Australian patients and their health care practitioners will benefit
from ongoing access to The
Cochrane Library, an online resource published by John Wiley & Sons,
Inc., on behalf of The Cochrane Collaboration, that features over 5000
published systematic reviews of evidence for health care interventions;
ranging from surgical procedures and drugs to behavioural therapies and
preventive care. Cochrane reviews provide independent high-quality
evidence to aid in health care decision making.
The Australian Government, through the National Health and Medical
Research Council (NHMRC), has renewed funding for Australia’s national
licence to the Library. This means every Australian will continue to be
able to access reliable information about what works and what does not.
Australians are the highest per capita users of the Library in the
world. In 2011 Australians viewed 708,000 Cochrane abstracts online and
downloaded 501,642 full reviews. The three most popular reviews in
Australia were models of care for childbearing women, preventing falls
in older people living in the community, and zinc for the common cold.
The most popular review internationally looked at interventions for
preventing obesity in children.
NHMRC CEO Professor Warwick Anderson said that NHMRC is committed to a
health literate society where all Australians benefit from access to the
latest health and medical research.
“Access to high quality research evidence is being increased through
support of The Cochrane Library and NHMRC’s open access policy on the
research it funds. Ongoing promotion of research findings will ensure
translation into clinical practice.”
Ongoing support for The Cochrane Library is recognition of the vital
role systematic reviews play in informing policy and practice.
“Continuing to provide access to the Library will ensure Australia
remains a significant contributor to the Cochrane Collaboration, and the
leading user of the best available research evidence,” Professor
Anderson said.
The renewal of The Cochrane Library licence marks the 10th anniversary
of the announcement of the original licence at the Cochrane Colloquium
held in Melbourne in 2002.
About The Cochrane Library
The Cochrane Library contains high quality health care
information, including the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, from
the Cochrane Collaboration. Cochrane Systematic Reviews bring together
research on the effects of health care and are considered the gold
standard for determining the relative effectiveness of different
interventions. The Cochrane Collaboration (http://www.cochrane.org)
is a UK registered international charity and the world's leading
producer of systematic reviews. It has been demonstrated that Cochrane
Systematic Reviews are of comparable or better quality and are updated
more often than the reviews published in print journals (Wen J et al; The
reporting quality of meta-analyses improves: a random sampling study.
Journal of Clinical Epidemiology 2008; 61: 770-775).
In June 2012, the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews received
an impact factor of 5.715, from Thomson ISI, placing it in the top ten
general and internal medicine journals.
The Cochrane Library is published by Wiley on behalf of The
Cochrane Collaboration.
The Cochrane Library Podcasts: a collection of podcasts on a
selection of Cochrane Reviews by authors of reviews in this issue will
be available from www.cochrane.org/podcasts.
Accessing The Cochrane Library
The Cochrane Library can be accessed at www.thecochranelibrary.com.
Guest users may access abstracts and plain language summaries for all
reviews in the database, and members of the media may request full
access to the contents of the Library. For further information, see
contact details below. A number of countries, including countries in the
World Bank’s list of low- and low-middle income economies (countries
with a gross national income (GNI) per capita of less than $4700), have
national provisions by which some or all of their residents are able to
access The Cochrane Library for free. To find out more,
please visitwww.thecochranelibrary.com/FreeAccess.
