Category Archives: About the Library

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

Available Upon Request: Towards Meaningful Data Discoverability Webinar

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How do we enable data discoverability, linkage, and re-use? Join us for presentations that will answer this question as we explore the importance of FAIR research data to foster transparency, reproducibility, and research integrity.

Date: Wednesday, March 31
Time: 12:00 PM – 1:30 PM
Location: Zoom Webinar – REGISTER NOW

Elsevier, an early adopter and co-author of the FAIR Data and Data citation principles, has rolled out data sharing policies across its journals. They will provide insights on the implementation of the infrastructure that supports authors with complying with journal and funder data sharing mandates, and will discuss other resources for authors to manage their FAIR data and code.

The MSK Library will highlight their efforts in launching a new service focused on Research Data Management, including collaboration with internal and external stakeholders. They will demonstrate how this initiative facilitates best practices and enhances data discoverability at MSK. Data Stewardship & Integration will cover how this service fits into the overall management of data across the institution.

Speakers/Panelists:

Sarah Callaghan, PhD, Editor-in-Chief, Patterns, Cell Press, Elsevier
Sarah comes to Patterns from a 20-year career in creating, managing, and analyzing scientific data. Her research started as a combination of radio propagation engineering and meteorological modeling, then moved into data citation and publication, visualization, metadata, and data management for the environmental sciences. She was editor-in-chief of Data Science Journal for 4 years and has more than 100 publications. Her personal experience means she understands the frustrations that researchers can have with data. She believes that Patterns will bring together multidisciplinary groups to share knowledge and solutions to data-related problems, regardless of the original domain, for the benefit of humanity and the world.

Marina Soares E. Silva, PhD, Product Manager, RDM/Mendeley Data, Elsevier
Marina is the product manager responsible for Data and Code Linking in the context of article submission at Elsevier and contributes to internal and external initiatives on article-data linking. Marina has managed several partner relationships with universities testing the Mendeley Data repository with a focus on user research. Additionally, Marina was the Product Manager responsible for delivering a Research Object Composer that enables the publication of complex FAIR data objects in the cloud. This was work in the context of the NHLBI Data Stage project and a joint partnership with researchers at the University of Manchester and with Seven Bridges Genomics. Marina started as a Biology undergrad in Portugal and moved to the Netherlands to complete a PhD in experimental biophysics at the AMOLF Institute. In 2013, after one year as a postdoctoral researcher in Developmental Biology at the MSK/Sloan Kettering Institute, Marina joined Elsevier as Publisher. In this role she focused on improvements to the Peer Review process of the Biomaterials and Nanomaterials portfolio and launched the journal Materials Today Nano.

Anthony Dellureficio, MLS, MSc, Associate Librarian, Research Data Management, MSK
 Anthony joined the organization in 2019 to help develop and launch this new service in support of our researchers’ workflow by introducing them to resources that focus on data management plan creation, data discovery, and data reuse. As the service continues to expand, collaboration with researchers, data science industries, and library colleagues will be key to ensure that the Library offers the right data management services. Anthony previously worked as the digital archivist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, rare medical text cataloger at the Johns Hopkins Institute of the History of Medicine, and archivist at the Johns Hopkins Medical archives. Most recently he led the Library and Archives systems team at The New School for about ten years. His academic area of interest is in the history of genetics, and he is a regular reviewer for the Quarterly Review of Biology.

Theodora Bakker, MS, Director, Data Stewardship & Integration, MSK
Theodora has been at MSK for two and a half years as the head of Data Stewardship and Integration, and in 2020 also became the Product Manager for the Unified Data Fabric, an initiative to bring together high quality, standardized data across the MSK missions. Theodora has spent almost 20 years in academic medicine, including as a researcher, an information specialist, and has spent the last 9 years leading data stewardship. She has worked on standardizing and integrating research and clinical data to foster better data sharing for clinical, education, and research purposes, and partners with the MSK Library to achieve that goal throughout cancer care.

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