Progressing mental health research – the GALENOS project on Wellcome Open Research
| 28 June, 2024 | Jack Nash |
Mental health conditions affect millions globally each year and cause significant social and economic impacts. Wellcome Open Research wants to help define a new era of mental health science that will speed progress by combining strengths from different areas of research.
To achieve this, Wellcome Open Research and the Global Alliance for Living Evidence on aNxiety, depresSion, and pSychosis (GALENOS) project have developed a new living evidence resource hub for global mental health research. Read more about the GALENOS project, the value of Living Systematic Reviews (LSRs) in mental health research, and the partnership between Wellcome Open Research and the GALENOS project, in our blog below.
The goals of the GALENOS project
Mental health is a rapidly evolving field, with new research published every day, all over the world. This presents a huge challenge to researchers, funders, and other stakeholders in mental health science to keep track of the latest literature and findings and use them in a meaningful way.
To help overcome this challenge, the GALENOS project, funded by Wellcome, has been established to create a continuously updated, comprehensive, and trustworthy catalogue of scientific literature in anxiety, depression, and psychosis research.
The three-year project was formally launched on 8 March 2023 and comprises an international collaboration led by Professor Andrea Cipriani from Oxford University, with the objective to produce 24 Living Systematic Reviews over the next three years.
What are Living Systematic Reviews?
Systematic reviews are a valuable research format that summarise and analyse all available evidence related to a particular research question or topic. They provide key resources for researchers looking to understand the current information in their area of expertise.
However, traditional systematic reviews can rapidly become outdated, presenting a static snapshot of evidence at the time the review was conducted, which is only amplified by the long lead times in traditional publishing before the review is finally published. This is a major challenge in fields where new scientific literature is being published every day, resulting in a substantial amount of new evidence being omitted from each systematic review.
To overcome this challenge, Wellcome Open Research and GALENOS have collaborated to adopt Living Systematic Reviews, to address the issue and to help bridge the evidence gap in these ever-changing fields.
Living systematic reviews are defined as “a systematic review that is continually updated, incorporating new evidence as it becomes available”. Based on systematic reviews, a pre-existing article type on Wellcome Open Research, LSRs provide a versioned record of research that will help to meet the goals of the GALENOS gateway.
“F1000 are delighted to be supporting the GALENOS project. Publishing these living systematic reviews on Wellcome Open Research means that they will benefit from the visibility of open access publication whilst allowing academics, clinicians and those with lived experience to thoroughly assess the transparent reporting of methods, sharing of data and open, post-publication peer review comments.
This approach should enhance the trust in the evidence that GALENOS produces. The versioning system at the heart of the F1000 publishing model is ideal for living systematic reviews and will allow the outputs of GALENOS to be a truly living resource.”
James Cleaver, Head of Publishing, F1000
GALENOS’ partnership with Wellcome Open Research
Wellcome Open Research’s open publishing model aligns closely with the primary goal of the GALENOS project – to make the latest research easily accessible to researchers without barriers. The openness of research published in the GALENOS gateway ensures the research is available to all, including policymakers, practitioners, and the public, accelerating the pace of research discovery to solve societal challenges in real-time.
Alongside open publication of the article itself, the platform also advocates a rigorous Open Data Policy, therefore other researchers can validate, replicate and reproduce the findings. Making data open also increases the transparency and accountability of research processes and results, fostering additional trust from the public on any new findings. To this end, GALENOS have created their own open data repository to meet their objectives of rigour, openness and transparency in the production of the LSRs.
To further support the living systematic review article type, which is vital to achieving the goals of the GALENOS gateway, Wellcome Open Research allows for article versioning. Traditionally, authors would be required to submit any updates to their work as a new article, whereas with Wellcome Open Research, the article can be updated. To retain trust in the work, new versions of the article are peer reviewed to ensure any new findings are verifiable and the underlying science is sound. All versions of articles published on the GALENOS gateway are given a unique DOI, so the different iterations can be linked together.
Discover more about the GALENOS project, as well as read the first published mental health Living Systematic Review on the GALENOS gateway.