The next 30 years: an exciting and ambitious future for Cochrane - a message from Editor in Chief Karla Soares-Weiser
As you may already know, Cochrane is making some significant changes which will lead to a number of improvements but will also bring about some changes to the way we work. Karla Soares-Weiser, Cochrane’s Editor in Chief, gives her view on some of the ambitious plans ahead for the future.
“As Cochrane celebrates our 30th anniversary, I am extremely grateful for your continued support and commitment. We have achieved a lot together and our incredible Cochrane community has kept us at the forefront of health publishing for all that time. You are the reason for our success.
The dedication and commitment of our community - the wealth of talent and passion, and the vision for a better world in which decisions are made based on the best available evidence - has resulted in us making an outstanding worldwide contribution. These values were vital to creating Cochrane’s reputation as the most trusted source of evidence in healthcare.
“The dedication of our community has resulted in us making an outstanding worldwide contribution”
We have seen many changes since Cochrane started life back in 1993, but never as intense as in the past few years. The pandemic has altered things for everyone, and we are also seeing changes in what our funders require from us and rapid changes in the publishing sector, with more commitments to make research output open access.
To maintain our hard-earned place as one of the world’s most trusted health evidence producers, Cochrane needs to change the way we do things. As well as looking back at how far we have come, we are now also looking ahead and have made some ambitious plans based on some specific objectives:
We will maintain the high quality of our output: We will continue to publish timely and high-quality systematic reviews with a commitment to transparency, integrity, independence and diversity. They will be accessible to everyone, everywhere to help people make informed health decisions. That remains our fundamental purpose.
We will strive to make Cochrane reviews accessible to everyone: We will produce new, different types of evidence syntheses in the various formats that our users and stakeholders have told us they need. We are also now looking at ways to make all Cochrane reviews Open Access by 2025.
We will strive to offer the best possible experience for our authors and editors: We are using AI with crowd support to improve our screening processes/evidence pipeline and working to improve our systems and processes to provide a quicker, clear and more streamlined experience for our authors. We are also focusing on making our reviews shorter and easier to produce and introducing interactive data tools to help bring the evidence to life.
We will maintain and strengthen our editorial independence: We are introducing a clearer, more consistent and transparent editorial process for all authors. All reviews will be done through this new process from the end of 2023.
I believe we have what it takes to adapt and succeed, but we need to act swiftly and we must work together to meet the challenges of the future.
“We need to act swiftly and we must work together to meet the challenges of the future”
Change is not always easy, but we have an excellent team in place and full support from Cochrane’s leadership. We want you to come with us on this exciting new journey and to support you as Cochrane adapts to the new way of doing things. "