blog

More than words  – pace and action are critical when dealing with a pandemic, which is why the Health Research Board (HRB) have joined the global fight against COVID-19. It is helping to unlock the potential of Irish based researchers through a rapid response funding call in collaboration with national funding and innovation agencies.

Patricia Clarke, Programme Manager for Policy and EU funding, HRB, talks about the new Coronavirus collection the funding agency has created on their publishing platform, HRB Open Research, a partner platform with F1000. This provides a venue for rapid dissemination of the latest COVID-19 research, by HRB funded researchers and makes the information publicly available, so that the global research community can see what is being done and respond effectively.

This new collection aggregates and showcases all COVID-19 related research articles published on the HRB Open Research platform and provides full access to the underlying data and expert peer review, thus allowing others to reuse, build-upon, learn and further support the global efforts to tackle this pressing public health emergency.

Readers can stay up to date by using the tracking function which alerts readers to all new articles added to collection, as well as updates to peer review reports, author responses, public comments and the publication of any updated versions. 

The time for action

The collection will house research produced from Ireland’s Rapid Response Research and Innovation funding programme. This is a national, coordinated response involving the main Irish research and innovation agencies that will deliver significant and timely research to target key challenges we face in context of COVID-19. These funding calls are characterised by rapid evaluation processes, FAIR data sharing and open access publication.

Within this coordinated response the HRB, in partnership with the Irish Research Council (IRC), has awarded around 21 grants to fund research that will provide evidence for the national and global efforts to deal with the virus outbreak. The research priorities of this call are aligned with the WHO R&D Blueprint and informed by the Global Infectious Disease Collaboration for International Disease Preparedness (GloPID-R).

We hope researchers will see value in using this collection, ensuring that their research is shared as quickly as possible with the community, granting immediate access by others. This coordinated effort by HRB/IRC is complemented by the COVID-19 Rapid Review Initiative, where scholarly publishers are working together to maximize the efficiency of peer review, ensuring that key work related to COVID-19 is reviewed and published as quickly and openly as possible.

We are also exploring options of making this collection open to other funders under the national, coordinated response to ensure that all COVID-19 research in Ireland benefits from having a rapid publication venue.

The Collection

The Coronavirus Collection already has two articles published. “The researchers at Ageing Research Centre believe it is important that this study protocol is freely available quickly and not hidden behind a paywall,” says Dr Katie Robinson and Dr Aoife O’Neill, University of Limerick, who see the HRB Open Research platform as a way to reach all academics, scientists, policy makers, and the others, who are contributing their expertise to tackle this global pandemic.

Their Study Protocol (still awaiting peer review) which is published in the collection, was carried out with a team of researchers from the Ageing Research Centre (ARC) sets to challenge ageism and stereotypes of older adults by representing the diversity of community dwelling Irish older adult and family carers’ experiences and views. These will be collated and disseminated to policy makers and healthcare providers to shape public discourse on COVID-19. Robinson and O’Neill add: “Since this protocol was published, ARC researchers have been contacted by researchers from Sweden and the United Kingdom who are completing similar studies with plans to share emerging findings.” 

The second article is by Professor Eamon O Shea, National University of Ireland, Galway. He published his Open Letter on HRB Open Research because : “I wanted to engage directly with peer dementia researchers on the ongoing importance of including people with dementia and family carers in their research programmes. The research community in this area is relatively small and it is important to stimulate debate on their role and potential in generating more information on the human and social needs of people with dementia during the crisis.”

A view supported by Brenda Gannon, University Of Queensland, Australia, who has reviewed the open letter: “This letter is timely and well warranted, given the escalation of the COVID-19. ‘No-one will be left behind’ must not just be a statement; but must be followed up with meaning. This is particularly important for more vulnerable people in society, such as those with dementia.”

Rapidly share your research

The Coronavirus Collection welcomes all types of publications related to the pandemic, including but not limited to: applied research outputs, clinical trials, clinical case reports, epidemiological, economic, systems or sociological modelling, transmission dynamics, evidence on efficacy/feasibility of new, enhanced or re-purposed products relevant to COVID-19, collaboratively written policies, protocols, methods papers, data papers and any other information that needs to be shared rapidly.

We also recognise that as well as COVID-19 research being shared, there is the need for rapid, expert peer review to validate and improve the work. If you would like to openly contribute expert review to the research published in this collection, please consider joining the COVID-19 Rapid Review Initiative or contact us at info@hrbopenresearch.org.

We encourage our researchers to submit their COVID-19 research to this collection, and if you have any other ideas or requests on how HRB Open Research can help disseminate your work please get in touch with us; we are here to help.