SOURCES SOUGHT
U -- Consumer Health and Medical News Source for MedlinePlus
- Notice Date
- 10/20/2015
- Notice Type
- Sources Sought
- NAICS
- 519130
— Internet Publishing and Broadcasting and Web Search Portals
- Contracting Office
- Department of Health and Human Services, National Institutes of Health, National Library of Medicine, 6707 Democracy Blvd., Suite 105, Bethesda, Maryland, 20894, United States
- ZIP Code
- 20894
- Solicitation Number
- NIHLM2016688
- Archive Date
- 11/13/2015
- Point of Contact
- Maryann Carroll, Phone: 3014517329
- E-Mail Address
-
maryann.carroll@nih.gov
(maryann.carroll@nih.gov)
- Small Business Set-Aside
- Total Small Business
- Description
- This is a Small Business Sources Sought notice. This is NOT a solicitation for proposals, proposal abstracts, or quotations. The purpose of this notice is to obtain information regarding: (1) the availability and capability of qualified small business sources; (2) whether they are small businesses; HUBZone small businesses; service-disabled, veteran-owned small businesses; 8(a) small businesses; veteran-owned small businesses; woman-owned small businesses; or small disadvantaged businesses; and (3) their size classification relative to the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) code for the proposed acquisition. Your responses to the information requested will assist the Government in determining the appropriate acquisition method, including whether a set-aside is possible. An organization that is not considered a small business under the applicable NAICS code should not submit a response to this notice. All responsible sources may submit a capability statement which will be considered by the National Library of Medicine. This Sources Sought Notice is not a Request for Quotations (RFQ), nor is an RFQ available. Interested firms responding to this Sources Sought Notice must provide a capability statement that displays the following: (a) Microsoft Word or PDF file in 12 point font (b) DUNS number, organization name, address, point of contact, and size and type of business (e.g., 8(a), HUBZone, etc) pursuant to the applicable NAICS code) (c) Technical and administrative points of contact, including names, titles, addresses, telephone and fax numbers, and e-mail addresses (d) Staff expertise, including their availability, experience, and formal and other training; (e) Current in-house capability and capacity to perform the work; (f) Prior completed projects of similar nature; (g) Corporate experience and management capability; and (h) Examples of prior completed Government contracts, references, and other related information; The capability statement should contain enough sufficient detail for the Government to make an informed decision regarding your capabilities; however, the statement should not exceed 6 pages (excluding attachments.) This sources sought notice requires capability statements to be submitted via eCPS.: 1) Electronic copy via the NLM electronic Contract Proposal Submission (eCPS) website at https://ecps.nih.gov/NLM. For directions on using eCPS, go to https://ecps.nih.gov/NLM/home/howto NOTE: To submit your electronic capability statement using eCPS, all offerors must have a valid NIH External Directory Account, which provides authentication and serves as a vehicle for secure transmission of documents and communication with the NLM. The NIH External Directory Account registration process may take up to 24 hours to become active. Submission of proposals by facsimile or e-mail is not accepted. All capability statements must be submitted electronically no later than 10:00am eastern time on October 29th, 2015 to Maryann Carroll, at maryann.carroll@nih.gov. Disclaimer and Important Notes: This notice does not obligate the Government to award a contract or otherwise pay for the information provided in response. The Government reserves the right to use information provided by respondents for any purpose deemed necessary and legally appropriate. Any organization responding to this notice should ensure that its response is complete and sufficiently detailed to allow the Government to determine the organization's qualifications to perform the work. Respondents are advised that the Government is under no obligation to acknowledge receipt of the information received or provide feedback to respondents with respect to any information submitted. After a review of the responses received, a pre-solicitation synopsis and solicitation may be published in Federal Business Opportunities. However, responses to this notice will not be considered adequate responses to a solicitation. Confidentiality: No proprietary, classified, confidential, or sensitive information should be included in your response. The Government reserves the right to use any non-proprietary technical information in any resultant solicitation(s). -------------------------------------------- Statement of Work Consumer Health and Medical News Source for MedlinePlus National Library of Medicine 1. Background Information To assist consumers in obtaining the information they need to make informed decisions about health care, the National Library of Medicine (NLM) has developed MedlinePlus (medlineplus.gov), an easily understandable Web resource for the public. MedlinePlus contains and links to information from authoritative health Web sites and content providers, especially those from the National Institutes of Health. NLM makes MedlinePlus available to the public through a variety of MedlinePlus-branded Web sites, Web services, Web applications, APIs, email and social media communications, XML files and search results. This Statement of Work (SOW) addresses NLM's need to license a consumer health and medical news source for MedlinePlus in English and Spanish. 2. Objective It is the intent of the National Library of Medicine (NLM) to procure health and medical news articles, written for a lay audience, to be included on the MedlinePlus sites in English and Spanish. Content must be formattable for viewing with a Web browser, but NLM will also consider additional news content in video or other formats. NLM will host the content on its own servers. 3. Mandatory Requirements: a) Vendor must allow NLM to host the health news articles, and retain them for public search and display for an agreed upon time (minimum of 90 days). b) News articles must cover health and medical topics of broad (national or international) interest targeted at U.S. audience and should include: health and wellness, biomedical research results, new drug information and new disease treatments. NLM will not display or consider in-scope content focusing on the business aspects of medicine, healthcare or content written solely for health professionals. c) Articles must include: headline, byline, body, and published-on date. d) Vendors must provide at least five English and five Spanish in-scope health news articles daily, Monday through Friday. e) Spanish content must be in correct and culturally neutral Spanish, not written or narrated in the style or vocabulary of a particular Spanish nationality. f) Vendor must not require NLM to display all received content. g) Respondents should include any documentation related to editorial policies and procedures that insure the accuracy and integrity of each story. h) Delivery of content must be reliable and consistently available at least every weekday. i) Information must be current. Published dates and times included as a standard field are required. The vendor must also provide NLM with the ability to identify the final version of each news article and to associate that final version with all previously delivered versions, so NLM may display only the final version. j) Articles must be of substantial content. The majority of stories should be a minimum of 150+ words in length. Please indicate the average reading level for all articles and video transcripts. k) Titles must be accurate in spelling and grammar and also brief yet descriptive. l) Vendor must allow NLM to edit content for length and/or clarity (spelling out acronyms, removing extraneous words, such as "study" at the end of a headline, etc.). m) Vendor must allow NLM to edit or add metadata or structured data markup to news content in order to achieve Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and social sharing goals for the MedlinePlus sites. n) Attribution to outside resources provided: Information should include names and affiliations for sources quoted, and publication date and issue if source is a journal article. o) No commercial content: Information must be free of commercial endorsements or advertisements. p) Unobtrusive co-branding: Co-branding must not be intrusive. Please include a description and/or example of the desired co-branding. q) Accessibility of content: Content must be accessible in accordance with Section 508 (29 U.S.C. 794d). It is the responsibility of the content provider to familiarize themselves with Section 508 requirements and ensure that their content meets these requirements. r) Vendor must allow NLM to index the content provided for our search engine. s) Vendor must allow NLM to have linked headlines to the content appear on any MedlinePlus-branded page and in the search results for the NLM main web site. Linked headlines may also appear on the NLM homepage (http://www.nlm.nih.gov). t) Vendor must allow NLM to send out linked headlines to individual subscribers by email, via RSS feeds or through links in social media applications such as Twitter. u) Awardees will be required to provide NLM with technical support and access to any needed files in order for the NLM transition team to work on programming necessary in advance of the release for a seamless implementation on the MedlinePlus sites. Vendor Responsibilities: v) For citations of journal articles in the PubMed database (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed), the data provided by the vendor includes a mechanism for linking from individual news stories to the specific PubMed record/abstract. w) Equivalent news content provided in English and Spanish. (1) English stories translated or trans-created in Spanish should be delivered within 2 business days of the equivalent English story. (2) There must be a mechanism for toggling between the English and Spanish versions of a news story when it is available in both languages. x) Images are included with some articles to provide added value (indicate what percentage of articles include images). Any included image must have appropriate alt attribute text that conveys the context and purpose of the image as well as any text within the image. The alt attribute text should conform to accessibility best practices. NLM is allowed to edit the alt attribute text for any image. y) Content file data includes metadata such as Medical Subject Heading (MeSH) unique identifiers or Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) Metathesaurus Content Unique Identifiers. z) Video or other multimedia health news stories meant for consumers are included in the delivered content (indicate the average frequency and volume as well as format for this news). If supplied, the videos must be accessible and meet the following requirements: (1) Each video must be in mp4 format to be compatible with JW Player and HTML5. (2) Each video must be closed-captioned and the closed captioning must use WebVTT format. (3) Each video must be supplied with a full text transcript. (4) Each video must have a synchronized audio description track for visually impaired users, unless all of the visually presented information in the video is already described or provided in the audio portion of the video. (5) Videos must have no flashing, strobing, or flickering elements within a frequency greater than 2 Hz and lower than 55 Hz. 4. Specific Technical Requirements a) Format of content: Awardees must deliver content to NLM via XML. NLM prefers to retrieve data via FTP. Vendor must deliver files a minimum of once per business day. b) Vendor's transfer method must be compatible with NLM's high-security environment. c) Article files must be delivered in XML (Extensible Mark-up Language) such that allows NLM to transfer the data into our online system. d) Content include unique identifier and/or "final" version designation to identify duplicates and updated/final articles. e) Any content hosted by the vendor rather than by NLM must be securely accessible via https protocol. f) Sample technical documents, including the schema specifying layout of articles, and sample XML marked-up articles for English and Spanish should be included in response to this solicitation. NLM prefers schema versus DTD for better data validation. g) Vendor will allow NLM to implement links to social networking sites and other online sharing forums from the individual content pages to allow MedlinePlus users to share content of interest within their social networks. NLM will implement the links through a custom solution or through a third party such as AddThis.com. h) Vendor will allow MedlinePlus users to generate an ‘email to a friend' containing the linked headline, to generate a print version of the article on the fly, or to otherwise share for personal use. The content provider does not need to provide the service. NLM may implement this with a custom solution. i) NLM will forward to the vendor any feedback received from users regarding content. j) When NLM staff identify major issues related to content, accessibility, or technical requirements, they will communicate the issues to the vendor. The vendor must describe their procedure for remediation and turn-around time for responding to the issues. 4.1 Accessibility Requirements Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act requires that Federal agencies' electronic and information technology is accessible to people with disabilities. The news files received must be Section 508 compliant. Specifically, the end product must be conformant with all applicable provisions, including: 1194.21 Software applications and operating systems 1194.22 Web-based intranet and internet information and applications 1194.24 Video and multimedia products (if applicable to the product offering) 1194.31 Functional performance criteria. 1194.41 Information, documentation, and support. Applicable clauses depend on the nature of the content. These provisions can be found at the U.S. Access Board Guidelines and Standards. Updates to Section 508 guidelines are currently under revision. The Offeror will be expected to comply with revised section 508 standards within a reasonable timeframe once these new accessibility guidelines are issued. In addition, the Offeror should provide Level AA conformance to the World Wide Web Consortium's Web Accessibility Initiative (W3C-WAI) WCAG 2.0 standards when possible since they will likely soon be required by law under the update. Conformance includes ensuring that all content, including text, all non-text content such as multimedia and images, and any associated players or viewers, are fully accessible per Section 508 and WCAG 2.0 Level AA standards. This includes but is not limited to ensuring that all text elements are captioned and synchronized with the content and that all non-text elements are fully described, including any images, still or moving, that provide context as to the meaning of the content. 4.2 Accessibility Program Need Requirements for accessibility based on Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (29 U.S.C. 794d) are determined to be relevant for the following program need: "Consumer Health and Medical News for MedlinePlus." 4.3 Accessibility Product Requirements 1194.21, 1194.22, 1194.24, 1194.31 and 1194.41 from 36 CFR part 1194 Subpart D have been determined to apply to this acquisition. Solicitation respondents must describe how Information and Communication Technology deliverables meet at least these requirements identified as applicable in the attached Government Product/Service Accessibility Template (GPAT). 4.4 Accessibility Evaluation Factors Responses to this solicitation will only be considered for award after it has been determined that the proposal adequately addresses the requirements for Section 508. Only proposals which contain adequate information to document their responsiveness to the accessibility requirements (e.g. a completed GPAT) will be eligible for any additional merit consideration. If the deliverable proposed in response to this solicitation includes features and functions in addition to those identified as requirements, these features and functions also need to conform to relevant Section 508 technical provisions, functional performance criteria, and information, documentation and support. The accessibility of these additional features and functions should be described in the completed GPAT. 4.5 Accessibility Acceptance Criteria The consumer health and medical news stories licensed as a result of this solicitation will be accepted based in part on satisfaction of identified requirements for accessibility. The Offeror must include a completed GPAT, a sample of which is included as a part of this solicitation. The Offeror should complete the two right-hand columns, including an explanation of how the product complies with the clause. If the deliverable includes features and functions in addition to those identified as requirements, these features and functions also need to conform to relevant accessibility technical provisions, functional performance criteria, and information, documentation and support. 5. Other Required Information a) The response to this solicitation must include the cost for licensing this product. The cost should be an annual flat fee for providing the content to users of any MedlinePlus branded sites or services. b) Respondents should provide a representative list of other organizations that license the content, along with accompanying Web site URLs, for NLM to review. Provide at least three references that we may contact. Also requested is a copy of your policy (or other evidence of commitment) of your customer service policy. c) License agreement governing use of content on Web sites, email, RSS and other electronic distribution/media must be included in response to this solicitation. 6. Contract Type Anticipated Contract Type: Firm Fixed Price 7. Place of Performance Files will be delivered or retrieved electronically. 8. Period of Performance There will be a base year, plus four option years. Base Year: 1/11/2016-1/10/2017 Option Year 1: 1/11/2017-1/10/2018 Option Year 2: 1/11/2018-1/10/2019 Option Year 3: 1/11/2019-1/10/2020 Option Year 4: 1/11/2020-1/10/2021 9. Deliverables/Delivery Schedule SOW TASK # Deliverable Title #Calendar Days After Award 3 Regular content update At a mutually agreeable schedule 14 Initial content file delivery 14 days after award 4 Response to requests for emergency updating of content Within a mutually agreeable turn-around time 10. Inspection and Acceptance Criteria NLM will inspect and do a quality review of the delivered content as part of the regular update process. 11. Accounting and Appropriation Data Funds are available or will become available prior to the award. For each subsequent year of funding, the task order is subject to availability of funds. 12. Other Pertinent Information or Special Considerations Features and product offerings will be evaluated as they exist at the time of proposal submission. Beta releases and planned updates will not be considered. 13. Post-Award Administration The process for the routine delivery and updating of content will be followed. Past Performance Evaluations will be completed annually and at the end of the task. 14. Transition Plan The awardee will be required to provide NLM with technical support and advanced delivery of the content files within 14 days of being selected by NLM so that NLM can plan for the implementation of the content pages and links to these pages on MedlinePlus-branded sites, services and files. In the event that NLM ceases licensing this product, the Offeror will be notified within 30 calendar days of the change, but will help assist with the transition by providing technical support and addressing questions that facilitate transitioning to a new provider of content. The contractor shall create any requested non-proprietary documentation that NLM requests to aid with the transition. Any documentation developed for this purpose shall be the property of the government.
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- SN03926030-W 20151022/151020234454-1a75188c97ccf71606ef14e13a8cf30e (fbodaily.com)
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