NLM shows how libraries can aid COVID-19 research and response efforts
The National Library of Medicine, part of the National Institutes of Health, has been working on multiple fronts to improve researchers’ understanding of SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes the novel coronavirus) and aid in the response to COVID-19 (the disease caused by the novel coronavirus). By enhancing access to relevant data and information, NLM is demonstrating how libraries can contribute in real time to research and response efforts during this crisis.
With new initiatives launched in the past two weeks, NLM is using PubMed Central®, its digital archive of peer-reviewed biomedical and life sciences journal literature, to expand access to full-text articles related to coronavirus. These activities build on recent requests from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and science policy leaders of other nations calling on the global publishing community to make all COVID-19-related research publications and data immediately available to the public in forms that support automated text-mining.
Other NLM resources include:
NLM’s GenBank Sequence Database — NLM created the Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 data hub, where people can search for, retrieve, and analyze sequences of the virus that have been submitted to GenBank. Our GenBank team is expediting the processing of all SARS-associated coronavirus sequences. Depending on the quality of submitted sequences, they are being annotated and released to the public as fast as 20 minutes after receipt and, in almost all cases, within 24 hours of receipt.
NLM’s Sequence Read Archive (SRA) — NLM’s SRA is the world’s largest publicly available repository of unprocessed sequence data which can be mined for previously unrecognized pathogen sequence. For example, a team from Stanford University recently reported that in a search of certain metagenomic datasets in the SRA, they identified a 2019-nCoV-like coronavirus in pangolins (a long-snouted mammal). This type of genetic sequence research can play an important role in understanding how the virus originated and is spreading.
NLM Intramural Research Contributions —NLM has a multidisciplinary group of researchers comprised of molecular biologists, biochemists, computer scientists, mathematicians and others working on a variety of problems, including some that relate to SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19. One such project is LitCovid, a resource that tracks COVID-19 specific literature published since the outbreak. This resource builds on NLM research to develop new approaches to locating and indexing the literature related to COVID-19 including a text classification algorithm for screening and ranking relevant documents, topic modeling for suggesting relevant research categories, and information extraction for obtaining geographic location(s) found in the abstract.
Read more in this blog post by NLM Director Patti Brennan: https://nlmdirector.nlm.nih.gov/2020/03/24/how-does-a-library-respond-to...