Indexing of the Biomedical Literature for the National Library of Medicine (NLM)

The purpose of this announcement is to notify contractors of the upcoming release of the Request for Proposal (RFP) for indexing of the biomedical literature for the National Library of Medicine (NLM). The main task of this contract is to apply descriptive terms selected from NLM’s controlled vocabulary of Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) to journal article citations in MEDLINE to make it easier for users to find relevant information when searching PubMed. This process is known as MEDLINE. This contract also includes tasks that involve linking MEDLINE records to the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI’s) Gene database and providing indexing for the Health Services Research Projects in Progress (HSRProj) database. The scope of journals indexed for MEDLINE is broad and covers biomedicine, as well as the life sciences. In addition, biomedical articles may be selected for indexing from a set of physics and chemistry journals. MEDLINE indexing is to be performed within NLM’s indexing system via two distinct approaches: Regular Indexing and MTIFL (Medical Text Indexer First Line) Completion.

An estimated solicitation issue date of late January 2020. The applicable NAICS code for this effort is 519120, Libraries and Archives with a size standard of $15.0M. This effort will be a Total Small Business Set Aside and has been determined pursuant to FAR Part 15 Contracting by Negotiation. The solicitation will include four (4) Contract Line Items (Task 1) – Regular Indexing; (Task 2) – MTIFL Completion; (Task 3) – Gene Linking; and (Task 4) – HSRProj Indexing. This effort will be a Firm Fixed Price (FFP) per Unit contract with maximum quantities. For the base year, the NLM seeks to obtain: Regular indexing of up to 690,000 journal articles; MTIFL completion of up to 100,000 journal articles; Creation of up to 70,000 gene links; and Indexing of up to 2,100 HSRProj records.

The contract shall be for a base period of 12 months from date of award, with options for four (4) additional 12-month periods. The Government anticipates multiple awards; however, the Government reserves the right to award one or more contracts at its discretion.

For this contracting notice, the participation of foreign entities is not permitted. Interested contractors are encouraged to view the Draft Statement of Work (SOW) (Attachment 1).