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Article collections are a familiar feature in online journals – on Wellcome Open Research, they provide an opportunity for Wellcome-funded conferences, research groups and communities to collate their content and provide a dedicated home for related published material.

Collections on Wellcome Open Research are designed to serve the community in a way that works for them and there are many ways in which one can utilise this functionality:

1) Create a hub for emerging themes or articles relating to a specific topic

A common use for article collections is to put subject-specific material into one convenient place. Each article in a collection is individually citable and is also automatically integrated into the main body of the platform’s content.

Some examples of existing collections on Wellcome Open Research are, the World Bank in Global Public Health, which publishes articles based on two main questions. Firstly, it looks at the World Bank’s contribution to global health and how effective this has been. Secondly, it asks how the Bank’s increasing involvement as an economic institution has transformed how we develop policies to address health. Another collection, Predicting the cost of malaria elimination in the Asia-Pacific, publishes articles with the aim of developing an evidence-based case to invest in the elimination of malaria in this region.

2) Publish the outputs from conferences and workshops

Sometimes referred to elsewhere as supplements, proceedings or special issues, article collections can also be used to publish the outputs from an event. Articles from the event are published in a personalised and searchable landing page that links back to the event page.

The articles can be published to coincide with the event or just after as Wellcome Open Research’s rapid publishing model allows for the speedy publication of outputs.

The first group to use a collection to collate the outputs from a conference is the Global Forum on Bioethics in Research. This collection will host a series of articles outlining the discussions and outcomes based on the theme of “the ethics of data sharing and biobanking in health research” and is due to launch in the summer.

3) Evolving projects

When the nature of your task is constantly evolving – collections can be used to keep these projects up to date. If there is a small new update to a tool that doesn’t warrant a whole new article, authors can easily update their article which is neatly threaded to their previous work.

4) Your ideas

Hackathons, citizen science, patient and public involvement in research – these are examples of innovative projects that need a place for their outputs. Collections are owned in part by the community running them, and we will provide the collection owners with the support needed to promote, shape and grow a collection.

If you are a Wellcome-funded researcher and would like to discuss the idea of using a collection for your own research or event, then please do get in contact with us – we would love to hear from you!