Category Archives: About Resources

Publishing in Journals where Articles are Made Immediately Freely Available to All

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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!

Read Thousands of Medical Textbooks ONLINE!

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Even though the medium has changed, the MSK Library still provides access to thousands of textbooks to our users. To locate a specific textbook, you can start at the Library Website, and look for the search box under ONESEARCH for “Books and More” which will search across our print and electronic book collection. Note: This method is not meant to browse our collection.

To browse eBooks that the library subscribes to, there are a variety of sources and platforms. The following are just a few you can access.

  • AccessMedicine and AccessSurgery, where you can discover a large array of major clinical textbooks (e.g. Harrison’s, Fitzpatrick’s, Goodman & Gillman’s, Hurst’s, Schwartz’s, and William’s). These two platforms also have a variety of other resources and tools for clinicians and you can search across the platform or within a specific text. Chapters can be individually saved and printed.
  • STATRef! is another platform that includes a large number of textbooks (e.g. 8th Edition of the AJCC Staging Manual, Decker, ICD-10, Merck Manual, and Red Book).
  • Wiley Online Library houses 22,000 eBooks covering 60 different subject areas.

Have a question regarding MSK eBook collections or want to learn about other available eBook platforms, don’t hesitate to contact us!

Article Usage Count in Scopus and Web of Science

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It is well known that the number of times an individual journal article is cited is one of the top metrics of scholarly impact. Still, there are other metrics which may be useful in determining the popularity of an article. One such metric is item usage statistics. In electronic resources, usage statistics may show different aspects of access and usage, for example, number of downloads, abstracts views, etc. Some databases (ex., Scopus, Web of Science) offer limited usage metrics in each record.

In Scopus, usage count is provided via PlumX Metrics (featured in a previous Library blog post). Click on the PlumX Metrics icon located in the right upper corner of each Scopus record to see article metrics, including some usage statistics, as well as exposure of the article in social media.

In Web of Science usage count is built in and provided for each article. Search results can be sorted by usage.

To see the usage count for an article, click on its title in the search result list and scroll down.The usage count can be found on the right hand pane of the record.