Medical-evidence giant Cochrane battles funding cuts and closures "This month, more than 1,000 people will gather in London for a meeting of Cochrane, the group known for its gold-standard reviews of evidence in medicine. The conference marks the 30th anniversary of an organization that helped to spark a worldwide movement to base health care on research. But in the hallways, some attendees will be discussing whether and how the group can survive. In March, 19 of 52 groups that produce Cochrane’s systematic reviews closed after the UK National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) stopped funding them. And in July, Cochrane UK in Oxford — where the group was founded — revealed that it will close next March, after the NIHR ceased its support. The closures come amid a major reorganization that will change how Cochrane produces and publishes systematic reviews, instigated partly in anticipation of funding difficulties. Some researchers are concerned that Cochrane will not be able to maintain its output of reviews — which shape the clinical guidelines used by doctors worldwide — or meet the growing demand for more complex, timely evidence syntheses. “I don’t see a very clear or bright future for Cochrane,” says Gabriel Rada, a specialist in evidence-based health care at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, Santiago, who previously directed Cochrane Chile." https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02741-z
Well I won't be mourning their losses. They do a lot of harm with their low quality reviews of psych and alt therapies.
One can always hope this is the end of this rotten organization, and the beginning of the end for this failed paradigm. The big picture is that evidence-based medicine is just the old paradigm, a bunch of people deciding what's true based on their preferences. No more scientific, and sometimes far less so, than a legislative committee. Cochrane made this an even more gated system, since opposing opinions are effectively shut out. It's basically an aristocratic model. The only effective paradigm, the only way of knowing things and figuring out what is true, is the scientific method, and this is clearly not the scientific method. It's the old system codified into an even worse outcome, because it pretends that mere opinions are actually scientific, rather than "this bunch of dudes said so some time ago". Well, that bunch of dudes can get buried in the deepest pit on Earth, no one will shed a tear over it.
https://events.cochrane.org/colloquium-2023 https://events.cochrane.org/colloquium-2023/schedule some interesting workshops Details of the workshops can be found here (see link to pdf) Abstracts accepted for the 27th Cochrane Colloquium, London, UK. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 2023; (1 Suppl 1). https://doi.org/10.1002/14651858.CD202301 https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD202301/full
Time for the whole Cochrane edifice to close down as a failed experiment. It was never going to produce good science by letting any team who wanted to do the reviews, giving writing teams greater power than editors over withdrawal of reviews, and creating methodology for reviews that didn't allow research to be rejected from inclusion if the results were subjective outcome questionnaires in unblinded trials.
Posts moved from Independent advisory group for the full update of the Cochrane review on exercise therapy and ME/CFS (2020), led by Hilda Bastian I don't know how relevant this is, but it sure is interesting. Western Norway University announces that Cochrane Norway are moving to them from the Norwegian Institute of Public Health (who are responsible for the Larun et al review). The article from the University does not say anything about the reason behind this change. There are pictures of editor-in-chief Karla Soares-Weiser visiting the University. Høgskulen på Vestland skal lede Cochrane Norway google translation: Western Norway University will lead Cochrane Norway
Potentially due to the reduced funding the Norwegian Institute of Public Health is receiving from the government going forward?
Possibly. I don't know if there's much money involved in being a national Cochrane center, but yes I guess they have to downsize wherever they can these days.
HVL is an interesting choice, they are aiming to become a university so having a Cochrane centre seems like a good way to attract people with the right qualifications (one of the criteria to become a university is Norway has to do about if the employees are well enough qualified + many enough to support doctoral candidates).
Norway funding - Cochrane statement 2020 https://www.cochrane.org/about-us/our-funders-and-partners puts the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad)) in the £100k>£500k per annum band with no other Norwegian source mentioned. Perhaps Norad had a time limited funding for Cochrane Norway related to international public health (vaccine uptake ? Covid ?) and so there was a co-operative arrangement with NIPH ? If the Norad grant has expired and the project has closed maybe CN simply became homeless ?
I see Cochrane as slipping rapidly down the plughole. There have been lots of reasons but I wouldn't be surprised if this particular move indicated a specific lack of confidence of the Norwegian government in activities at the Health Institute.
So Cochrane Norway have to go to where there's money and University of Western Norway has offered it...in exchange for the "kudos" that Cochrane brings??!! They must be aware of the kerfuffle over the Exercise review...or maybe they aren't. Claire Glenton is the only person moving from NIPH to the new host.
I get the impression that the new place is more an institution wanting to be a university than an established one. So it looks bit like beggars can't be choosers for Cochrane Norway. Maybe the other NIPH people see it as too much of a step down to get involved. I wonder if Flottorp's vociferous support for Sharpe et al and co-authoring of wingeing papers reflected a realisation that her position was under threat.
I'm not sure what høyskoler are called in English, they are institutions of higher education, but are supposedly more practical rather than "academic". Though the difference between a bachelor at a høyskole and a university can be as little as the inclusion of ex.phil. at the universities. Anyway, many høyskoler in Norway have become or want to become universities. They are still established institutions.
It’s most likely due to budget cuts at FHI. They got added funds during the initial covid-years, and had a huge role at the time. This must have led them to inflate their organization, because the budget cuts are more like going back to about the amounts they used to get. This had led to letting people go, cutting the free access to science databases, and now not hosting Cochrane Norway anymore. It’s very interesting, what will happen now? The authors will still own the review, but will they be under the same guardian wings of cochrane norways leader as they’ve been used to…? Will this do something with the influence some people have gotten used to have, behind closed doors? The new home is HVL, and this is an probably a good choice as they have a uniqe master program for ‘knowledge based practices’, and have a focus on science/knowledge summaries in their profile. It’s a situation of you scratch my back, i’ll scratch yours still, as it’s surely a big deal to HVL and makes their position stronger. And Cochrane needs someone willing to fund.
