Since 2016, Springer Nature has been helping its authors bring more attention to their work by creating shareable links to view-only versions of their peer-reviewed research papers that can be freely-distributed to their potential readers via an initiative called SharedIt.

What is SharedIt?

“SharedIt is a content sharing initiative from Springer Nature that allows authors and subscribers to easily and legally share links to free-to-read versions of research articles anywhere, including social media platforms, repositories and personal websites. All articles published in the Springer Nature owned journal portfolio and over 1,000 co-owned or partner-owned journals are included in the initiative.”

What many authors and readers do not realize is that the mass sharing of downloaded PDFs of peer-reviewed, published journal articles is usually not allowed within standard copyright agreements. The SharedIt initiative makes the sharing legal because the article PDF can only be downloaded and printed if the article has been published as an open access paper or if the viewer has a personal or institutional subscription through which they may gain access to the full-text PDF. For everyone else, the article in its entirety can be read in a free, view-only version but cannot be downloaded/saved/printed. The information, however, can still be read and further shared via the paper’s SharedIt link, even via far-reaching social media channels.

To learn more about SharedIt – see:

• Hall D. Innovations in publication: free sharing of all Biophysical Reviews’ content. Biophys Rev. 2017 Apr;9(2):67-68. doi: 10.1007/s12551-017-0253-y. Epub 2017 Mar 20. PMID: 28510084; PMCID: PMC5418491.
• Press Release (London, 17 October 2016): We’ve SharedIt! Springer Nature completes integration of its content sharing initiative across its entire owned portfolio of over 1,300 journals.
• See Your Research Soar with SharedIt: Use this sample social media plan to promote your research using your SharedIt author link.
• SharedIt: Springer Nature’s Free Content Sharing Initiative.

…or AskUs at the MSK Library.

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!