Pandemic Paper Partner

“There’s a great deal of interest in how everything that has happened in the last year will impact how science is communicated and shared going forward,” says Kathryn Funk, program manager for PubMed Central (PMC) at the U.S. National Institute of Health’s (NIH) National Library of Medicine (NLM).

In March 2020, Funk helped launch the Public Health Emergency COVID-19 Initiative, which provides open access to coronavirus-related research and data as part of a collaboration with publishers and scholarly journals.

“The records in this ever-growing collection of articles have been accessed 150 million times and leveraged to support the artificial intelligence and machine-learning communities,” says Funk. By the end of September 2020, NLM had made available more than 80,000 articles, which were accessed more than 40 million times.

She was also instrumental in facilitating early access to COVID-19 research results from NIH-funded research. “We were working to respond to the need we were hearing from researchers and librarians for increased discovery of COVID-19 research results being posted publicly prior to journal publication,” she says. This led to the launch of the NIH Preprint Pilot in June 2020, which Funk says has added 2,200 preprints, the majority of which were unavailable in published journals. “These records have been accessed more than one million times, expanding discovery of key NIH-supported research results.”

Funk, says nominator Jennifer Marill, technical services division chief for NLM, “is a creative leader who has worked tirelessly to increase the sharing of scientific information to enhance public health and reduce illness during this unprecedented time.”