What Will 2020 Bring?

I don’t have a crystal ball, but as director of NLM, I need to keep an eye to the future.

Last month, I highlighted a few of NLM’s many accomplishments in 2019. Today, I want to devote some time to musing about what might happen at NLM in 2020.

I know that I’ll be in a new office, but I don’t know where just yet! No, I’m not leaving NLM, but as we prepare for major renovations to our Building 38, most of the staff in the building, including me, will move to other office space on campus for about two years. That will be enough time to implement a major redesign of the first floor of our 60-year-old, architecturally dramatic but not really fit-for-purpose workspace to make more efficient use of the space, add modern office layouts and meeting spaces, and modernize our HVAC systems. I’ll keep musing throughout the renovations; I just won’t be sitting on the mezzanine while I do it.

I know that NLM will continue to grow our Intramural Research Program (IRP), which focuses on computational biomedical and health sciences. We hired two new tenure-track investigators this past year and expect to add one or two more in 2020. The IRP brings together two NLM divisions, the National Center for Biotechnology Information, specifically the Computational Biology Branch, and the Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications, which emphasize discovery based on molecular phenomena and clinical information. I also expect to see greater alignment of our training efforts, including an expansion of the public-facing parts of our training.

I know that we’ll continue to make biomedical and health information literature available to the public, scientists, and clinicians. I anticipate a greater emphasis on public access and open science. Our entire PubMed Central (PMC) repository of full-text literature is already freely available to the world, and with the increasing interest in open access to government-supported research findings, I expect that this repository will grow. PMC will grow in new ways, too, such as enhancing the discoverability of data sets in support of published results made available with articles as supplementary material or in open repositories, and supporting greater transparency in scientific communication through the archiving of peer review documents.

I know that we’ll move many NLM resources to the cloud and continue to support efforts to make strides through the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Science and Technology Research Infrastructure for Discovery, Experimentation, and Sustainability (STRIDES) Initiative to accelerate discovery by harnessing the power of commercial cloud computing. This will not only offer some logistical savings, it will also increase the discoverability of our resources.

I know that NLM will play a bigger and more vital role in big science as it unfolds at NIH. Our intramural researchers are expanding the application of deep learning technologies to clinical, biological, and image data. In collaboration with the NIH Office of Data Science Strategy, we’ll build and release new tools to help researchers leverage the FHIR standard to make clinical data more accessible for research, and to improve phenotype characterization. These initiatives will accelerate data sharing by advancing standard approaches to research data representation.

I know that NLM will advance its impact on and outreach to professional and lay communities around the country. Our National Network of Libraries of Medicine has exciting plans to expand its training in research data management and to provide local health information education and support to help health care providers working with American Indian and Alaska Native populations address challenges such as mental health and HPV-related cancer.

I know that we’ll continue to improve health by improving access to data and information. Stay tuned to my Musings posts in 2020 to see what we accomplish!