Three Questions for our Librarians – Sylvie

To introduce our staff to everyone at the Center, we’re rolling out a new series of posts, Three Questions for our Librarians! This month, I asked three questions to Sylvie Larsen, Supervisor, Document Delivery.

What areas can you help MSK users with?
In my position as Supervisor of Document Delivery, I’ve gotten very good at finding tricky citations. I’ve tracked down foreign language articles, meeting abstracts from obsolete societies, and even a thesis from Kuala Lampur. It’s my favorite part of my job – it’s like a scavenger hunt!

What projects have you been working on recently?
Recently, I’ve put together a poster for the Medical Library Association meeting. My team and I looked at information collected from a survey to see how we could improve our service. It can be challenging to know exactly what our users need, especially in an institution like MSK, we’re not only a school, a research center, or a hospital, we’re all three together, so our users needs are different from a lot of other institutions. Checking in with them was very informative.

If you could travel anywhere in the world, where would you go?
I would love to see the Northern Lights from one of those ice hotels.

Join the MSK Library and JoVE, for Advancing Authorship: Library Series, March 29

Please join the MSK Library and JoVE (Journal of Visualized Experiments) for the first in our series of special internal events Advancing Authorship, on Thursday, March 29!

Hear from MSK colleagues about their experiences translating work into video articles published with JoVE, and how you can too!

To learn more about the event and speakers, see the flyer here.

This event is geared toward early career scientists in particular, but we’re confident any MSK researcher interested in learning about this newer mode of publication, will gain something from this event. Please join us Thursday, March 29 at 1:00 pm in M-107!

Reflections: DORA Five Years Later

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