It is not uncommon, especially in Europe, for funding agencies to require their grantees to publish their research findings in journals that will make the resulting articles openly-available to all immediately upon publication. In fact, the Cancer Moonshot program at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) recently announced just such a policy – see this Science news article from August 2019 for details: “In departure for NIH, Cancer Moonshot requires grantees to make papers immediately free”.

This “immediately freely available” requirement is quite different than, for example, the requirements of the NIH Public Access Policy which allows for a 12 month embargo period during which the article remains behind a paywall so that the publishers are able to make money from subscriptions to their most current content. Even though Open Access (OA) journals have been around for almost 20 years now, with the first OA publisher, BioMed Central being founded in 2000, selecting an open access journal to submit a manuscript to is still confusing territory for many authors, no doubt largely due to the many OA subtypes available to choose from. This recent article nicely describes the OA subtypes – see:

Piwowar H, Priem J, Larivière V, Alperin JP, Matthias L, Norlander B, Farley A, West J, Haustein S. The state of OA: a large-scale analysis of the prevalence and impact of Open Access articles. PeerJ. 2018 Feb 13;6:e4375. doi: 10.7717/peerj.4375. eCollection 2018. PubMed PMID: 29456894; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC5815332.

Two resources that authors may find useful for identifying potential journal candidates to submit their manuscripts to are PubHubs, a subscription database that the MSK Library provides access to, and the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), a free database that indexes >13,000 journals. Both of these databases have advanced search features that include filters that the searcher can select to limit their search results to their desired OA options.

For example, in PubsHub, a database which contains information on both traditional and OA journal options, users can filter the results list by such options as whether the journal is a “Fully Open Access Journal” (versus a traditional or hybrid OA title), whether the title is indexed in PubMed/Medline, whether it is peer-reviewed, and by range of impact factor.

DOAJ, on the other hand, contains information only on OA titles. It includes such information as OA article publication cost and can be filtered by options such as peer-review status, etc.

For assistance with selecting an OA journal title to submit an article to for publication, feel free to Ask US at the MSK Library!

The U.S. National Library Medicine is responsible for two free web drug-related databases that are intended to be used by both consumers and healthcare professionals. Provided as a public service, these databases do not include any pharmaceutical company advertisements and are not marketing tools. Both resources also provide application development support, making the content easily available to computer programers/developers.

1. Pillbox

“The Pillbox website was developed to aid in the identification of unknown pills (oral solid dosage form medications). It combines images of pills with appearance and other information to enable users to visually search for and identify oral solid dosage form medications.” Among other identifiers, Pillbox can even be searched by pill imprint, shape, and color.

Pillbox is one of the largest free databases of prescription and over-the-counter drug information and images, combining data from pharmaceutical companies, Food and Drug Administration (FDA), National Institutes of Health (NIH), and Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). As of 10/01/19, it includes 8,781 pill images, 33,255 products, and 67,365 records.

2. DailyMed

DailyMed provides high quality information about marketed drugs, both human and animal drugs, via their FDA labels (package inserts). It provides health information providers and the public with a standard, comprehensive, and up-to-date resource of medication content and labeling as found in medication package inserts.

This website contains 112,954 drug listings as submitted to the FDA. (Note: This is not a complete listing of labels for approved prescription drugs.) The website also includes a label archives search where previous versions of labels can be found.

To learn more about these tools or other drug-related databases (like Micromedex or LexiComp Online) provided via the MSK Library, feel free to Ask Us!

A group of researchers from Erasmus University Medical Center in the Netherlands recently published a paper where they describe the development and validation of bibliographic database search filters/hedges useful for identifying scholarly literature in the field of palliative care.

Rietjens JA, Bramer WM, Geijteman EC, van der Heide A, Oldenmenger WH. Development and validation of search filters to find articles on palliative care in bibliographic databases. Palliat Med. 2019 Apr;33(4):470-474. doi:10.1177/0269216318824275. Epub 2019 Jan 28. PubMed PMID: 30688143; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC6439930.

Search filters can be used by anyone carrying out database searches, both professional librarians and non-librarians alike. They help you save time by allowing you to take advantage of the good work of others to more quickly and efficiently extract what you need from bibliographic databases.

To add a search filter to your search strategy, simply copy the appropriate search string provided by the authors and paste it into the database search form that you are using, being sure to note the database name and vendor interface (the syntax will vary depending on the particular interface being used). You can copy the palliative care filter directly from Table 1 or from the plain text version available in the Supplemental data file. After starting your research with the topic-specific core set of search results that the search filter/hedge returns, you can then add your favorite terms to further customize the search strategy toward your particular interests.

For more tips on identifying literature on a particular topic, be sure to Ask Us!