fees on top of the university’s multi-million dollar subscription, resulting in much greater cost to the university and much higher profits for Elsevier. Additional terms that broke off negotiations can be found here.

But don’t big publishing companies always charge fees for authors to make their work open access?

Yes they do – via APCs (or article processing charges) either for fully open access journals or via hybrid journals (i.e. content in the journal is closed unless an author elects to pay an APC).

However these fees are typically paid by authors individually rather than through a bundled deal at an institutional level.

The APCs at Elsevier vary but generally, the range is $1100- 4000 USD per article

What was UC trying to do?

It wanted to follow the model of “big deals” or “publish and read” deals that are occurring in Europe. In such deals you try to bundle the costs of such APCs charges alongside your regular subscription price – ideally, because you’re negotiating the two separate costs together, it should result in savings across the university as a whole.

This also takes a more holistic approach to the publishing life cycle rather than separating author costs from reader costs.

Why didn’t Elsevier go for it?

Well they *did* except the price they wanted UC to pay was too high. I can only speculate as to what price they wanted UC to pay but from reading UC commentary, it looked like Elsevier expected UC to pay an APC (in full) each time a UC author published with them. As you can imagine, this pricing approach wouldn’t have resulted in any savings for the university and may in fact have resulted in more costs.

What happens now?

UC has perpetual access rights to Elsevier journals prior to January 2019. For newly published articles, UC will locate the materials through interlibrary loan or locating through another means of scholarly sharing (e.g. checking to see if the article was made openly available via a repository).

Is anyone in Canada negotiating a big deal? 

Not that I’m aware of but to some extent CRKN negotiations have strived for something similar. Many of McGill’s current APC discounts are the results of CRKN negotiations which bundle the two (i.e. discounts on author fees plus subscription prices).