Every year Cochrane awards members of its Community a range of prizes that highlight high-quality methodological research through to supporting health decision-making in developing countries, and contributors who have made a significant contribution to the organization.

The prizes and awards that are presented at the annual Colloquia, will this year be awarded at the Santiago Colloquium from the 22-25 October 2019.

You have until the 2 August 2019 to make your nominations.

Submissions to the Kenneth Warren Prizes, Bill Silverman Prize, and the Anne Anderson Award can be made through this online survey. 

To find out more about each prize and the criteria, please click on the links below:

The Kenneth Warren Prize is awarded to the principal author of whichever Cochrane Review authored by a national living in a developing country is judged to be both of high methodological quality and relevant to health problems in developing countries.

The Chris Silagy Prize is awarded to an individual who has made an "extraordinary" contribution to the work of Cochrane which would not be recognized outside the scope of this prize.

The Bill Silverman Prize is awarded to acknowledge explicitly the value of criticism of Cochrane, with a view to helping to improve its work, and thus achieve its aim of helping people make well-informed decisions about health care by providing the best possible evidence on the effects of healthcare interventions.

The Anne Anderson Award is awarded to a female member of Cochrane who has made a significant contribution to the enhancement and visibility of women's participation within Cochrane.

The Thomas C Chalmers Prize will also be awarded at the Santiago Colloquium to the principal author of the best oral and the best poster presentation addressing methodological issues related to systematic reviews. Submission to this prize closed on the 26 April 2019 alongside the closure of abstract submission for the Colloquium.

Learn more about the 2018 winners and their stories, here.

The minutes from the Governing Board’s teleconference, July 2019, are now available.

Governing Board members are Cochrane’s directors and trustees, and are elected to direct the strategy and policies of the organization.

Questions about the minutes can be sent to support@cochrane.org

At its teleconference on 10 July, the Governing Board voted unanimously to appoint Catherine Marshall as its new Co-Chair from 1 September 2019. Catherine will work alongside fellow Co-Chair Martin Burton, and replace Marguerite Koster, who is stepping down from the role after one year due to increased commitments in her job at Kaiser Permanente, in Southern California, but will remain on the Board as a member.

Catherine was one of the first two appointed members of the Cochrane Governing Board in 2016. She is also a member of the Board’s Governance Committee, and Finance Audit and Investment Committee, and was elected as Treasurer in September 2018.

Outside Cochrane, Catherine is an Independent Guideline Adviser and Health Sector consultant based in New Zealand. She is currently Co-Chair of the Partnership Advisory Group with the Guidelines International Network (G-I-N) and was previously Vice Chair of its board of trustees. She was also the inaugural Chief Executive of the New Zealand Guidelines Group, where one of her key responsibilities was the development and implementation of evidence-based guidelines and advice – which often relied on evidence from the Cochrane Library. Catherine is also a prominent health consumer advocate, working on the development of health consumer legislation in New Zealand and as a former member of the NZ Stronger Consumer Voices Alliance. In 2018, she helped organize and participate in the consumer programs for the Cochrane Colloquium in Edinburgh.

“Catherine is a recognized leader in the global evidence-based medicine community” says outgoing Co-Chair Marguerite Koster. “Her experience leading non-governmental and charitable organizations will be a significant asset to Cochrane as she assumes the position of Co-Chair of the Governing Board.”
 
Martin Burton adds, “I am delighted that Catherine has been elected to the Co-Chair position. She is passionate about Cochrane and brings a unique set of skills to the role. At the same time, I am sorry to say “goodbye” to Marguerite. She has been a truly outstanding Co-chair and a wonderful colleague to work with. I am very pleased that she is prepared to continue to serve on the Governing Board.”

And of her appointment, Catherine says, “In the last three years as a Governing Board member of Cochrane, I have been deeply impressed by the strength of Cochrane and the talent of the people who contribute to the collaboration. I am strongly committed to expanding our reach around the globe and finding ways Cochrane advice can assist health consumers.”
 
Members of the Governing Board can be contacted at support@cochrane.org
 

Dear Colleagues,

The 2019 financial and resource monitoring of Cochrane Groups is taking place from today, Friday 19 July 2019, to Friday 20th September 2019.

Monitoring of Cochrane Groups takes place annually. The information provided by Groups supports an organization-wide data-gathering exercise that gives a picture of Cochrane’s overall ‘financial health’:

• It enables the Governing Board and Central Executive Team to provide information to the public about who funds Cochrane, the collective monetary cost of the organization’s work, and the number of people involved in Group activities;
• It supports the preparation of statistics about Groups in order to benchmark operations and identify best practice;
• It identifies whether Groups are operating sustainably, highlighting any actual or potential resource issues.

Given its important purpose, all registered Cochrane Groups are required, as a condition of their involvement in the organization, to complete a Financial & Resource Monitoring form for their last complete financial year by Friday 20th September 2019. This includes Affiliates and Satellites.

Access the monitoring form, and more information about the process, on the 2019 Monitoring webpage.

You can email the Central Executive Team at monitoring@cochrane.org if you need help or have any questions. A summary of the collated data will be publicly available by early 2020. Specific details about Groups will remain confidential.

With our grateful thanks,
 

Martin Burton and Marguerite Koster, Co-Chairs of the Governing Board

Mark Wilson, Chief Executive Officer

Karla Soares-Weiser, Editor-in-Chief

Priority setting is a hot topic in Cochrane!  This is understandable as, in order to be relevant to the needs of our users, Cochrane evidence needs to respond to national, regional, and global health priorities.  However, with the big push towards conducting more priority setting processes across Cochrane, we know it’s difficult to keep up to date with what is currently going on!

With this in mind, we have launched a ‘Current Cochrane Group Priority Setting Projects’ page. We hope this will become a ‘go-to’ place to keep up-to-date with which groups are conducting priority setting exercises and how you could get involved, rather than having to trawl through individual group websites.

If you are running a priority setting process and would like your process to be included on this page, the information to provide is below.  Once completed, simply submit the information requested and send to Muriah (mumoquit@cochrane.org) who will ensure that it is posted. If part of your priority setting process involves a survey open to a broad group of users, then you can consider sending to Muriah to be included as part of the weekly Comms Digest and advertised through the ‘Survey round-up’ page.

As well as the guidance note for Cochrane groups, the Knowledge Translation Working Group on Priority Setting has also developed a number of other resources for priority setting. These include, case studies and examples of documents from around Cochrane such as priority setting plans, surveys, workshop agendas and publications. All of these are freely available in the ‘Priority Setting’ pages of the Cochrane Training - Knowledge Translation Resources website . 

And if you can’t find what you’re looking for or have suggestions – please let us know (khead@cochrane.org)!

Cochrane Group:
URL of Group website:
Twitter Handle:
Title of Priority Setting:
General information: 1-2 sentences explaining what the scope of the priority setting is, any specific methods and/or stakeholders which will be involved.
Target Audience: 1-2 sentences explaining the target audience of your current stage in your priority setting. e.g. general public, health professionals. 
Special requests: Optional; Is there anything (with approximate dates) that the Cochrane Central Executive or other Cochrane Groups/Cochrane members could help with? e.g. Disseminating surveys, linking up with stakeholders etc.
End date: What is the date after which input from other Cochrane Groups would be unhelpful? When should your information be removed from this page?
Further information: e.g. Link to priority setting plan on Group website, link to survey.

The minutes from the Governing Board’s meeting in Krakow, April 2019, are now available.

Governing Board members are Cochrane’s directors and trustees, and are elected to direct the strategy and policies of the organization.

Questions about the minutes can be sent to support@cochrane.org

Cochrane's 2018 Annual Review is now available for download and dissemination. To find out more about what we achieved in 2018, what's happening across the organization in 2019, and links to share with stakeholders, please view or download a PDF of the Annual Review. 

"We’re a knowledge organization built on the capabilities and passion of our collaborators; and the good news is that people from around the world are flocking to contribute and support our work."
Mark Wilson
Cochrane Chief Executive Officer

View or download the 2018 Annual Review

Cochrane is currently reviewing the editorial management systems used by our editors and authors to prepare Cochrane Reviews, and the other content published in the Cochrane Library.

Cochrane uses several editorial management systems (EMS) to manage its content. The primary system used for Cochrane Reviews is Archie, which was developed in-house in 2003. Over the years Archie has fallen behind the technological curve and the system does not meet all the desires of our users; in addition, the EMS marketplace has evolved since 2003.

Cochrane needs to find or develop a sustainable editorial management solution that will serve the needs of our audience and contributors and the time to evaluate our technical needs and options is now. Cochrane requires an EMS that meets user needs, accommodates different content types, and is sustainable.

This programme of work forms part of an Organizational Target in 2019 which aims to evaluate, plan and begin implementation of an improved editorial management solution for Cochrane Review production.

Cochrane has engaged Origin Editorial to lead the analysis. Origin Editorial will conduct an analysis built with feedback from users and key stakeholders to understand the current and future requirements, evaluate current and potential systems against our requirements, and make a recommendation about a future approach.

For more information about this project (Project EMS strategy) and for updates, see the project website.

About Origin

Origin Editorial is a full-service editorial office collaboration, managed, and staffed, by industry recognized thought-leaders on peer review management best practice and journal business operations. The Origin team has considerable experience using multiple editorial management systems and has previously been called upon to advise developers of these systems on functionality needs and to facilitate an understanding of how editorial office users interact with such systems. Origin is also regularly engaged to advise journals and publishers alike on optimal peer review management workflows for a variety of stakeholders.

The principal project leads will be Jason Roberts, Senior Partner at Origin Editorial and David Allen. Jason Roberts has blended 3 career paths (publisher, peer review management and research in to peer review and publication ethics) to become a leading voice in the industry on the improvement in peer review management with a view to elevating the quality of published research. He is a past president of the International Society of Managing and Technical Editors and resides in Ottawa, Canada. David Allen has 19 years of medical publishing experience including being a former director of publications for the American Society for Bone and Mineral Research as well as a former Publisher for Elsevier. He has extensive experience with multiple editorial management systems and has undertaken several system implementations for a variety of publications. David is based in South Carolina, USA.

Take the opportunity to join the pilot of study-centric data in RevMan Web! Learn more about the advantages of study-centric data and why it’s important on the Community website.

Why?
If you join the pilot of study-centric data in RevMan Web you will get the chance to:

• Trial a new process of managing data and setting up analyses in RevMan Web with a high level of support
• Impact further development of study- centric data in RevMan Web
• Evaluate the overall user experience of the new process

What?
Using study-centric data means that the review process will consist of:

• Setting up review-level interventions, outcomes and (optionally) covariates
• Defining the study arms and rather than entering the data in the analysis you add it within each study
• Automatically generating analyses by choosing the synthesis PICO (Outcome, Experimental intervention, Control intervention and possibly covariates to subgroup by)

Who?
This pilot is suitable for your review author team:

• if you are interested in new technology in the review production process
• if your review group is working on an intervention review and you are about to start or complete data extraction (updates are eligible and there is a migration tool to support this)

Support for review teams in the pilot

Initial call with pilot group
Review author teams involved in the pilot will be invited to attend an introductory call where the Managing Editor of the review group is also invited. This session will outline plans for the pilot and how your review fits into it as well as showcase study-centric data functionality in RevMan Web. It will also provide the author team with the opportunity to ask any questions they have.

Video calls
Individual feedback sessions for the review groups will be set up using GoTo Meeting teleconference software on a regular basis and general calls open to all pilot participants will be arranged so learning and experience can be shared across the pilot groups.

Training materials
The knowledge base contains video tutorials and how-to articles to help you get started with using study-centric data. There you can find clear descriptions of which types of analyses you will need to continue to use custom input data for.