The March for Science took place on Saturday, 22 April 2017 - also known as Earth Day, a commemoration of environmental advocacy and science in the public interest established in the United States nearly 50 years ago. The March took place in more than 600 cities around the world, to champion the science that upholds the common good.

Cochrane contributors participated in marches worldwide and are sharing photos with us and on the #sciencemarch and #MarchforScience hashtags on social media. If you’ve got photos or stories to share, please post them to the Cochrane Facebook Group, tag @cochranecollab on Twitter, or send them to the Communications and External Affairs team.

Cochrane CEO Mark Wilson quoted in coverage of the London March in the Guardian.

Cochrane is delighted to announce today the development of Cochrane Global Mental Health: a partnership that brings together the five Cochrane Review Groups that cover mental health conditions and the WHO Collaborating Centre for Research and Training in Mental Health and Service Evaluation, Section of Psychiatry and Clinical Psychology.
 

Cochrane Global Mental Health is located in the city of Verona, Italy, and is affiliated with the University of Verona, where the WHO Collaborating Centre is based. Cochrane Global Mental Health will promote evidence-based decision making in mental health care in low- and middle-income countries by supporting and training new authors of Cochrane Reviews, as well as working with clinicians, professional associations, policy-makers, patients, and the media to encourage the dissemination and use of Cochrane evidence globally.

Activities of Cochrane Global Mental Health will be co-ordinated and led by Corrado Barbui, Director of the WHO Collaborating Centre for Research and Training in Mental Health and Service Organization, University of Verona, and Marianna Purgato, Post-Doctoral Researcher affiliated with the WHO Collaborating Centre.

• Read more about the launch on Cochrane.org
• Read the Cochrane Library Editorial: "Evidence-based interventions for global mental health: role and mission of a new Cochrane initiative" 
• Visit the Cochrane Global Mental Health website

2016 Dashboard is keeping us on track for 2017

Cochrane's Annual Dashboard presents some key metrics on our organizational performance over the previous calendar year. It includes data on Strategy to 2020 target achievements, and key metrics around the four Strategy to 2020 Goals. It’s an excellent tool to use to reflect on what we accomplished in 2016 and the work to be done in 2017.

View the full 2016 Dashboard.

Read more about Annual and Quarterly Dashboards.

Read more about Strategy to 2020.

The Governing Board has approved a new set of principles concerning the implementation of Cochrane's Charter of Good Management Practice. Effective March 2017, the principles of the Charter apply to directors and managers of all Cochrane Groups, as well as to members of the Central Executive team (CET). Thus all Cochrane staff and volunteers should expect that the behaviours and approaches of all Cochrane Group leaders and managers conform to the principles outlined in the Charter policy.

If you have questions about any aspect of this policy or the Charter, please contact a member of the CET.

The Agenda and Open Access papers for the Cochrane Governing Board meeting in Geneva are now available.

Cochrane Community members may be particularly interested in the following papers:

CEU Screening Guide

Knowledge Translation Strategy

Membership Thresholds

Report on 2016 Targets for Strategy to 2020

Report on the 2016-2017 Governing Board election

Structure and Function Review of Cochrane Fields final design proposals

What’s happening with the Organizational Policy Manual?

Following the launch of the new Cochrane Community site in early 2016, we have been working to complete the integration of content from the old Community site and other legacy sites to make all relevant information easily accessible in one location. As part of this process, we have undertaken an extensive review and revision of the Organizational Policy Manual (OPM), which for many years had served as a repository for a variety of organizational information.

During the OPM review, we determined that a significant amount of the content was obsolete, redundant, or relevant to operational information available elsewhere on Cochrane.org, Community, or Group sites. As a result, we have relocated, re-directed, and turned off relevant content formerly housed in Sections 1 & 2 and Appendices of the OPM. Information relevant to Cochrane policies is now housed in the following locations:

• Editorial policies are available in the Editorial and Publishing Policy Resource (EPPR) on the Community website.
• Organizational policy information relevant to the wider organization and the general public is available in the ‘About us’ section on Cochrane.org.
• Organizational policy information relevant to the core Cochrane community is available in the ‘Organizational info’ section here on the Community site.

With current policy information available in one of these sections, most of the old OPM is now offline. The only section still located on the old website is operational information related to Review Groups and Methods Groups, which will eventually be updated and migrated to the new site as part of  the Structure & Function project. 

If you have any questions about this project, or feedback about missing, misdirected, or non-functional hyperlinks or content, please contact Nancy Owens.

The Central Executive Team and Wiley are currently working with publishing technology company HighWire (previously Semantico), to develop a new platform for the Cochrane Library with greater functionality that makes it easier for users to discover and use Cochrane content in their decision-making. This is a complex project that is divided into many different areas, including the display of Cochrane Reviews and CENTRAL, linking of the CDSR and CENTRAL, the search and discovery interface, and multi-language search and the display of non-English language content.

Due to the project's complexity, delivery has unfortunately been delayed. We are working hard to minimize this delay and will provide more information as it becomes available.

If you have any questions, please contact Deborah Pentesco-Gilbert, Editorial Director, Wiley, or Harriet MacLehose, Senior Editor, Cochrane.

With the recent election of the Author representatives, membership of the new Cochrane Council is now complete!

The purpose of the Council is to provide:

• a forum for Cochrane Groups to consider high-level matters affecting Cochrane as a whole;
• a mechanism to raise matters and provide input to the Governing Board on behalf of Cochrane Groups; and
• a forum to consider matters at the request of the Board and inform Board deliberations.

The Council will meet for the first time at the Geneva Mid-Year Meeting on 6 April 2017. The agenda for that meeting will be available soon. In the meantime, please refer to the new Council pages for more information.

Applications are open for the Aubrey Sheiham EBHC in Africa Leadership Award until 31 July, 2020.

We continue to honour Professor Aubrey Sheiham, a longtime supporter of Cochrane’s work and mission. Prof Sheiham was a dental epidemiologist who was inspired and encouraged by Archie Cochrane to question many of the practices in medicine and dentistry. His main commitments were to challenge dental establishments to be far more critical and to improve the health of populations in low and middle-income countries. Prof Sheiham particularly believed that the misuse of healthcare resources has more serious ethical and health implications in low-income countries because the latter are often under-resourced and inadequate to start with. Prof Sheiham considered that supporting and training key health personnel in the concepts of Cochrane will improve the effectiveness and efficiency of health care.

This award is offered annually by Cochrane to an individual from Africa to support the conduct and dissemination of a high-impact Cochrane Review focusing on a topic relevant to resource-constrained settings with a focus on leadership in evidence-based healthcare. The award is administered by Cochrane South Africa.

In addition to undertaking and disseminating the review findings, the awardee will be expected to support capacity development by mentoring a novice author from Africa while conducting the review.

For more details on the criteria, the award and the application requirements see: https://southafrica.cochrane.org/news/aubrey-sheiham-ebhc-africa-leadership-award

• 31 July: Deadline for applications
• 30 September: Announcement of the Award winner

Applications should be submitted to Joy Oliver at joy.oliver@mrc.ac.za
Queries can be sent to Charles Wiysonge at charles.wiysonge@mrc.ac.za

Cochrane and Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) are delighted to announce the support of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for Cochrane and OHSU's ongoing work to build, pilot, and scale a next generation evidence system to transform the translation of health research into practice. This system is a major component of Cochrane's wider technology development program designed to address the challenge of making sense of an ever-increasing amount of health research and builds on Cochrane’s investment in projects including Linked Data, Project Transform and review production tools.

Read more about this exciting initiative on Cochrane.org