Frequently Asked Questions

1. Handling Revisions (with respect to alerting users of changes to the publication) Each publication has a field in the RSS file to indicate date of publication (or last revision date). One state agency had the idea to include the date of revised publication on the inside title page of the document when ‘substantive’ changes have been made. NIOSH does not provide guidance on how states publish their documents. NIOSH is considering adding a feature to flag new publications.
    
2. Access to the Peer Reviewed Publications: The Provider Guide describes the appropriate links for journal articles. It sounds like NIOSH would prefer a link to the free full text of the article. If copyright/subscriber issues prevail, the next best alternatives respectively are the DOI (digital object identifier) and PMID (Pubmed). The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has a public access policy that ensures the public’s access to journal articles supported wholly or partially with federal NIH funds (one year post-publication). (NIH Public Access Policy). Does NIOSH have a policy on posting copyrighted articles? What is NIOSH’s legal advice for states on posted copyrighted and federally funded materials?
   
   Although federally funded grants often produce material that can’t be copyrighted, many publishers don’t have language in their author copyright forms that work for states. NIOSH has no policy recommendations for states on whether to post copyrighted publications to their state website. It would be ideal if every state would be able to post the full text of the article on their website, but all we can recommend at this time is to follow the legal advice of your agency. Many states are simply providing the URL of the abstract of the publication to avoid possible infringement of copyright law.
    
3. Non-English Publications: What is NIOSH’s recommendation on including publications written in other languages?
   
   NIOSH’s current recommendation is to put the language of the publication following its title. Example: "Food Flavorings - Spanish." NIOSH also recommends writing the title of the publication in its original language in the publication’s description.
   
   Example:

   Title: Heat Stress - Spanish
   Description: "Estrés por Acaloramiento." Information on how laborers can prevent heat stress. Produced by the California Department of Public and Occupational Health Branch.

   
   Although the RSS Editor has a field available to assign language, NIOSH still recommends writing the title of the publication in English and include the title of the publication in its native language in the publicaiton's description. By default, any publications that do not have a value assigned for language are assumed to be written in English.
   
   The results of a query in the clearinghouse will display the language next to the publication’s title. For example, a search for the key terms "Heat Stress" would yield these titles:
    
   • Heat Stress
   • Heat Stress - Chinese
   • Heat Stress - Spanish
   • Heat Stress - Vietnamese
   
   By writing the titles of all the publications in English, you can see all the languages in which a given publication is available. Writing the titles in English makes the clearinghouse most accessible to English-speaking occupational health professionals, who are the primary users of the State-based Occupational Health Clearinghouse. A non-English speaker would still be able to find the publication by reading the publication’s title found in the title.
    
4. Viewing with Excel: Can I view my RSS file within Excel?
   
   Yes, you can copy and paste the RSS file into Excel file. You just need to copy one cell in "Sheet View" and paste it into Excel. Unfortunately, the resulting spreadsheet is not very clean. When it pastes, the values of some cells are split along several columns. This is probably due to the fact that Excel interprets double quotes as delimiters.
   
   Also, only the codes for the values of some fields paste into Excel. For example, the code for "Annual Performance Report" is "AP". When you paste the XML file into Excel, "AP" appears instead of "Annual Performance Report". Look in Appendices B, C, D, and E of the Feed Specification document to learn what these codes mean. The Feed Specification document is found under the help menu of the RSS Editor.
    
5. Assigning Industry Sectors to General Reports: How should I assign industry sectors to a general report that applies to all industry sectors?
   
   To avoid having a general report that contains data for multiple sectors getting picked up by an individual sector search, NIOSH recommends assigning the industry sector "non-specific" to these types of reports. This will prevent sector-specific searches from producing a very long list of documents that aren’t really sector specific.
    
6. Multiple RSS Feeds: Can I create more than one RSS file or RSS feed for my program?
   
   Yes, you can create as many RSS files as you would like. You might prefer to create separate RSS files for each program in your state. For example, you could create one RSS file for publications from your pesticide poisoning program and another for your ABLES publications.
    
7. New Publications in Clearinghouse: When will changes to my RSS file or RSS feed be reflected in the clearinghouse?
   
   Any changes made to your RSS file or RSS feed should be reflected in the clearinghouse about a week after they have been submitted. These changes are dependent upon NIOSH manually initiating a scan for updates. If your changes are not reflected in the clearinghouse within a week, please email NIOSH at .