More About Preprints

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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

MSK Publications Added to Synapse in March 2018

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Take a look at these MSK-authored articles, recently published and picked up by over 60 news outlets thus far:

To read the news stories, click on the Altmetric donut from the links above and go to “News.” For more information about Altmetric’s news sources, see Sources of Attention: Mainstream Media Outlets. Altmetric’s newstracker pulls in content from all of the news outlets they track, looking for links to scholarly papers.

See all MSK publications added to Synapse in March 2018.

JCO Precision Oncology Molecular Tumor Board Case Discussion Series

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An American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) journal that only began being published in 2017, JCO Precision Oncology introduced a new article series in 2018 called the JCO Precision Oncology Molecular Tumor Board Case Series. According to the introductory editorial by James M. Ford, MD, this series “aims to provide an important learning platform for the oncology community about how to effectively use genomic information for optimal targeted drugs and clinical trial matches”.  Based on the well-written, clearly presented information in the first paper in this series by Rodrigo Dienstmann, it certainly promises to be a very timely and useful addition to the knowledge/evidence base for precision oncology.

JCO Precision Oncology is one of two new ASCO titles that launched in 2017. According to the publisher: “JCO PO is a peer-reviewed, online-only, article-based journal publishing original research, reports, opinions, and reviews that advance the science and practice of precision oncology and define genomics-driven clinical care of patients with cancer. Innovative and timely scientific and educational content provide a deeper understanding of actionable cancer genomics, personalized translational and clinical oncology research, and recent treatment advances based on tumor molecular profiling.” The second new title is JCO Clinical Cancer Informatics: “JCO CCI is an online-only interdisciplinary journal publishing clinically relevant research based on biomedical informatics methods and processes applied to cancer-related data, information, and images.”

Both of these ASCO titles are not yet fully-indexed in MEDLINE or PubMed and so only the publicly available papers deposited in PubMed Central will appear indexed in PubMed. As such, the best way to currently access the content of these journals is by going directly to their respective JCO websites. To view the current NLM Catalog record of each journal that indicates the journal’s Current Indexing Status, click on each of their titles: JCO Precision Oncology and JCO Clinical Cancer Informatics. Please note that as these journals publish more articles over time and establish themselves as reliable, authoritative titles, their indexing status in PubMed/Medline will be re-evaluated by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) and will likely change.

These two journal titles have also been added to the collections of the MSK Library – see their respective MSK Library catalog records (that include their Online access link to the full-text) by clicking on their titles: JCO Precision Oncology and JCO Clinical Cancer Informatics. If accessed from off-campus (ie. from a device not on the MSK network), a remote access login may be required. For more information about these journals or other MSK Library resources, feel free to contact us!