How an international research funder’s forum developed guiding principles to ensure value and reduce waste in research [version 2; peer review: 2 approved, 1 approved with reservations]

Background: When health-related research funding agencies choose to fund research, they balance a number of competing issues: costs, stakeholder views and potential benefits. The REWARD Alliance, and the related Lancet-REWARD Campaign, question whether those decisions are yielding all the value they could. Methods: A group of health-related research funding agencies, organisations that represent health-related research funding agencies and those that inform and set health-related-research funding policy from around the world have come together since 2016 to share, learn, collaborate and influence emerging practice. This group meets under the name of the Ensuring Value in Research Funders’ Forum (EViR Funders’ Forum). The EViR Funders’ Forum worked together to develop a set of ten Guiding Principles, that if funders adhered to would reduce research waste and ensure value in research. Results: The EViR Funders’ Forum has previously agreed and published a Consensus Statement. The Forum has agreed on a set of ten Guiding Principles to help health-research funders to maximise the value of research by ensuring that: research priorities are justifiable; the design, conduct and analysis of research minimise bias; regulation and management are proportionate to risks; methods and findings are accessible in full; and findings are appropriately and effectively disseminated and used. Conclusions: When setting research funding policy, we must balance multiple stakeholders’ needs and expectations. When funders do this well, they maximise the probability of benefits to society from the research they support - when funders do this badly, they passively allow or actively contribute to research waste. These challenges must be resolved by funders either working together or in conjunction with other actors in the research ecosystem

Trial Forge Guidance 1 : what is a Study Within A Trial (SWAT)?

Randomised trials are a central component of all evidence-informed health care systems and the evidence coming from them helps to support health care users, health professionals and others to make more informed decisions about treatment. The evidence available to trialists to support decisions on design, conduct and reporting of randomised trials is, however, sparse. Trial Forge is an initiative that aims to increase the evidence base for trial decision-making and in doing so, to improve trial efficiency.One way to fill gaps in evidence is to run Studies Within A Trial, or SWATs. This guidance document provides a brief definition of SWATs, an explanation of why they are important and some practical 'top tips' that come from existing experience of doing SWATs. We hope the guidance will be useful to trialists, methodologists, funders, approvals agencies and others in making clear what a SWAT is, as well as what is involved in doing one

Letter to the editor - round table unites to tackle culture change in an effort to improve animal research reporting

A round table discussion was held during the LAVA-ESLAV-ECLAM conference on Reproducibility of Animal Studies on the 25th of September 2017 in Edinburgh. The aim of the round table was to discuss how to enhance the rate at which the quality of reporting animal research can be improved. This signed statement acknowledges the efforts that participant organizations have made towards improving the reporting of animal studies and confirms an ongoing commitment to drive further improvements, calling upon both academics and laboratory animal veterinarians to help make this cultural change

Trial Forge Guidance 2: how to decide if a further Study Within A Trial (SWAT) is needed

The evidence base available to trialists to support trial process decisions—e.g. how best to recruit and retain participants, how to collect data or how to share the results with participants—is thin. One way to fill gaps in evidence is to run Studies Within A Trial, or SWATs. These are self-contained research studies embedded within a host trial that aim to evaluate or explore alternative ways of delivering or organising a particular trial process. SWATs are increasingly being supported by funders and considered by trialists, especially in the UK and Ireland. At some point, increasing SWAT evidence will lead funders and trialists to ask: given the current body of evidence for a SWAT, do we need a further evaluation in another host trial? A framework for answering such a question is needed to avoid SWATs themselves contributing to research waste. This paper presents criteria on when enough evidence is available for SWATs that use randomised allocation to compare different interventions

Dynamic flat-fielding of BATSE data and the BATSE all sky survey

This thesis describes developments made by Matthew Westmore that will further the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory’s (CGRO) contribution to high energy astrophysics with the production of the first all sky survey in the 25-1000 keV band.  The BATSE instrument served as CGRO’s all sky survey viewing the entire sky continuously for the 9 year CGRO mission.  Earth occultation techniques have been applied to the BATSE database since launch to study transient and steady sources.  The standard occultation techniques suffer from two main limitations;  the background problem and the interference problem.  The interaction of particles from the cosmic diffuse background, atmospheric albedo emission, and cosmic ray protons provide the dominant sources of noise.  The response of the BATSE detectors to these sources is further complicated by orbital modulation.  These slowly varying components to the BATSE background counting rates introduce systemic uncertainties and limit the sensitivity.  Since the BATSE detectors are uncollimated and the Earth’s limb is extended, the Earth occulation techniques suffer from the effects of interfering sources.  This again introduces systemic uncertainties and limits the sensitivity.  This thesis details work completed to address these two limitations so that the BATSE database may be fully exploited. The slowly varying background noise components from the detector counting rates have been removed wit the use of particle physics-based Monte-Carlo simulations.  Semi-empirical fitting to the data to determine the background model parameters is not adequate.  A fully physical computational model of the various sources of background has been developed over the last decade in Southampton and provides the desired level of accuracy.  The author has been involved in adapting this technique to remove the background levels from the raw detector counting rates before carrying out further analysis.  This process is known as dynamic flat-fielding.</p

Dynamic flat-fielding of BATSE data and the BATSE all-sky survey

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