Managing Scholarly Publication Data: Learning From Our User Communities

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Science has always been grounded in data, but the volume and diversity of data generated by twenty-first century science and the establishment of data management mandates by funding agencies have motivated The Rockefeller University Library (RUL) and the Memorial Sloan Kettering (MSK) Library to partner together and survey our respective user communities.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH), as described in a document dated February 2015, plans to build upon and enhance its longstanding efforts to increase access to the scholarly publications and digital data resulting from NIH-funded research. We don’t want to wait to determine how our libraries can contribute and support this initiative. Our 10-minute survey (or less) will help us better understand the potential services we can develop to support our researchers.

Data is a meaningful and valuable research outcome just as scholarly articles are with reports of the analysis of research data. It is a goal of the MSK and RUL Librarians to support our users by developing appropriate and effective data management services. To do this, we need to better understand current scholarly publication data practices as well as solicit feedback from researchers whose science would benefit from data management support. Librarians have always been a part of the scholarly communication ecosystem, describing, organizing, curating, and providing access to published literature. Scholarly works (artifacts) are being provided in different formats (data sets, code, video, etc…) and we should be prepared to help support data sharing within our institutions as well as in the larger scientific community.

If you want to learn more about this collaborative project, feel free to contact Carol Feltes (cfeltes@mail.rockefeller.edu) or Donna Gibson (gibsond@mskcc.org). We would be delighted to hear from you. If you have completed our survey (closes Monday, February 1, 2016), we thank you for your time and comments! Implementing any successful new service can only happen with the input of our users!