Community Engagement Report

The last time you visited these pages you may have completed a survey, attended a workshop, or provided feedback directly to the project team. The slide show below presents a summary of what we heard during the Cochrane community engagement period. Feedback submitted to the project team is available in full here.

Looking to the future:

This video contains the personal reflections from the Evidence production and methods directorate senior team.

Strategy for Change

Cochrane’s Strategy for Change is an organizational strategic framework that will guide Cochrane from 2021 onwards. It focuses on the changes we need to make over the next two years to remain sustainable.

This new model for synthesizing evidence in Cochrane is anchored firmly in three strategic goals:

• Producing trusted evidence

• Advocating for evidence

• Informing health and care decisions.

These goals are underpinned by four enabling principles, that must form the foundation of any future production model:

• Efficiency

• Sustainability

• Awareness and impact

• Accountability

Global Challenges

Across the globe, people and communities grapple with multiple health and care challenges. Defining a new model for evidence synthesis in Cochrane enables us to respond to these pressing challenges in a different way. While this represents an important change to the way we prioritize Cochrane evidence syntheses currently, it also offers new opportunities to deliver on our vision of better health for all.

Stakeholders

Meeting the needs of our many stakeholders through the single format of a Cochrane review has been a long-standing challenge. Consumers, carers, clinicians, researchers, policy makers, guideline developers, students and journalists all have different evidence needs and levels of health literacy. This proposed model offers new opportunities to better identify and understand our stakeholders and their needs. We can also explore different ways for stakeholders themselves to contribute to shaping Cochrane’s direction.

Review Development

Under a new model, we are looking to draw a clearer distinction between Cochrane as the producer and Cochrane as the publisher of evidence syntheses.The evidence synthesis development phase can be iterative, should recognise the skills of people playing different roles in the process, and provide clear mechanisms for how expertise can be sought, incorporated, and recognised.

Evidence Synthesis Units

Under this proposed new model, the existing Cochrane Review Group and Network structure will be replaced by 8-10 larger, multi-topic, interdisciplinary evidence synthesis units. These units will follow the strategic direction of the organization, be outward-looking and comprised of people who are highly skilled in evidence synthesis methods. Cochrane leaders from within and outside the central team will work with funders to identify core funding for the units. The central team will also focus on fundraising to support suites of evidence syntheses.

Direct pathway to publication

This proposed model includes new pathways for author teams to submit their reviews directly to the Central Editorial Service. We envisage a simple, direct, ‘journal-like’ pathway for submitting manuscripts to attract authors of high-quality evidence syntheses that wouldn't otherwise be published in the Cochrane Library. This direct pathway to publication can also be used by Cochrane Review Groups during the transition to a new model for producing reviews in Cochrane.

Editorial Process by the
Central Editorial Service

Under this proposed model, the editorial process for all evidence syntheses are managed centrally. Cochrane’s existing Central Editorial Service has been in operation since 2018, performing the editorial process for some of Cochrane’s highest-profile reviews. In addition, Cochrane is running an Editorial Independence and Efficiency Project, to test an independent editorial process for Cochrane reviews developed or supported by Cochrane Review Groups.

Publication

The way evidence is published and presented on the Cochrane Library is vital to ensuring Cochrane evidence is used widely and effectively. Moving to a shorter, more journal-like format with a separation between the main manuscript and supplementary materials would allow Cochrane to deliver evidence syntheses that are easier for authors to produce, while supporting transparency and rigour. This would also lay the foundations for future Cochrane Library developments to make our data more visible and attract new users.

A collaboration for and about
the future

Responding and adapting in a time of great change is hard for all of us. We need your ideas about the best ways to meet the critical challenges of our times. So whether you’ve been part of the Cochrane community from the beginning or you represent more recent or prospective contributors, we encourage you to help shape our response.

The decisions we collectively make now can build on our legacy and foster new opportunities for people of all ages and walks of life to work together to address the most pressing of global issues.

In this way, Cochrane’s original mission and vision will continue to evolve, and deliver better health evidence and outcomes around the globe now and into the future...