Rapid Research Notes

Posted by Alison Aldrich on September 15th, 2009 Posted in: News from NLM

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Formal scholarly communication is not traditionally a speedy process. The course from research to publication can take months or years. There are occasions, however, when an emergency situation compels publishers to pick up the pace so that researchers and decision-makers can communicate more rapidly. The H1N1 flu outbreak this year has been one of those situations. A number of publishers including the Public Library of Science (PLoS), EBSCO, and the Cochrane Collaboration have accelerated the pace of reviewing influenza information and made selected resources publicly available.

Rapid Research Notes is a new resource from the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). It is a permanent public archive for resources released by publishers to facilitate faster communication among researchers, policymakers, and other stakeholders.

PLoS Currents: Influenza is the first collection of reports to be included in Rapid Research Notes. NCBI expects to add additional collections over time. Future additions will not necessarily pertain to influenza. Some points to keep in mind:

• Contributions to Rapid Research Notes are made by publishers, not individual authors.
• Resources contributed to RRN cannot be withdrawn.
• All Public Library of Science articles are published under a Creative Commons attribution license which means that anyone is free to share or adapt the content. Collections added to RRN in the future may have different use restrictions.

Read more in the NLM Technical Bulletin and on the About RRN page.