Dear CET colleagues,

I am delighted to announce the appointment of Jo Anthony as the new Head of the Knowledge Translation department, and Chris Champion as the new Head of Membership, Learning & Support Services.

Jo has more than 20 years’ experience in print and broadcast journalism and as a senior executive and communications specialist. She joined Cochrane in 2014 as Media and Communications Officer, and during the last four years has worked with Cochrane Groups, authors and editorial teams to increase the coverage, reach, accessibility and impact of Cochrane’s evidence around the world. She designed and implemented media and dissemination plans, was central to the development of Cochrane’s new brand identity and led the Central Executive Team’s events management support for the Global Evidence Summit last September. She has a proven track record of leadership roles within global organizations, including the BBC, commercial media, and digital content production companies managing international multi-disciplinary teams.

Chris Champion has been part of Cochrane for more than eight years. Having developed his editorial skills at Oxford University Press he joined Cochrane as a Managing Editor in 2009 working first at the Developmental, Psychosocial and Learning Problems Group, and then at the Common Mental Disorders Group in Bath, UK. After five years as a Managing Editor he was appointed as Senior Advisor to Cochrane’s Chief Executive Officer, and in 2015 became Senior Programme Manager in the CEO’s Office. Having worked in Cochrane’s Review Groups, participated in and led various Cochrane committees, and more recently been the lead on several major Strategy 2020 initiatives such as the structure and function projects, the formation of the Knowledge Translation framework, and developing and implementing the new Cochrane Membership scheme, Chris has a real depth of understanding of Cochrane and our community and is therefore well placed to understand and deal with the challenges that the new Membership, Learning and Support Services department will face.

Both candidates beat off strong external competition in the recruitment process over the last month, and their appointment is indicative of the tremendous talent we already have within the Cochrane community. They will formally take up their new roles from Monday 5th March. I’m sure you’ll join me in warmly welcoming them to their new posts!

Best wishes,

Mark

Mark G. Wilson
Chief Executive Officer

We are pleased to announce a new module on Network Meta-Analysis (NMA) for the Cochrane Interactive Learning course.

Developed in partnership with Cochrane’s Membership, Learning and Support Services, NMA subject matter experts and world-leading e-learning designers, the new module is the tenth in the Cochrane Interactive Learning course and continues our commitment to provide high quality, engaging and innovative distance learning.

Chris Champion, Head of Membership, Learning and Support services: “I’m delighted to be able to launch this tenth module of Cochrane Interactive Learning focussed on network meta-analysis. As a globally diverse organisation, the ability to deliver high quality, engaging learning online is critical for Cochrane to meet its mission.  This new module is a direct response to Cochrane’s content strategy and is part of our commitment to continually augment and update the Interactive Learning programme. We hope that Cochrane authors and editors alike will find this to be a valuable training resource to develop their knowledge around this increasingly important area of systematic review methodology.”

David Tovey, Cochrane’s Editor in Chief says: “Cochrane launched its Content Strategy in 2018. One of the highest priorities identified was to increase the number of reviews using network meta-analysis, where multiple interventions can be assessed against one another to provide more intuitive and applicable health care decision making support. This new Interactive Learning module is part of a broad range of initiatives to support Cochrane authors to take up this challenge and it will sit alongside guidance in the new Cochrane Handbook, an extension of the MECIR standards for network meta-analyses and the continuation of regular face-to-face training from the Comparing Multiple Interventions Methods Group. We hope that, taken together, these initiatives will help us increase the production of these reviews in Cochrane and therefore to meet the needs of our users more effectively.”

Professors Julian Higgins and and Tianjing Li were the subject matter expert team co-authoring the module: “We enjoyed our collaboration with the Cochrane Membership, Learning and Support Services team to produce this new module. The module introduces the underlying concepts and assumptions of network meta-analysis, which is of increasing importance to evidence-informed healthcare. It describes the benefits of network meta-analyses, and illustrates their features using examples and interactivity.”

The new module is freely available to Cochrane contributors, and residents of HINARI countries, and there are also subscription options. Find out more and access the new module at: interactivelearning.cochrane.org

The US Cochrane Center, based at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, has closed. Director Professor Kay Dickersin, and Associate Directors Tianjing Li and Roberta Scherer have stepped down from their positions, but will continue to work with Cochrane in other capacities. Cochrane’s Governing Board Co-Chairs Martin Burton and Cindy Farquhar thanked them for their commitment to Cochrane’s work over many years: “Professor Kay Dickersin has led the US Cochrane Center since it was founded, and has been at the heart of Cochrane’s work in the United States for over 20 years,” Cindy said. “On behalf of the entire Cochrane community, including the many people she has so generously and graciously supported as Director of the Center, we would like to thank her and all of her team at the Johns Hopkins School.” In their letter to the Governing Board and the Centre Directors’ Executive, Professor Dickersin, Dr Li and Dr Scherer wrote: “Over the years, we have thoroughly enjoyed working with you, other Centre Directors, and our colleagues at US Cochrane West and Cochrane Caribbean. We wish you all the best and lots of success in growing Cochrane.”

Cochrane plans to establish a new US Network and will issue an invitation soon for expressions of interest from institutions and organizations in the United States to join the Network and host a new Cochrane US Center, which will manage the Network including the two existing US Associate Centers: Cochrane US West, which opened in 2015 based at the Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU) in Portland, Oregon; and Cochrane Caribbean, launched in June 2013 at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica.

Teams at Australia’s University of Newcastle,  Cochrane Heart, and Project Transform’s living systematic review (LSR), machine learning and citizen science experts have combined forces to re-publish one of Cochrane’s first LSRs in record time. Following an update in September 2017, the LSR of ‘Interventions for increasing fruit and vegetable consumption in children aged five years and under’ was re-published in just four months!

The review team had assistance from Cochrane’s machine classifiers and Cochrane Crowd to identify the RCTs from their monthly search results. Amazingly, Cochrane Crowd contributors screened 1,600 citations (involving over 6,000 individual classifications) for this update in just 5 hours! Lead author Rebecca Hodder estimated this reduced the team’s screening time by 60%, allowing the authors to focus their efforts on incorporating five new and seven ongoing eligible studies. With the ongoing monthly searches so far revealing another ten new studies and four new ongoing studies, the review authors expect to include these in their next update, to be published by May.

A big thanks to Nicole Martin, Cochrane Heart Group Managing Editor, and Cochrane’s Editorial and Methods Department for coordinating their work to ensure the editorial review and sign-off process was completed as quickly as possible.

Hodder RK, Stacey FG, O'Brien KM, Wyse RJ, Clinton-McHarg T, Tzelepis F, James EL, Bartlem KM, Nathan NK, Sutherland R, Robson E, Yoong SL, Wolfenden L. Interventions for increasing fruit and vegetable consumption in children aged five years and under. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 2018, Issue 1. Art. No.: CD008552. DOI: 10.1002/14651858.CD008552.pub4.

Support for the Cochrane Review 'Interventions for increasing fruit and vegetable consumption in children aged five years and under' and application of machine/crowd technologies to monthly searches was provided by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect the views of the Foundation.

Support for Project Transform is provided by Cochrane and the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia (APP1114605). The contents of the published material are solely the
responsibility of the Administering Institution, a Participating Institution or individual authors and do not reflect the views of the NHMRC.

We are proud to announce this week the official launch of our first Cochrane Review Group (CRG) Networks, Cochrane Public Health and Health Systems and Cochrane Cancer.

We welcome the formation of these new thematic Networks as part of the implementation of Cochrane’s CRG Transformation programme, which sets out the changes we will be making to ensure Cochrane addresses the challenges it faces in relation to the production of a comprehensive collection of timely, high-quality reviews, relevant to our stakeholders.

The new CRG Networks, each consisting of sustainable connection Review Groups, provide an opportunity to optimize resources, support and leadership, and you will be hearing more about their work from our newly-appointed Senior Editors as part of their new websites:

We invite you to view their new websites:

• Cochrane Cancer
• Cochrane Public Health and Health Systems

On 25 January 2018, Cochrane Portugal held a Meeting in Coimbra. Those who attended the event included Xavier Bonfill, Director of the Cochrane Iberoamerica, António Vaz Carneiro, Director of Cochrane Portugal, João Costa, Co-ordinating Editor of Cochrane Movement Disorders, and over 20 representatives of several Portuguese academic and scientific institutions.

The goal of this meeting was to discuss the best way to adapt to the new geographical organisation and structure of Cochrane and the Iberoamerican Cochrane Network. At the next Governance Meeting, that will take place on 19-23 March 2018 in Lisbon, the Protuguese group will hold another meeting to establish the achieved agreements.

7th February Update
As of January 2018 we started sending out these membership activation emails through a gradual process. We hope to have sent out all emails by the middle of February. Everyone who does not respond will receive a reminder after 6 weeks.

Key messages

• We are writing to everyone in Cochrane for two reasons
  • For those eligible, we want them to activate their membership status
  • We want everyone to opt in to receiving communications from us in future
• All Group staff are eligible for membership, please activate yours as soon as you receive the message
• The information below is so you are aware what is going on in case anyone comes to you with concerns.

Who we are contacting

We need to write to every contact that we hold on our systems.

We appreciate that some contacts have a higher level of engagement than others, e.g. if you are a author on multiple reviews you are highly engaged in Cochrane work, but if you are a peer reviewer who once did a peer review then you may be surprised to be on Cochrane’s systems. With this in mind we are sending a variety of messages tailored to people’s level of engagement, so that everyone receives appropriate messages.

Why we are contacting people

We have two primary objectives for the mailings:

1. Membership: we will be offering all eligible contributors the chance to activate their membership
2. Data protection: we will be asking everyone to ‘opt in’ to receive future communications in order for us to be data protection compliant.

We will also be asking people to set up their Cochrane account if they do not already have one.

Who qualifies for membership

For the initial wave of members, we have tried to identify everyone who has actively contributed to Cochrane in recent years and also anyone who has ever written a Cochrane Review. These people, alongside anyone with a staff role in a Cochrane Group or a role on a key committee, will be offered membership in the initial round.

In future, membership will be based on thresholds of contribution now that we are able to track a broad range of contributions.

What is involved in activating membership

In the email people will receive instructions to activate their membership. It is a simple process of reviewing terms and conditions and accepting them.

The main feature of the terms and conditions is that to be a member you must declare that you are not employed by a pharmaceutical or medical devices company.  For more information, please see the full terms and conditions.

Why we need people to ‘opt in’ for future communications

We are updating our data protection policies to bring us in line with EU legislative changes which come into effect in May 2018. The key point is that in future we will only be able to send newsletters and similar communications to people who have actively opted in to receive such mailings.

We think it is really important to stay in touch with our community, and we see our newsletters showcasing our evidence and other exciting news as a really useful channel to do this, so we are urging people to opt in to receive communications from Cochrane and also sign up for Cochrane Connect and any other newsletters of interest.

The email around opting in relates to everyone who we have on our databases, so people will be contacted about this regardless of whether they qualify for membership or not.

Why we are asking people to set up their Cochrane account

We want people to be managing their own user accounts as much as possible. The Cochrane account is your key to accessing Cochrane tools and services, including RevMan, Crowd, and TaskExchange. My Account is the new area to manage your Cochrane account. We’re actively developing the My Account area, and over time we hope to be able to display information about what you have contributed to Cochrane, what learning you have completed, and provide a service to download contribution certificates. We will also be using this space to display membership status and other details around available benefits.

At present, My Account allows you to customize your preferences around newsletters and communications and confirm your interests so that we can contact you with specific issues that might be of interest to you.

Who to contact

If you have any queries about the mailing or if you receive any questions from people who have received the mailing please contact membership@cochrane.org

FAQs

We have put together some anticipated FAQs below and we will add to this list as questions come in.

What are the benefits of membership?

• We want membership to be a recognition of what someone has contributed to Cochrane’s work, but in addition, we also offer a range of benefits to members, which include:
  • voting rights and eligibility to stand for internal governance positions;
  • allow you to track all of your contributions to Cochrane
  • discounts on certain products and services, e.g. Cochrane Interactive Learning; and
  • members only communications.
• Over time we will gradually expand on these benefits as the membership concept develops.

Why haven’t I received an email?

• We are contacting most people we have on record, but some people have already proactively given consent to be contacted. If you have done that in My Account, then you might not get the opt-in opt-out email. You can always check your opt-in/opt-out status by logging in to My Account and going to the Communications tab.

I think I should be a member, but I have received an email that just asks about my communications preferences.

• If the email you receive doesn’t talk about activating your membership, but you believe you should be a member, you are welcome to contact us to ask why you are not a member and where appropriate we will correct any mistakes in our records. Our contact address is membership@cochrane.org

What sort of communications are you talking about?

• We use the term ‘communications’ to mean general email messages from the organization;  this may include newsletters, Annual General Meeting information, key news or decisions. Examples of our newsletter can be seen at the Cochrane Connect page.

I am an author and I want to opt out. Will the Cochrane Review Group still be able to email me?

• Yes, personal contact with individuals in Cochrane relating to your work with us is not covered by this.

Can I opt out, but still choose to receive the Connect Newsletter?

• No, opting out will mean you cannot receive newsletters.

What is the legislation that has caused these changes?

• We are responding to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which takes effect on 25 May 2018. For more information please see the GDPR Guide. 

I still have a question…

• If after reading this you still have a question, please contact membership@cochrane.org

Dear Cochrane colleagues,

I wrote to you last week reflecting on Cochrane’s 2017 achievements and outlining the key organizational priorities for us over the next twelve months. 2018 promises to be another exciting year of transformation and change as we increase still further our capacity to produce and disseminate high-quality evidence to impact health decision making around the world.

Today we’re unveiling some structural changes to Cochrane’s Central Executive Team (CET) designed to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the way that it works, both in leading and supporting the Cochrane community. Over half way through Strategy to 2020, and five years after the CET was first designed as a fully-integrated team, we wanted to make some changes that would equip the CET better for delivering the complex and demanding organizational changes and product development that the Governing Board has set us. Here are some of the major CET structural changes:

• The Cochrane Innovations team is being formally integrated within the charity’s management structure and we are establishing a new ‘Innovations, Research & Development Department’ that will allow us to integrate the Innovations team’s product development and commercialisation work (which in the coming years will be focused on the Cochrane Library) much more fully and efficiently within Cochrane’s structure and decision-making. We will continue to have a Cochrane Innovations Trading Company (with Charlotte Pestridge continuing to be its CEO) through which we will commercialize some of our non-Library products (like Cochrane Interactive Learning).
• We are introducing a new ‘Knowledge Translation Department’, drawn from the existing Communications & External Affairs Department (CEAD), focusing on facilitating and supporting Cochrane’s organizational KT; communications; translations; ‘content’ advocacy, partnerships & external engagement; as well as events & marketing. The new department highlights the centrality of Knowledge Translation to Cochrane as an organization, and this team will act as the principal driver of the development and delivery of Cochrane’s KT work: maximising the dissemination, use, and impact of Cochrane evidence; and ensuring that all our KT outputs and activities are provided in an effective and efficient manner to support Cochrane’s strategic aims and objectives.
• To support this, the Head of the new KT department will also take on responsibility for the line management and coordination of Cochrane Fields.
• We are introducing a new ‘Membership, Learning & Support Services’ department, which broadens the scope of the existing L&SD to cover membership, learning and development, our support to consumers and patients (including the Consumers Executive) and other (future) community subsets (such as Cochrane Students for Best Evidence). The new department will also be responsible for Cochrane’s user/community support (excluding that for the Cochrane Library, which remains with our publisher, Wiley).
• The ‘Finance & Core Services’ department takes on business services/planning/monitoring/ reporting responsibilities, including management of Cochrane’s future publishing arrangements.
• The Editorial & Methods Department is essentially unchanged but will be divided into three units within it, covering Editorial Policy & Publication; Review Production & Quality; and Methods Research & Development.

You can see a full overview of the structural changes and a presentation, entitled ‘Working Better Together’ we developed to introduce and explain the realignment to CET staff. Last week we launched recruitment processes for two new Senior Management Team positions: the new Head of Knowledge Translation Department and the new Head of Membership, Learning & Support Services and I hope that you will have a close look at the two job descriptions.

I am also delighted to inform you of two further items of news. Firstly, that we have started activating Cochrane membership accounts as part of the next phase of our membership programme. Everybody who has contributed to Cochrane in the past is being informed that they are eligible for membership and being asked to activate their membership account. Please activate your account as soon as you see that email and urge others to do the same - everyone needs to take this step to confirm their Cochrane membership. Launched in the last quarter of 2017, Cochrane’s Membership scheme is the critical organizational initiative that will enable us to grow our collaboration and attract many new people with a wider range of experience and skills into our work, but an important foundation of the scheme is ensuring that those Cochrane collaborators already listed on our Archie database want to continue their involvement with us.

Secondly, we are proud to be announcing the official launch of the first Cochrane Review Group Networks: Cochrane Cancer, and Cochrane Public Health and Health Systems. The new CRG Networks provide an opportunity to optimize leadership and support at a new editorial level within Cochrane; and you will be hearing more about their work from our newly-appointed Senior Editors later this week.

If you have any questions about the new Central Executive Team structure, please do not hesitate to contact me or another member of the Senior Management Team. We are confident that these changes will improve our support to you; and help us all to achieve our Strategy to 2020 goals over the next three years.

With my very best wishes,

Mark
Mark G. Wilson
Chief Executive Officer

Dear Colleagues,

I am delighted to announce that we are establishing a new community support team. The team will be providing a helpdesk style support service to the community managing support areas such as IT support, learning enquiries and general contact enquiries. For most enquiries from the community this team will be the first point of contact.

The team consists of three part-time Community Support Officers (CSO) and one part-time Senior Community Support Officer.

Starting today are our three CSOs:

Denise Mitchell - Denise already works part-time for the CET as the Executives Support Officer as well as being a copyeditor. She also has valuable experience of working in a Review Group.

Diane Gal - Diane has previously been involved in Cochrane projects when working at the University of Portsmouth. She is also an author on two Cochrane Reviews with the EPOC group.

Ursula Gonthier - Ursula is the editorial assistant at the Cochrane Wounds Group and will be continuing in that role alongside this new role. She has extensive experience of supporting authors from her work in the Review Group.

We are delighted to be able to launch this team with three CSOs who already have a great depth of Cochrane knowledge and experience and we hope that this will allow us to develop this support service rapidly.

In addition to the three CSO posts we have appointed a senior CSO who will be one day per week. That role is an escalation point for the team if any enquiries are particular challenging and need an even deeper knowledge of Cochrane. We will confirm that appointment in due course.

The team will be responding to a range of email inboxes, but they will also have one unified mailbox where people can send enquiries: support@cochrane.org.

Chris Champion
Acting Head of Membership, Learning and Support Services