Dear Colleagues,

We are delighted to announce the results of the recent elections and appointments to the Governing Board:

Co-Chair:

Martin Burton has been appointed by the Board as its Co-Chair for a term of two years. Martin served as a member of the Board until this month, and already has substantial leadership experience in Cochrane as Director of Cochrane UK and Co-ordinating Editor of the Cochrane Ear Nose & Throat Review Group. Martin is based in Oxford, UK, and will share chairing duties with Cindy Farquhar, who is Co-ordinating Editor of the Gynaecology and Fertility Review Group, and is based in Auckland, New Zealand.

Two internal members:

The election of internal members has now concluded, and you have elected the following two candidates for a term of three years:

• Tracey Howe
• Joerg Meerpohl

Tracey Howe is Director of the Cochrane Global Ageing Field and is based in Glasgow, UK. Joerg Meerpohl is a serving Board member who has now been re-elected. He is Co-Director of Cochrane Germany and is based in Freiburg.

Sincere thanks go to all the candidates who stood in this election; their contribution and willingness to volunteer their time is greatly appreciated.

Three external members:

The Board has appointed three external members for a term of three years:

• Maria Gladys Faba Beaumont
• David Hammerstein Mintz
• Rae Lamb

Maria Gladys Faba Beaumont is a sociologist by training and works with the National Institute of Public Health in Mexico and the Pan American Health Organization; she is based in Mexico City. David Hammerstein Mintz is a civil society advocate for the Commons Network, an organization he co-founded. He is also a former Member of the European Parliament and is based in Valencia, Spain. Rae Lamb is Aged Care Complaints Commissioner for Australia and has a background in health journalism and health services research; she is based in Melbourne.

The candidate statements of all elected and appointed members are available for you to view on Cochrane Community website, as is the vote count for the internal election. The elections and appointments are governed by the Board electoral and appointment procedure.

The members of the Board congratulate and welcome the new members and extend their grateful thanks to Lisa Bero, outgoing Co-Chair; and Mona Nasser and Denise Thomson, outgoing Board members, for their outstanding contributions to Cochrane as members of the Board.

Questions about any aspect of this process should be sent to elections@cochrane.org.

UK Research and Innovation will be formed in April 2018, bringing together the seven existing Research Councils (including MRC), along with Innovate UK and a new body, Research England. Operating across the whole of the UK with a combined budget of more than £6 billion. Research England will work closely with its partner organizations in the devolved administrations. The organization's ambition is to be the best research and innovation agency in the world.

Find out more:

• MRC news item
• UK Research and Innovation website

We are looking for Cochrane Groups to host the 2020 and 2021 Cochrane Colloquia, and the 2019, 2020, and 2021 Cochrane Governance Meetings.

Call to host Cochrane Colloquia

Colloquia are Cochrane’s annual conferences, hosted each year by a different Cochrane Centre, Associate Centre, or Affiliate. Colloquia are designed to bring people together in one place to discuss, develop, and promote Cochrane’s work, as well as to shape the organization’s future direction. They are a chance for the community to get together to discuss the latest topics in evidence-based health care, and to learn about Cochrane methods through workshops and presentations.

The 2018 Colloquium will be held in Edinburgh and hosted by Cochrane UK; the 2019 Colloquium will be held Santiago, Chile and hosted by Cochrane South America. We are looking for other Cochrane Groups to host the 2020 and 2021 Colloquia.

Important information

• Deadline for submissions is 28 July 2017
• Your proposal will be put forward to the Cochrane Governing Board for decision as an Open Access paper
• You will be notified of the result in September 2017
• Cochrane Centres, Associate Centres, and Affiliates can apply. If you are an Associate Centre or Affiliate, you must supply a letter of support from your overarching Centre alongside your proposal
• All proposals must include a letter of support from your host institution and/or funders
• You are required to submit a proposed budget alongside the form
• To apply, download the application form.
   

Cochrane Governance Meetings call

Governance Meetings are Cochrane’s annual business meetings. 'Cochrane Governance Meetings' is the new name for the Cochrane Mid-Year Meeting; this name will be in use for the 2018 meetings onwards.

They are an opportunity for the Cochrane’s Governing Board, Councils, and Executives to meet and discuss the organization’s Strategy to 2020 and related targets, and how these are being developed and implemented.

Cochrane Portugal will be hosting the 2018 Governance Meetings in Lisbon. We are looking for other Cochrane Groups to host the 2019, 2020, and 2021 events.

It is important to note that Cochrane Governance Meetings must be held in Europe or an easily accessible transport hub. At a minimum, the location should be within two hours’ travelling time of an international airport.

Important information

• Your proposal will be put forward to the Cochrane Governing Board for decision as an Open Access paper
• You will be notified of the result in September 2017
• You are required to submit a proposed budget alongside the form
• All proposals must include a letter of support from your host institution and/or funders

To apply, download the application form.

Colloquium and Governance Meeting hosts are given support from the Cochrane Executive Team throughout the organization and hosting of the event.

If you would like to arrange a call with Holly Millward, Cochrane’s Event Support Officer, to discuss your proposal, please email hmillward@cochrane.org to arrange a time.

Please submit all proposals and support documentation to Holly Millward by 28 July 2017.

Cochrane is a global independent network of researchers, professionals, and people interested in health, including healthcare consumers. Cochrane's healthcare consumers are made up from a wide range of people, including patients (or people with personal experience of a healthcare condition), health and social care service users, care-givers and family members. Also included are people who represent or are advocates for patients and carers. What unites them all is their search for high quality, unbiased information about health conditions and treatments.

Consumer involvement is vital to Cochrane’s work as it:

(i)    promotes transparency, accountability and trust in the way that research is produced;
(ii)    results in evidence that addresses consumers’ needs, reduces waste in research, improves the translation of research into policy and practice, and ultimately leads to improved benefits for health systems and outcomes for patients;
(iii)    is consistent with current health research approaches and is expected or mandated by our funders, partners and consumers. 

Read more about the Statement of Principles for Consumer Involvement in Cochrane on the Cochrane Consumers Network website. 

The XVI Annual Meeting of the Cochrane Iberoamerican Network was held in Medellín on 5-7 June 2017. The event was organized by the Associate Centre University of Antioquia and coordinated by Hector Ivan García, director of this Associate Centre, and Xavier Bonfill, director of the Cochrane Iberoamerican Network.

Besides presenting interesting conferences and workshops related to evidence-based health care and clinical synthesis research in the region, the director of the Cochrane Iberoamerican Network discussed the activities currently under way across the different countries, and shared several future projects.

Attending this event were representatives of the Cochrane Editorial Unit, Karla Soares and Sera Tort. Their attendance enabled the discussion about common issues of Cochrane systematic review production and the main future challenges in this field.

Congratulations to Cochrane Iberoamerican Network for another great Annual Meeting!

• Read this news item in Spanish: Celebrada la XVI Reunión Anual de la Red Cochrane Iberoamericana en Medellín (Colombia) del 5 al 7 de junio de 2017

Just think how much time could be saved if you could crowdsource the screening for your review! Cochrane Crowd are trialling just such a service, known for now as Review Screen, or RevScreen for short.

Cochrane Crowd, Cochrane’s citizen science platform, launched in May 2016, until now has mostly focussed on identifying randomized controlled trials (RCTs) for uploading into the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL).

The Cochrane Crowd team envisage extending the established system to create efficiencies for individual reviews. Anna Noel-Storr, Co-Lead of Cochrane Crowd, explains, “We know that Cochrane Crowd works to screen RCTs for CENTRAL. Our Crowd of nearly 6,000 volunteers has screened well over 450,000 abstracts, finding around 34,000 RCTs – a brilliant collective effort. Alongside the existing process, we want to see if the system could be harnessed to deliver benefits directly to review teams by having the Crowd identify RCTs from the search results of individual reviews.”

So far things look very promising. Anna says, “Pilots have been completed for four reviews, with Cochrane Crowd volunteers jumping at the chance to work on these specialized screening tasks. It is incredibly efficient, with screening for the pilots being completed as quickly as 4.5 hours. Review teams have offered acknowledgement to volunteers who screen more than 200 records which has proved to be a good incentive to the Crowd.” The image below shows some of the key results for the four pilot studies.

Miranda Cumpston, Head of Learning and Support, Cochrane Central Executive, trialled the service recently, with the Crowd taking just four hours to screen 1,200 records and finding 370 RCTs. “This is an incredibly useful service, and the Crowd was super-fast in screening the records. It will be especially useful for large search datasets for which removing the non-RCTs can save a significant amount of time and reduce the burden on the review team.”

Colleen Ovelman, Managing Editor and Information Specialist at Cochrane Neonatal, has also trialled the service and recommends it to other review authors. “This is a wonderful system! I see crowdsourcing as a very promising way to engage others in the work we do with Cochrane, and there is no doubt that Cochrane Crowd, through this new service, can make the review process more efficient.”

So what next for this innovative service? The Cochrane Crowd team are making tweaks to the platform based on pilot feedback and are aiming for broader launch in the second half of the year. “We’re making a few technical changes with the aim of improving system efficiency without compromising accuracy, and to enable review teams to access screening results directly, as soon as screening has been completed, rather than the Crowd team acting as gatekeepers. We’re also developing some guidance to help authors teams understand just what Cochrane Crowd could do for them. It’s early days and, as with any new process, we need to make sure we keep a close eye on early use of the service. However, the pilot work done so far has been very encouraging and I’d just like to say a very big thank you to all those who contributed to those pilots, and to the author teams who took part”, says Anna.

Sign up to Cochrane Crowd to be amongst the first to hear new updates about RevScreen.

To hear more about Cochrane Crowd, you can watch this short video. If you have questions about RevScreen, or would like more information, contact the Cochrane Crowd team at crowd@cochrane.org. You can also keep up-to-date with Cochrane Crowd’s news by following them on Twitter.

Support for Project Transform was 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.

Entire Cochrane membership invited to vote

Voting for the 2017 election for two (2) internal members of the Cochrane Board is now open until Monday 24 July 2017. The results will be annouced on 27 July 2017. 

All Cochrane contributors are invited to vote in this election. You may cast your vote online at elections.cochrane.org, where you will be asked to login to your Cochrane Account to access the voting form. If you have any queries about or difficulties with the voting process, please contact elections@cochrane.org.

Cochrane places high regard on minimizing bias, promoting access, and enabling wide participation. For these reasons:

• Any Cochrane individual, Group, or committee may encourage members to participate in elections without endorsing specific candidates.
• Cochrane leaders or leadership committees (such as Executives) should not publicly endorse specific candidates.

For more information on canvassing and candidate promotion, please see the Board electoral and appointment procedure.

The minutes from the Governing Board’s meeting in Geneva, 5-7 April 2017, 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 admin@cochrane.org.

Additional resources:

• Agenda and open access papers from Geneva meeting
• Governing Board membership
• Full list of meeting minutes and open access papers.

We are pleased to announce the 12 successful titles from the fourth Cochrane Review Support Programme (CRSP) funding round.

1. Adverse events in patients taking macrolide antibiotics versus placebo for any indication (Cochrane Acute Respiratory Infections)
2. Cognitive behaviour therapy versus standard care for schizophrenia (Cochrane Schizophrenia)
3. Continence outcomes in pelvic organ prolapse surgery (Cochrane Gynaecology and Fertility)
4. Fluoride toothpastes of different concentrations for preventing dental caries (Cochrane Oral Health)
5. Methods of consumer involvement in developing healthcare policy and research, clinical practice guidelines and patient information material (Cochrane Consumers and Communication)
6. Mobile phone based interventions for improving adherence to medication prescribed for the primary prevention of cardiovascular disease (Cochrane Heart)
7. Peri-operative interventions in pelvic organ prolapse surgery (Cochrane Gynaecology and Fertility)
8. Saline irrigation for allergic rhinitis (Cochrane ENT)
9. Selective noradrenaline re-uptake-inhibitors (SNRIs) for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in adults (Cochrane Developmental, Psychosocial and Learning Problems)
10. Surgery for women with posterior compartment prolapse (Cochrane Gynaecology and Fertility)
11. Treatment for lupus nephritis (Cochrane Kidney and Transplant)
12. Very early versus delayed mobilisation after stroke (Cochrane Stroke)

We received 17 applications (19 reviews) from 13 groups. To evaluate the applications we convened an international assessment panel comprising nine Cochrane contributors and consumers of Cochrane Reviews, who generously shared their time and expertise:

Dr Corrado Barbui, WHO Collaborating Centre for Research and Training in Mental Health and Service Evaluation, Department of Neuroscience, Biomedicine and Movement Sciences, Section of Psychiatry, University of Verona, Verona, Italy

Dr Urbà González, Unit of Dermatology, CLĺNICA GO&FER, Barcelona, Spain

Prof Sally Green, Australasian Cochrane Centre, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia

Dr Richard Lehman, Hightown Surgery, Oxford, UK

Prof Ashraf F Nabhan, Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, Faculty of Medicine, Ain Shams University, Cairo, Egypt

Dr Susan Norris, World Health Organization, Geneva, Switzerland

Dr Mbah P Okwen, Centre for the Development of Best Practices in Health, Yaoundé Central Hospital, Yaoundé, Cameroon

Dr Sera Tort, Cochrane Editorial Unit, London, UK

Dr Ronaldo Zonta, Secretary of Health of Florianópolis, Florianópolis, Brazil

The next funding round will open in September 2017 and will be advertised via the usual Cochrane communication channels.