Reflections on Advancing Authorship: Preprints in the Time of COVID-19

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On Friday, September 25, 2020, the Library hosted our first ever virtual Advancing Authorship event, Preprints in the Time of COVID-19.

We heard from Dr. John Inglis of Cold Spring Laboratory, founder of preprint servers bioRxiv and medRxiv. We also heard from MSK authors about their decision to publish their COVID-19 related research as preprints, including Dr. Elizabeth Robilotti, Dr. Lior Braunstein, and Dr. Marin Hultcrantz. Overall, we had 149 attendees, and an engaging Q&A session. 

Screen Shot from “Preprints in the Time of COVID-19.”

If you attended, but didn’t have a chance to fill out our post-event survey, there’s still time!

Questions? Have an idea for a future Advancing Authorship event? Please contact asklibrarian@mskcc.org. 

 

 

 

International Open Access Week Has Arrived!

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Join the MSK Library in recognizing International Open Access Week being held October 19-25. We will be featuring five open access publications by MSK authors and will showcase one each day (Monday to Friday) as a Today’s Science Sparks on the Library Website. You can also browse the Today’s Science Sparks’ archives to find other open access articles.

International Open Access Week, a global event now entering its thirteenth year, is an opportunity for librarians and information professionals to engage with their communities about the benefits of open access and to increase awareness of the role open access plays in the scholarly communication ecosystem. This year’s theme is very timely, with a focus on “Open with Purpose: Taking Action to Build Structural Equity and Inclusion.”

If you want to learn more about other open access resources, please feel free to check out our Open Access LibGuide.  This subject-specific guide contains information about Predatory Publishing, Preprints, and Info for MSK Authors.

I would also like to highlight MSK-related COVID-19 research publications, as these works are publicly available to both researchers and interested readers. As of October 14, MSK authors have contributed 184 works and we see this number growing at a steady pace.

Finally, if you wish to further embrace the open access week experience, you can participate by following the conversation on Twitter during this time frame and tweeting your thoughts. Don’t forget to include the official hashtag — #OAWeek.

Donna Gibson
Director of Library Services

Three Questions: Jeanine McSweeney, Associate Librarian, Scholarly Communications

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For our next Three Questions interview, we spoke with Jeanine McSweeney, Associate Librarian, Scholarly Communications.

What areas can you help MSK users with?

I manage Synapse, the authoritative database of MSK authors and their publications. The Synapse Team tracks and adds new publications by MSK authors and organizes them under author profiles. Within Synapse you will find links to the full-text of a work, Altmetrics and citation counts, and integration with ORCID iD. I work with various departments at MSK to create customized groups of authors, helping them to track, showcase, and report on the publication output of their departments. Basically, if you have questions about managing your own or your department’s publications, or finding ways to demonstrate your research impact, I am here to help.

What projects have you been working on recently?

My fish tank, a recent trip to Watkins Glen, and me.

Over the summer we released our annual Synapse Publications Report, which highlights the publication output of our MSK researchers. Right now my team is working on restructuring the Synapse “journal articles” category so that our users can better pull out just the peer-reviewed research articles for their grant and reporting needs. Currently Synapse includes non-peer reviewed formats in the “journal article” category like editorials, letters, reviews etc., and we have learned from our users that breaking this down would be more helpful. We aim to have our workflow in place by the end of the year so that moving forward, pulling out needed data from Synapse is even more convenient for our users.

If you could travel anywhere in the world, where would you go?

When able, my first trip will be to Germany so I can visit with my partner’s family that I have not seen now in over a year. Aside from that, I read a lot of Agatha Christie when I was young and have romanticized notions of the English countryside that I would love to spend time exploring. So one of my bucket list trips is to spend a few weeks touring around England and the rest of the UK.