Blog

How can we track new variants of COVID-19 as they emerge? In this blog, Áine O’Toole and Verity Hill (University of Edinburgh) introduce ‘grinch’ – a new Software Tool which tracks the international spread of new variants of the virus through automated daily reports.

In this blog post, Sheridan Willis, Senior Associate Publisher at F1000, presents the top five most cited articles and shares article highlights from the Covid-19 Collection.

Alice Norton, Head of COVID CIRCLE, explains the benefits of using a Living Mapping Review to identify funding gaps and avoid duplication of research efforts during the pandemic.

In this blog post, Ahmed Samir Abdelhafiz, Cairo University, tells us about his work on developing ethical guidelines for the Egyptian human biobanking. His recommendations could strengthen mutual trust between the public and researchers and improve management and sharing of the valuable biological resources and related data.

We are thrilled that Wellcome Open Research has published 1000 articles! In celebration of this milestone, we present the 3 most downloaded articles, which are all hosted in the Covid-19 Collection.

In this conversation with Dan Lewer, from University College London, we discuss the first study to identify a cohort of primary care patients in England with a history of illicit opioid use that he and his co-authors carried out. Find out more about the unique insights this offers into primary healthcare, and how it can help improve access and quality of healthcare for this population.

To engage the public in health research, researchers are using drama to reduce barriers and increase trust to raise awareness about health issues and health policy. To discuss the value of community and public engagement in health research, we invited Gladys Sanga, KEMRI-Wellcome Trust Research Programme, Kenya, to learn how health research can be made appealing and accessible to the public.

Professor Mark Blaxter, Tree of Life Programme Lead at Wellcome Sanger Institute introduces the new Tree of life Gateway on Wellcome Open Research that launched today.

Today, the Tree of Life programme at the Wellcome Sanger Institute has launched its own open access publishing hub to home the genome sequences of the thousands of animals, plants, fungi and micro-organisms, such as algae, that live on and around Britain and Ireland.

For Mental Health Awareness Week, we interviewed Denford Gudyanga, University of Zimbabwe, to find out more about the Z factor and a pilot community engagement project that he and his team are working on, as set out in their Study Protocol published on Welcome Open Research. They are investigating whether drama is itself a useful tool to engage communities about mental health, and to learn whether drama can help raise awareness and educate communities about mental health to reduce stigma in Zimbabwe.