In 2014 Cochrane called for proposals for ‘Game Changer Initiatives’, ambitious projects to improve how we do business and enable our vision of ‘a world of improved health’.

Project Transform was funded by Cochrane and the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council as part of this initiative. As the Final Report describes, Project Transform has resulted in a wide range of practical, innovative outcomes for Cochrane which have already impacted on the way Cochrane works.

Cochrane CEO, Mark Wilson says “Project Transform truly was a ‘Game Changer’ for Cochrane. It led us to innovate in ways that will have a profound and long-lasting impact on Cochrane’s evidence production by improving our editorial processes, engaging our community, and ensuring Cochrane evidence is high-quality and up-to-date in order to improve health outcomes.”

Innovative ways of involving people in Cochrane’s work was a core focus of Project Transform, which included developing classifiers for study identification, a citizen science platform, Cochrane Crowd, and an online task-sharing platform, TaskExchange. “Cochrane Crowd and TaskExchange are now core components of Cochrane’s Membership Scheme, helping us recognise contributions to Cochrane, big and small, and building skills and connections across our community” says Chris Champion, Cochrane’s Head of People Services. “In combination with novel machine-learning technologies in Evidence Pipeline, Crowd members are now making a substantial contribution to how we find the evidence on which Cochrane reviews are based.” 

Project Transform has also taken living, continually updated, systematic reviews from idea to a living, breathing, reality. Cochrane Editor-in-Chief, Karla Soares-Weiser says “Producing systematic reviews that are relevant to decision-makers is our core business. Living systematic reviews are an example of Cochrane at its best, harnessing innovation to ensure our reviews are up-to-date while maintaining rigour.” Read more about Cochrane living reviews and how to do them, or join the Cochrane-hosted Living Evidence Network here.

Each of the Project Transform components are now an ongoing part of Cochrane’s work. If you’d like to get involved in any of these activities, please get in touch with the teams below:

Machine learning and classifiers - James Thomas, james.thomas@ucl.ac.uk

Cochrane Crowd - Community Support Team, support@cochrane.org

TaskExchange - Community Support Team, support@cochrane.org

Living Systematic Reviews - lsr@cochrane.org

Living Guidelines - Julian Elliott, julian.elliott@monash.edu

The agenda and open access papers for the Cochrane Governing Board teleconference on 12 December 2019 are now available to view online, for information only.

Cochrane's governing body is the Governing Board. The Board is responsible for overseeing the development and implementation of Cochrane’s strategic direction.

If you would like to comment on an item you can contact the Board: support@cochrane.org

Many thanks to those who attended Cochrane’s first Annual General Meeting online. Over 200 participants joined from Cochrane’s head office in London, individually online, and in groups from Germany, Russia, Spain, Switzerland, and the UK.

All Resolutions proposed at the meeting were passed by the members. The record of votes is available here.

The meeting was also recorded and is available to view below.

The Governing Board can be contacted at support@cochrane.org. For questions or comments related to the AGM, please contact Lucie Binder, Head of Governance & Strategy, at admin@cochrane.org.

All content remains freely available on the Colloquium website and open to the entire Cochrane Community of members and supporters!

Cochrane’s annual flagship event brings together the world’s most influential health researchers, scientists, academics, opinion leaders, clinicians, and patients to promote evidence-informed decision-making. The unprecedented situation of civil unrest across Santiago led to the cancellation of our face-to face 2019 Colloquium and Cochrane’s first virtual Colloquium.  Whilst we recognize our virtual meeting can never replace what we would have achieved together in-person in Chile, we believe that this unique week of content as a fitting tribute to recognizing the extraordinary efforts of hundreds of contributors and the Cochrane community's spirit of resilience and collaboration.

We were so pleased to see all of the social media activity around Virtual #CochraneSantiago last week and it was very exciting to see the diverse content. The amount of work that went into the nearly 180 digital posters and close to 120 video oral presentations was impressive! We heard about equity in systematic reviews; learned about how to better disseminate evidence to diverse stakeholders; and looked at different elements of methodological diversity. We also had time to look back; we relived some memories of prior Colloquia, celebrated acheivements of our community,  and had our Annual General Meeting. We ended the week by looking ahead; to ways people can get involved, the vision of our new Cochrane Library Editor, and to our next Colloquium; #CochraneToronto in 2020! In the midst of all of this content, we also screened more than 100,000 records for the Cochrane Crowd #ColloquiumChallenge2019!

If you participated in the Colloquium last week, please share your feedback with us by 20 December. This short survey will help us know what you thought of Cochrane’s first Virtual Colloquium and will help inform what we do virtually in the future!

Finally, we would like to remind you that all Virtual #CochraneSantiago content will stay active and the 2019 Colloquium website, so you can get back to watching those oral presentations you missed during Colloquium week.

Thank you for your participation and feedback!

• Take part in the 5 minute participation survey
• Visit all the virtual #CochraneSantiago content

Dr. Karla Soares-Weiser became the new Editor in Chief of the Cochrane Library in June. Karla replaced Dr. David Tovey, who stepped down from the role at the end of May following ten years of distinguished service.

Learn more about Karla's story and her journey through Cochrane since 1995 in the video below;

Karla Soares-Weiser was born in Brazil and now lives in Israel. She is a trained psychiatrist, holds a Master's degree in epidemiology, and a Ph.D. in evidence-based healthcare from the University of São Paulo. She has been working in evidence-based health care since 1997 and is an author of over 60 Systematic Reviews, including 33 Cochrane Reviews. She has held numerous positions in Cochrane Groups, including as a Visiting Fellow at the IberoAmerican and UK Cochrane Centres, where she provided training in systematic review production. Outside Cochrane she has held Assistant Professor posts in Brazil and Israel, and established her own consultancy business providing evidence synthesis services to government agencies and not-for-profit organizations. She was instrumental in the development of Cochrane Response, the organization’s evidence consultancy service; and in 2015 was appointed Cochrane's first Deputy Editor in Chief. Since 2016 she has been leading the transformation programme of Cochrane Review Groups into Networks, and in 2017 became Acting Editor in Chief for four months during David Tovey’s leave on health grounds.

Following her appointment, Karla reiterated her vision for the Cochrane Library: “to improve health care decision making by consistently publishing timely, high priority, high-quality reviews responding to the needs of our end-users. I am committed to working with the Cochrane community to achieve this vision, strengthening diversity, and striving for an excellent author experience.”

• Learn about Cochrane's Strategy to 2020
• Visit the Cochrane Library's website

Update to Subheadings in RevMan Web: Addition of 'Summary of findings and assessment of the certainty of the evidence'

We will be adding in a new subheading to the Methods section where people will describe their approach to rating the certainty of the evidence and preparing Summary of Findings tables. Given the importance of describing GRADE methods in the review it is advisable to add the information about GRADE and preparing Summary of Findings tables under this heading. Whilst this information is included in many reviews, it is done so variably: sometimes as part of Data synthesis, Assessment of risk of bias, or under a user-defined heading at the end of the Methods section. The new Handbook chapter provides the basis for a standardised heading (see https://training.cochrane.org/handbook/current/chapter-iii#section-iii-3-3-3), and following informal consultation we have decided to add a new level 3 subheading 'Summary of findings and assessment of the certainty of the evidence'.

Where will the new heading be placed?
It will be placed as the last subheading under Data collection and analysis in the Methods section.

Will this be a fixed heading?
It is a fixed heading in RevMan Web. Note that authors who are only working in RevMan 5 will not see this heading but can add it in as a user defined heading.

What happens when a review that is available in RevMan Web is checked out in RevMan 5? Will the heading just happily show?
If a review that is available in RevMan Web is checked out in RevMan 5, the heading will be shown as a level 3 heading.

When will this be switched on in RevMan Web?
This will be enabled from Thursday 5th December in RevMan Web. Reviews which are available in RevMan Web, and are currently checked out in RevMan 5, will not be updated until they are checked in.

Will authors need to add this heading in if they are working in both RevMan Web and RevMan 5?
No. If a review is accessed in RevMan Web, the heading will be added in.

• Learn more about the way that headings work in RevMan (both online and desktop versions)

Watch videos of Cochrane groups from different parts of the world who tell us how they contribute to Cochrane in their countries and languages.

Only about 6% of the world’s population are native English speakers, while 75% of people don’t speak English at all.

Many people do not have access to high quality health information, because it is not available in a language that they understand. We translate Cochrane evidence to make it more accessible, and to reduce the linguistic barrier to global evidence-informed health decisions. We have published more than 29,000 translations of Cochrane plain language summaries and abstracts as of November 2019.

Our translation activities are part of our wider knowledge translation programme which aims to ensure that people around the world have access to the health information they need, in the right formats and languages, and to enable people to use our evidence in practice. Cochrane groups in different parts of the world lead our knowledge translation activities in different languages. They translate Cochrane Reviews and related Review content targeted at different audiences, such as podcasts or blogshots. But they also write and disseminate news and other content in their language, do social media, work with professional societies, policy makers, patient groups or the media in their country, and offer training.

Our Cochrane groups who lead multi-language activities share their achievements and challenges in brief videos, and cover topics including volunteer engagement, machine translation, and knowledge translation approaches in their regions and languages.

Cochrane Brazil share how they teach EBM to journalist students and why it’s important.

Cochrane Croatia introduce some of their Cochrane projects including translation of plain language summaries and podcasts into Croatian, evaluation of different presentation formats of Cochrane evidence for different audiences including school children, and their collaboration with the Cochrane Oral Health Group.

Cochrane France tell us about their achievements and challenges in translating and disseminating Cochrane Reviews in French.

Cochrane Russia give an overview of their Cochrane activities, and their translation and dissemination achievements.

View other videos in our multi language series:

• Cochrane Iberoamerica have been translating Cochrane Reviews into Spanish for more than 15 years and tell us how their activities evolved over time
• Cochrane Iran explain how they implement Strategy to 2020 in Iran and present their Persian translation and dissemination activities
• Cochrane Japan introduce their Japanese translation activities and what motivates their volunteers to participate
• Cochrane Korea tell us about the importance and challenges of their Korean translation activities
• Cochrane Malaysia explain how they select and involve volunteers to translate plain language summaries into Malay, what motivates their translators to contribute, and their efforts to evaluate the quality of their Malay translations
• Cochrane Poland explain their plain language summary translation workflow and how they disseminate their translations
• Cochrane Taiwan ran a social media competition and asked their followers to create a video about how they use Cochrane Reviews
• Cochrane Thailand tell us about their history and structure, their training and Thai translation activities
• Beijing University of Chinese Medicine present their Simplified Chinese translation activities and volunteer team
   
• Automatic translation: Renato Benito, CEO of Nimdzi, talks about the newest developments in automatic translation and interpretation, and how Cochrane these technologies can benefit Cochrane

More about Cochrane multi-language activities:

• Learn about volunteering as a Cochrane translator
• Learn more about Cochrane evidence in different languages

Cochrane Crowd are running a citation screening challenge to coincide with the Virtual Cochrane Santiago Colloquium! Help Cochrane Crowd reach 48,000 classifications in 48 hours and be amongst the first to try out the all new, shiny CINAHL task! Details on this and how to join in below.

When is it running?
Start: Wednesday 4th December at 11:00 am GMT
Finish: Friday 6th December at 11:00am GMT
You can check what time that is for you here

How much time do I have to commit?
Of course, we’d love you to do the whole 48 hours! Just kidding. Any contribution is welcomed, whether it be a few five-minute grabs or a more focused effort (so you better make sure you have some screening snacks to hand to keep those energy levels up).

Sounds good so far. But I’m new to Cochrane Crowd. What is it all about?
Your best bet is to watch our 2-minute video introduction here.

What is the new CINAHL task?
For this challenge we want you to help identify possible reports of randomised trials (RCTs) that we have retrieved from a source called CINAHL. We haven’t identified RCTs from this source before. CINAHL is THE source for nursing and allied health professional research.

If I join in, what will I be doing?
Your mission for this challenge is to assess those records from CINAHL and decide whether you think they are describing a randomised trial or not. There will be a brief training module to complete if you haven’t done this kind of task before task before. Once identified, these studies go into a central register where health researchers and practitioners can access them.

Will there be prizes?
Of course! We’re glad you asked! Yes, prizes will go to the top three contributors. What are the prizes, you ask? A snazzy (limited edition!) T-shirt and a highly readable book – it’ll be like Christmas come early!

How do I sign up for the challenge?
There is no need to sign up for the challenge per se. You can just head to Cochrane Crowd anytime during the 48 hours of the challenge and get cracking!  If you’ve not been to Cochrane Crowd before, then you can sign up here.

Sounds fun, can I tell all my friends about it and get them to join in?
Yes please! We want as many as possible to join us. Feel free to share this page (share buttons below).

Is there a Twitter hashtag?
Sure is, we’ll be keeping in touch with #ColloquiumChallenge2019

How can I find out more?
You can email Emily and Anna from Cochrane Crowd at crowd@cochrane.org. And don’t forget to follow us on Twitter!