Category Archives: Director’s Reflections

Learn about the library from the Director’s perspective

Reflecting on National Library Week’s Theme

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National Library Week was first sponsored in 1958 by the American Library Association (ALA). Libraries of all types (academic, research, special, school, public) across the United States recognize this special week in April. This year’s National Library Week took place April 4 – 10, 2021. The theme “Welcome to Your Library” focused on the importance of how we deliver library services beyond the traditional brick and mortar library.

While the MSK Library did not organize a celebration, I want to take a moment to reflect on this theme and how the MSK Library team (and other hospital and research libraries’ staff) respond to their user communities. 2020 changed how libraries interact with their users and COVID-19 pushed us to rethink how to best support our users and look for opportunities to continue to be part of their day-to-day work/life activities. Many libraries strived to continue to deliver a positive user experience with synchronous virtual reference and consultation services, moving training and orientation classes completely online, and creating safe areas where clients could drop by the library to pick up print materials. We have always offered online services, the pandemic amplified the need for ongoing promotion and awareness of how we can collaborate on information-intense projects, answer reference questions, or handle research requests, in a virtual setting.

MSK staff can learn more about our Virtual Services, but I also want to extend an invitation to our users to reach out directly to us to schedule a brief Library Orientation to better understand these services, and the digital resources accessible via the Library Website.

Finally, another way for users to gain insights and stay in touch with the MSK Library is through our social media presence, so don’t hesitate to start following us on Twitter or Instagram.  And feel free to send me your Twitter handle, so we can follow you!

Donna Gibson
Director of Library Services

Giving CRediT Where Credit is Due!

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I recently attended the NISO Plus 2021 Conference. The virtual program was filled with rich and informative sessions with a few stand-outs to include one on the value and challenges of the CRediT Taxonomy.

CRediT, which stands for Contributor Roles Taxonomy, grew from the realization that authorship and how researchers are listed on scholarly outputs fails to represent the full range of contributions made by these researchers and often doesn’t paint the full picture of the work done by each of the listed authors on the research publication. In mid-2012, the Wellcome Trust and Harvard University co-hosted a workshop to bring individuals from the publishing world, funders, and academics together to discuss alternative models to recognize research contributions. After this workshop, a pilot project was conceived, focused on developing a draft taxonomy of contributor roles that could be used. The outcome of the pilot project is described in a Nature commentary.

The end result is CRediT, 14 high-level roles that can be used to demonstrate a researcher’s contributions to the scientific scholarly output. Moving from authorship to contributorship, the researcher could be assigned to one or more roles such as: Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal Analysis, Funding acquisition, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Resources, Software, Supervision, Validation, Visualization, Writing – original draft, and Writing – review & editing.

Two of the presenters at this session spoke of applications to support CRediT. Alex Holcombe, a professor of psychology at the University of Sydney, developed Tenzing with his colleagues to make it easier for authors to indicate who did what on their research projects, and provided a way to format this information so that it could be easily added to their manuscript when submitting to journals that use the CRediT standard. The second speaker, Richard Wynne, founder of Rescognito, developed a tool as a free service to help recognize and promote good research. The application is built on ORCIDs which identifies who did the work and Rescognito helps to answer the question, “what did the authors’ contribute?”

The list of publishers adopting CRediT is constantly evolving and include: Cell Press, eLife, Elsevier, Oxford University Press, PLOS, Springer Nature, Wiley, and Wolters Kluwer. These are all publishers that are familiar to the MSK research community.

In reflecting about the scholarly contributions by MSK researchers and this session, I am excited for the possibilities of leveraging the Contributor Roles Taxonomy to expand how we present our authors. By identifying their level of contributions, we would be able to provide transparency into what each author did. This information could be display and highlighted in their Synapse work records or on their Research Activity Dashboards.

Donna Gibson
Director of Library Services

What MSK Researchers Can Do to Ensure NIH Compliance

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I often receive on a weekly basis, emails from the MSK Community asking for NIH compliance support. With the steady flow of requests, I wanted to take a moment to remind our MSK authors what they need to do for NIH-funded research papers and where the Library can help.

Once the paper’s applicability has been confirmed (does the published work fall under the NIH Public Access Policy?), the copyright agreement has been addressed (paper/manuscript can be posted to PMC (PubMed Central), and the submission method determined (A, B, C, or D), then there are only three remaining steps left to ensure NIH compliance is achieved, just remember — Acknowledge, Acquire and Associate!

ACKNOWLEDGE and CITE
When an author or his/her delegate is about to submit a research manuscript for acceptance to a journal publication, it is important to acknowledge and cite all relevant grants. This includes the MSK Cancer Center Support Grant (CCSG) which is awarded by the National Cancer Institute (NCI). Acknowledging and citing NIH-funding on the manuscript is critical as it highlights for those publishers who are Method A or D, that action is required by them on behalf of their NIH-authors.

ACQUIRE
To demonstrate NIH compliance, the paper needs to be assigned a PMCID number. Many MSK publications can be found in Submission Method A and Method D, which means that the publisher will handle the manuscript’s deposit. If the author or his/her delegate sees no action taken within three months of the print publication date, contact me so that I can investigate the reason for the delay or work with the publisher to deposit the accepted manuscript.

However, if the journal is a Submission Method C, usually the corresponding author handles the paper’s deposit, but it can be assigned to the corresponding author’s delegate, or one of the other co-authors. Remember, it is the accepted manuscript and not the PDF found on the publisher’s Website that should be submitted to the NIHMS system. Authors or their delegates should not ignore the approval emails sent by the NIHMS system for each submission as they are time sensitive and the links will expire.  Addressing these emails moves the paper forward in the compliance process.

ASSOCIATE
All MSK peer-reviewed research papers need to be associated with the core grant (P30 CA008748). The corresponding author, his/her delegate, or one of the co-authors can complete this task by following these instructions.

If you have any specific questions regarding the NIH Public Access Policy, please don’t hesitate to contact me. I have also included the following links to key materials for guidance and additional information.

Donna Gibson
Director of Library Services