March 19, 2020 marked the day when the MSK Library closed its doors to our user community. While the physical space could not be accessed, this didn’t mean we were not available to support information requests from clients based at any location.  The moment we closed, our focus was on promoting and showcasing the Library’s digital resources and virtual services.

The Library will be part of the Reactivation: Phase B plan and we anticipate opening the Library to MSK staff in early October two days per week. In drafting plans to reopen, our goal is to work with leadership and internal departments to consider how best to balance the safety of the library team and our clients. Our reopening will include social distancing measures, clearly identifying seating arrangements for users, and an effective cleaning regime.

As a friendly reminder, the MSK user community, and our patients and their caregivers can continue to reach out to us via chat, phone, email, or by using one of the request forms on our ASK US web page.

As our reopening plan evolves, we will be posting important information on our Website and our social media platforms (internal and external).  Questions or comments can be directed to my attention — don’t hesitate to contact me!

Donna Gibson
Director of Library Services

The 2019 Synapse Publications Report is now available to help answer this question! Compiled by librarians, this report provides an analysis and documents the publications produced by MSK researchers, clinicians, nurses, and other healthcare professionals for the year in review. The final bibliography includes 5,130 works, comprised of references to research and conference papers, reviews, meeting abstracts, books and book sections. This represents an increase of over 11% from publications identified in our 2018 report.

Synapse is a public facing resource and the authoritative bibliographic database developed and maintained by the Library. Our ultimate goal is to track and showcase the wealth of knowledge attributed to Memorial Sloan Kettering.

I hope that by browsing the 2019 Synapse Publications Report, readers will gain a sense of the contributions made by MSK authors to the ever-growing body of scholarly research.

Feel free to send me an email and let me know what you think about this year’s report.

Donna Gibson
Director of Library Services

In early May, I attended a webinar about preprints and PMC (PubMed Central). Kathryn Funk, the Program Manager for this full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health’s National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM) shared information on a very timely initiative. Plans were about to be put into motion to launch a 12-month pilot project.

On June 9, 2020, the NIH Preprint pilot project kicked off with the intention of testing the feasibility of making preprints resulting from NIH-funded research available via PMC with related records in PubMed. This project supports NLM and their overall strategy to increase the visibility and discoverability of early NIH research results. According to NLM, lessons learned during this trial will inform the team on future efforts and next steps regarding preprints.

This launch comes at a time when the COVID-19 global pandemic has raised awareness and a growing interest in preprint servers as another communication channel for scientists to rapidly disseminate their research findings, avoiding the traditional peer-reviewed process and is why this pilot experiment will initially be focused on COVID-19-related preprints.

You can learn more about the NIH pilot project at the following sites:

• NIH Preprint Pilot Overview
• NIH Preprint Pilot FAQs
• NLM Director’s blog announcement: The NIH Preprint Pilot: A New Experiment for a New Era
• NLM Technical Bulletin: NLM Announces NIH Preprint Pilot to Provide Early Access to COVID-19 Research
• NIH Extramural Nexus: Emerging Research Now Available Through New NIH Preprint Pilot 

If the links above have piqued your interest, additional resources can also be found by visiting the Preprints tab on the Library’s Open Access LibGuide.

Donna Gibson
Director of Library Services