In academic publishing, a preprint is the version of a scientific paper that often is seen prior to its publication in a peer-reviewed scholarly journal. The preprint is usually available at no cost to the reader before and/or after the paper is published. As is the case with most preprint services, an author has a venue to post his or her findings ahead of the formal peer-review and publication process. There are also other benefits for the author when a decision is made to upload the manuscript to a preprint server. Among them – this action can help reduce the research publication time frame, speed up the process in disseminating the findings, and establish early provenance of the research.

Last year, I published a post about preprints (04/28/17) and listed a variety of sources that would be of interest to the MSK research community. Recently, there was a news release (03/20/18) from the American Chemical Society (ACS) announcing its partnership with the Royal Society of Chemistry and the German Chemical Society, adding to the list of preprint sources.  These three societies have come together to support the strategic development and associated costs for the global premier preprint server – ChemRxiv.

This year, we have the pleasure of collaborating with members of our PostDoc community to host an event focusing on preprints at one of the MSK Library’s Advancing Scholarship Discussion Series sessions. Working with Michiel Boekhout, PhD, and his colleagues (Lilian T. Lamech & Zheng Ser), our goal is to bring awareness about the value and benefits of preprints. Michiel, along with Lilian and Zheng are eLife Ambassadors, and one of the causes that eLife Ambassadors hope to champion is preprints and encouraging researchers to start posting their research findings as preprints (when appropriate).  You can read more about how eLife offers authors the opportunity to submit a preprint to bioRxiv.

Our upcoming event is scheduled for the end of June 2018.  Don’t hesitate to contact Michiel Boekhout (boekhoum@mskcc.org) or me to learn more.  You can also start exploring the value of preprints by reading the following editorial published in PLoS Biology (May 2017) entitled, “Ten simple rules to consider regarding preprint submission.”

Donna Gibson
Director of Library Services

The Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) recently announced their formal endorsement of the Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) in hopes that their action will encourage others to acknowledge the need to improve research assessment practices. While I read this announcement with interest, I also wondered: What’s been happening with DORA? Has DORA had any impact in the research community? Has any progress been made?

DORA began as a conversation during a meeting of the American Society of Cell Biology that took place in 2012 in San Francisco. Journal editors, researchers, as well as, other interested individuals came together to discuss the output and results of scientific research with the desire to eliminate the use of journal-based metrics (e.g. Impact Factor).  There were two other themes or recommendations made – the need to assess research on its own merits; and the need to capitalize on the opportunities provided by web-based publications (use and leverage other research impact indicators, such as, Altmetrics/online attention metrics). In June 2013, I published a blog about this initiative, entitled “Evaluating Scientific Research: Recommendations from DORA” and noted that organizers had obtained signatures from 310 organizations and 8,106 individuals — all willing to acknowledge and support this declaration. Continue reading →

The months of December and January always mark for me the time when I start to see “top 10” lists appearing on discussion forums, blogs, websites, and via direct mass email services. For some reason they catch my attention and peak my curiosity.  Depending on the theme of the list, I often wonder if I can predict what the list might reveal!

Some of the lists I review are for sheer entertainment, for example: 

• The 10 Best Books of 2017 (as selected by the editors of The New York Times Book Review)
• The Top 10 Gadgets of 2017

Other lists provide useful insights and prompt me to reflect on how the MSK Library is supporting our knowledge workers, and to consider whether there are any additional approaches that we should be using to engage our library user community.

• The Top 10 Library Stories of 2017 (Publishers Weekly looks back at stories that captivated the publishing world)
• Top 10 Trends at the 2017 Charleston Library Conference (as shared by Morgan Kubelka, Library Services, Wiley)
• OCLC Top Stories of 2017
• NLM IN FOCUS – a look inside the U.S. National Library of Medicine (not really a top 10 list but still very interesting to review!)

And still other lists provide me with a chance to see what the top science research stories were last year — how scientists impacted the world of scholarly communication by sharing their research findings and how interested readers reacted.

• 2017 Breakthrough of the Year from Science (AAAS)
• The 2017 in news: The science events that shaped the year from Nature
• The Altmetric Top 100 – what academic research caught the public imagination in 2017?
• Highly Cited Researchers in 2017 from Clarivate Analytics – see who’s made the list from MSK

I hope you take a moment to view my “top 10” list from 2017 and if you have one that you think worth sharing, please don’t hesitate to let me know.

Donna Gibson
Director of Library Services and Avid List Reader