We are delighted to announce that the work of Cochrane Crowd, Cochrane’s new citizen science platform, is going open access.

Cochrane Crowd, launched in May 2016, is a global community made up of volunteers who are helping to identify the research needed to support informed decision-making about healthcare treatments.

Cochrane Crowd has already identified thousands of reports of randomized controlled trials eligible for Cochrane’s Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL), helping Cochrane Review authors around the world to find the evidence they need for their reviews.

As part of Cochrane’s commitment to improving the knowledge base and being transparent about the data going into systematic reviews, the plan now is to make the crowd’s data about trial identification available and accessible to everyone. The open access data will be stored in a data repository, accessible via Cochrane Crowd and regularly updated.

We hope to implement this new and exciting phase of Cochrane Crowd by August 2016.

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.