NLM Leverages Its Information Resources to Improve Access to Monkeypox-related Literature and Research
The National Library of Medicine (NLM) is working to accelerate the global monkeypox response through initiatives that expand access to scientific literature, sequence data, clinical trial information, and consumer health information related to monkeypox.
NLM’s efforts follow on declarations by the World Health Organization and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary of the ongoing spread of monkeypox virus as a public health emergency. NLM is responding to the call to action by the White House Office Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and science and technology leaders from more than a dozen other nations to make monkeypox-related research and data immediately available to the public.
NLM will leverage its existing relationships with publishers that submit to PubMed Central (PMC), its digital archive of peer-reviewed biomedical and life sciences literature, to make the wide range of journal articles that can inform the monkeypox response freely available to the public. Depositing appropriate articles into the PMC Open Access collection will ensure that monkeypox-related research is readily available in both human- and machine-readable formats. Readers will be able to discover articles via PubMed and access the full text in PMC without delay. Artificial intelligence researchers can continue to develop and apply novel approaches to text mining to help answer questions about monkeypox.
In addition, NLM is prioritizing the review of monkeypox sequence submissions through its genetic sequence database, GenBank, as well as submissions to ClinicalTrials.gov, the world’s largest publicly accessible database of privately and publicly funded clinical studies.
NLM has also updated content on its MedlinePlus website to provide authoritative consumer-oriented information on monkeypox in both English and Spanish.
NLM will continue to aid monkeypox response efforts by providing support to researchers throughout the process of submitting data to NLM’s databases and electronic resources, and quickly making available research and data that can accelerate scientific discovery and improve health around the world.
About the National Library of Medicine: NLM is one of the 27 Institutes and Centers at the National Institutes of Health.