Minutes of
the Cochrane Collaboration Steering Group meeting,
22 and 25
October 2007
[These
minutes were approved by the Executive on 20 November 2007.]
|
Subject |
Item no. |
|
Academic
versus practical evidence-based health care |
19 |
|
Annual
General Meetings, agenda for |
22 |
|
Cash
flow forecast |
29.3 |
|
CENTRAL
interim measures and moving forward |
10; 21.1.2 |
|
Centre
issues |
21.2; 25 |
|
Chief
Executive Officer’s report |
4 |
|
Clinical
trials, Principles for protecting integrity in the conduct and reporting of |
36.1 |
|
Co-Chairs’
report |
3 |
|
Cochrane
Opportunities Fund |
5.1 |
|
Cochrane
Prioritisation Fund |
5.1 |
|
Cochrane
Review Group (CRG) issues |
21.1 |
|
Cochrane
reviews, changes to the Feedback system for |
11 |
|
Collaboration
review in 2008 |
16 |
|
Colloquia,
the next three |
4.3; 28.1; 28.2 |
|
Colloquium
2009 in |
28.2 |
|
Declarations
of interest |
2; 25 |
|
Developing
Countries Network |
21.2 |
|
Diagnostic
test accuracy reviews, register progress report; publication arrangements |
5.2; 33 |
|
Discretionary
Fund expenditure |
31 |
|
Editorial
board, development and establishment of an |
6; 21.1.1; 21.3.1 |
|
Entities,
deregistering Cochrane (MRG report) |
17.4 |
|
Entities,
establishing new Cochrane (MRG report) |
17.3 |
|
Entities,
flagging up problems within (MRG report) |
17.1 |
|
Environmental
sustainability |
32 |
|
Evidence-based
health care, academic versus practical |
19 |
|
Feedback
system, changes to the |
11 |
|
Field/Network
issues |
21.4 |
|
Financial
position and cash flow forecast |
29 |
|
Five-year
review of the Steering Group |
15 |
|
Guidelines
International Network (G.I.N.), invitation to join advisory board of |
14 |
|
Handbook
for Systematic Reviews of Interventions |
9 |
|
IMS
and workflow |
21.1.4 |
|
IMS,
status report on the development of the |
8 |
|
Industry
funding of trials, regular reporting of |
20 |
|
Information
Management System (IMS) , status report on the development of the |
8 |
|
Key
performance data |
24 |
|
Methods
Group issues |
21.3 |
|
Monitoring
and Registration Group (MRG) report |
17 |
|
Ombudsmen,
report from the |
26.1 |
|
Opportunities
Fund |
5.1 |
|
Plain
language summaries |
5.4 |
|
Principles
for protecting integrity in the conduct and reporting of clinical trials |
36.1 |
|
Prioritisation
Fund |
5.1 |
|
Profit
and Loss statements and cash flow forecast |
29.3 |
|
Project
Support Officer |
5.3 |
|
Problems
within entities, flagging up (MRG report) |
17.1 |
|
Publication
arrangements for Cochrane protocols & reviews of diagnostic test accuracy |
5.2; 33 |
|
Publishing
Cochrane products (Wiley-Blackwell report) |
12 |
|
Publishing
contract, extension of |
13 |
|
Register
of diagnostic test accuracy studies - progress report |
5.2 |
|
Report
and Financial Statements |
29.2 |
|
Review
of the Collaboration in 2008 |
16 |
|
Review
of the Steering Group, five-year, in 2006 |
15 |
|
RevMan
5 rollout and implementation strategy |
7 |
|
RevMan
5 training |
7.1 |
|
|
3; 37 |
|
Secretariat
staff issues |
4.4 |
|
|
28.2 |
|
Special
session in |
19 |
|
Spreadsheet
of outstanding action items |
34 |
|
STD
Group |
17.2 |
|
Steering
Group review in 2006 |
15 |
|
Steering
Group meetings, the next three |
27 |
|
Steering
Group members’ declarations of interest |
2 |
|
Strategic
Plan - Management Plan |
23 |
|
Succession
planning |
4.4; 18; 21.1.3 |
|
Trading
Company Directors’ report |
30 |
|
Training
in RevMan 5 and other Collaboration training needs |
7.1; 7.2 |
|
Treasurer’s
report |
29 |
|
|
19 |
|
Wiley-Blackwell
report (publishing Cochrane products) |
12 |
Minutes of the Cochrane Collaboration Steering
Group meeting,
22 and 25 October
2007
[These
minutes were approved by the Executive on 20 November 2007.]
Present: Steering Group members Godwin
Aja, Lorne Becker (Co-Chair), Lisa Bero, Jonathan Craig, Jon Deeks, Zbys
Fedorowicz, Ruth Foxlee, Donna Gillies (Treasurer), Adrian Grant (Co-Chair),
Sally Green, Joy Oliver, Rob Scholten, Peter Tugwell, Janet Wale, Liz Waters,
Liz Whamond, Katrina Williams, Narelle Willis and Hans van der Wouden.
Also present:
1.
Welcomes, apologies for
absence, and approval of the agenda
2.
Steering Group members’ declarations
of interest
There were no further declarations of interest in addition to those that had
been circulated with the agenda.
3.
Introduction from the
Co-Chairs
Adrian described some of the highlights of the past six months, particularly the
Prioritisation and Opportunities Funds, and the Co-ordinating Editors’
initiative to develop an editorial board (see
also item 6). He said that several people outside
4.
Chief Executive Officer’s
report:
4.1 The
Collaboration Secretariat: Nick thanked
4.2 Governance and structure: Nick
reported that the production rate of reviews had picked up since the Steering
Group had last met, and highlighted the fact that there had been an increase in
the Collaboration‘s income over the previous year. The work on establishing an
editorial board was now underway, thanks in particular to the hard work of Sophie
Hill; this board might take over some of the current role of the
4.3 Future Colloquia: Nick explained
that he was currently working with Steve McDonald, Co-Convenor of the
Colloquium Policy Advisory Group, to develop a Memorandum of Understanding
(MoU), with timelines and checkpoints, for future Colloquium hosts. He invited
suggestions for better management of some of the core functions of Colloquia. Sally
pointed out that the Collaboration had a good track record for Colloquia, and that
too many bureaucratic expectations in a MoU might put off potential Colloquium hosts:
it is the local organisers who bear the risk of hosting a Colloquium, and it
was agreed that the proposed MoU should be supportive rather than restrictive.
The document, ‘Standard operating procedures for Colloquia’, would form the
core of the MoU, and is potentially an extremely helpful resource for future
Colloquium hosts, although there could be an accessibility issue for some as it
is written in English.
4.4 Secretariat staff issues: Claire,
Jini and Nick left the meeting for discussion of extension of the CEO’s
contract and Secretariat staff succession planning. It was agreed to extend the
CEO’s contract by a further three years, from 1 April 2008. The Co-Chairs and
CEO would work together to ensure that the Collaboration could continue to make
the best use of the
Action: Adrian, Lorne
5. Progress
on projects:
5.1 Prioritisation and Opportunities
Funds: Nick reported that formal agreements were now in place for all but
one of the successful applications to these two Funds, and that some of the
deliverables had already been achieved.
5.2 Diagnostic test accuracy reviews - register
second progress report: The second progress report on the Register of
Reports of Diagnostic Test Accuracy, prepared by Ruth Mitchell on behalf of the
Cochrane Renal Group, was welcomed.
Jon explained that he had been in discussions with Wiley-Blackwell with regard
to their supporting this initiative. The negotiations had been somewhat protracted
but Wiley-Blackwell had recently suggested a willingness to fund a near-cost
level journal for this initiative, including other content. It was clarified
that the proposed journal would not include non-Cochrane reviews. There is
money up front to employ an executive editor half-time, who would also be
responsible for managing the production of this type of review. It was unlikely
that there would be royalties until year 3 and they were unlikely to be large. Concerns
were expressed that the work involved in launching the journal at this stage could
potentially detract from the implementation of diagnostic test reviews in the
Collaboration, and associated training activities.
Post
hoc note: The decision was made after the Steering Group meeting not to
launch a journal at this time.
5.3 Project
Support Officer: Nick spoke to the draft job description for the
Project Support and Communications Officer. He asked the Steering Group to
consider whether the Project Support Officer should be located in the
Secretariat or elsewhere. It was agreed that whilst the expectation should be
that the post be co-located with the CEO, if the most suitable candidate was
unable to relocate to
Action: Jon, Nick
5.4 Templates for Plain Language
Summaries (PLS): Lorne reported that he had discussed with the Norwegian Branch
of the Nordic Cochrane Centre the confusion that had arisen with regard to the
grant from the Opportunities Fund to develop templates for Plain Language
Summaries (PLS). Recent e-mails concerning this project had included modified Summary
of Findings tables with the suggestion that they could be incorporated into the
PLS; however, the Steering Group confirmed that no decision had been made to
incorporate tables into the PLS.
6.
Development and establishment of an editorial
board
[Deborah D and Deborah PG were present
for discussion of this item.]
Adrian recommended and it was agreed that the appointment of an editor-in-chief,
should this post be established, should be made by the Steering Group, in close
consultation with the Co-ordinating Editors. Previous Co-ordinating Editors
should also be able to be considered for this position. There was a strong
sense that the Steering Group is supportive of this proposal, with some uncertainty
as to its functions, and tension between cohesion of Co-ordinating Editors and implementation
of existing quality measures versus an editorial board function in respect of
whether or not reviews should be published in The Cochrane Library. There would have to be co-ordination with the
editorial board of diagnostic test accuracy reviews. Deborah Dixon welcomed the
prospect of an editorial board, as it would give Wiley-Blackwell a focus for
dealing with editorial issues, with the Steering Group continuing to be the
focus for discussions and decisions on strategic matters.
7. RevMan
5 rollout and implementation strategy
Monica described an amendment to the background document she had provided: the central
automatic conversion will happen in November 2008 rather than December 2008.
Monica explained that in principle the conversion of reviews to RevMan 5 could
all happen automatically, but that it would be a good opportunity to pick up on
some minor but important errors in the existing published protocols and
reviews. She reported that two conversion pilots had shown that it takes about
eight minutes to convert a review or a protocol to RevMan 5 manually, including
checking for potential existing problems with by-lines or missing author
affiliations according to a minimum conversion checklist. Correcting the
identified errors were not part of the pilot. More than sixty per cent of converted
reviews needed some editorial attention before they could be ‘re-marked’ for
publication. The Cochrane Library
currently contains more than 1700 protocols and 3300 reviews that need to be
converted. This would take about four to five months for one person to check
all reviews as part of a manual conversion, and cost about 12,000 GBP. The
central conversion would result in a report to each Cochrane Review Group (CRG)
with a list of reviews that needed editorial attention before ‘re-marking’ the
reviews for publication. The alternative would be to ask CRGs if they wished to
convert their own reviews, with some financial help from core Collaboration
funds. An explicit understanding should be built in that a CRG would be
expected to correct those errors in its reviews which had nothing to do with
conversion but which had been identified by the conversion process. There was
discussion as to whether a CRG could give permission to its satellite(s) to do
the conversion in return for funds.
It was agreed that it would be up to
CRGs to arrange how they did the conversion, but that funds would go to the
main CRG for them to disburse to satellites as they saw fit. This
was agreed in principle, in proportion to the number of reviews per CRG. The
IMS Support team would contact the Review Group Co-ordinators to discuss the
best strategy with them (local or central conversion), explaining what would be
involved. The IMS Support team would also collate the CRGs’ decisions. A maximum
of 60,000 GBP was set aside from core funds for the manual conversion work. It
was agreed that this decision should be announced at the Annual General Meeting
in two days’ time, to allay any anxieties about the amount of work involved in
converting reviews and protocols to RevMan 5.
Adrian and Lorne agreed to send the proposed letter to all Cochrane authors to give
them details of the RevMan 5 rollout plans, copying in the Author and CRG ‘at
large’ representatives, Donna, Hans and Zbys.
Action: Monica, Adrian, Lorne, Nick
7.1 & 7.2 Training in RevMan 5 and other Collaboration training needs: Donna spoke about the
issue of training needs for Cochrane authors, and the availability of a
self-paced tutorial on the
Action: Donna, Joy, Lisa, Rob, Sally
8. Status
report on the development of the IMS
As noted in the background paper, the IMS Team, in consultation with the EMAG,
is proceeding with the programming of a workflow system that would assist RGCs
in moving Cochrane reviews through the entire process from title registration
to publication of the completed (or updated) review. The system could also
provide data on the time spent in completing some of the critical steps in the
review production process, and could therefore be helpful to individual CRGs,
the
The IMSG had asked whether the Steering
Group intended to make the system mandatory for all CRGs once it became available.
The Steering Group agreed that once the workflow and tracking system had been
successfully piloted, it should be rolled out to all CRGs. Some members felt
that purchase of an existing system would be preferable to developing our own,
but it was pointed out that one year’s work had already gone into development
of this system alone, and several years into describing the requirements for
the system. A survey had previously been undertaken of commercial systems and
at that time it had been found that they did not meet the Collaboration’s
needs. Peter pointed out that he did not believe this to be the case: Elsevier,
for example, had a powerful electronic system, and he imagined Wiley-Blackwell
would have too. The Steering Group agreed that the workflow system should be used
uniformly across the Collaboration and be given a high priority by the IMS
Director. Monica was asked to provide a detailed plan as soon as feasible, for any
additional funding that might be necessary to allow for the implementation of a
tracking and workflow system. Monica said she would also try to schedule a
review of new commercial systems to see how these had been developed during the
last couple of years.
Monica asked the Steering Group to help identify
specific groups to be involved in future definitions of workflows.
Post hoc note: Peter reported that there had been unanimous
agreement at the Co-ordinating Editors’ meeting that the Collaboration was lagging
behind the publishing industry standard, and that resources must be found to
solve this as soon as possible. He recommended that Narelle be involved in these
discussions as it was such an important issue for Review Group Co-ordinators,
as should Cindy Farquhar, who is on the Co-ordinating Editors’ Executive.
Action: Jonathan, Peter, Monica, Narelle
Sally expressed appreciation for the enormous contribution of the IMS to the
work of the Collaboration. Monica reported that the IMS team was working to
full capacity, and requested a moratorium on new initiatives until after the
rollout of RevMan 5. She asked the Steering Group to consider increasing the
funding to the IMS. Nick recommended that a request for an increase to the IMS
budget should follow the model adopted (on the Steering Group’s instigation) by
the website development team, with funding to buy in programming assistance as
required, rather than employing additional staff, so that work could be
progressed concurrently rather than consecutively and therefore achieve the desired
deliverables more quickly. He offered to work with Monica on a paper for the next
Steering Group meeting in
Action: Monica, Nick
9. Handbook
for Systematic Reviews of Interventions
10. CENTRAL (interim
measures and moving
forward)
The Steering Group held a
preliminary discussion based on Ruth’s report on progress made on the interim
measures for CENTRAL, and the paper by Lorne, Nick and Ruth concerning the
future of CENTRAL. Ruth agreed to present the issues that the Steering Group had
raised, at the joint meeting of RGCs and TSCs the following day, and bring their
recommendations to the Steering Group for discussion on 25 October.
When the
Steering Group revisited this discussion on 25 October, it was affirmed that a Request for Proposals (RFP) was considered to
be a good basis for moving forward, and that this initiative is a priority for
the Steering Group, as CENTRAL is a core platform for the Collaboration. It was
suggested that the name ‘CENTRAL’ has a market presence which should be
retained (i.e. it should not be renamed). It was also suggested that the RFP
should include a list of requirements developed by the TSCs’ Working Group in
collaboration with the Steering Group; they should provide a clear view of the
requirements and not rely on those submitting an RFP to develop the core
components of the proposal. The requirements should include the recommendations
made by the CENTRAL Vision Group and agreed to by the Steering Group (although
it was recognised that the CVG did not cover all aspects of implementation),
and the RFP should address the implications for the TSCs’ work plans. The
process for selection (including membership of the selection panel) should be
clearly defined alongside the fully developed RFP. Jonathan and Nick agreed to
work with Ruth on the RFP.
11. Changes
to the ‘Feedback’ system for Cochrane reviews
Thanks were expressed to
Action: Lorne
12. Publishing
Cochrane products
[Deborah D and Deborah PG were
present for discussion of this item.]
Deborah
PG explained that there had been a sixteen per cent growth in revenue on the
previous year (compared to only a 3-4 per cent growth in Wiley-Blackwell’s
paper journals). Deborah D said that she expected a levelling off in the amount
of revenue. Deborah PG reported that there were now several additional options
in terms of new platforms for delivery of The
Cochrane Library. Deborah announced that as part of its ongoing commitment
to the dissemination of The Cochrane
Library in low- and middle-income countries, Wiley-Blackwell had switched
on all HINARI Band 1 countries (World Bank Figures,
2006, GNP below $1000 per capita) with one-click access free of charge
via Wiley InterScience (www.thecochranelibrary.com).
Access in these countries is based on IP recognition so all residents and
institutions with an Internet connection are now connected. Cochrane Library access via HINARI
remains free for registered users and will be free for the same countries via
INASP from January 2008. Deborah PG said that free access would soon be
publicised widely. Deborah then referred to several areas of future investment
and development, and outlined