Open systematic reviewing (OSR)

Systematic reviews (SRs) under the paradigm of evidence-based medicine (EBM) are written by a group of experts to critically review available research results in terms of their strengths and quality of evidence. Writing SRs is no easy task as the required reliable information is difficult to find, assemble, evaluate, synthesise (integrate) and updated by multiple authors/reviewers. The methods and tools of open systematic reviewing (OSR) will facilitate these difficult tasks.

OSR Vision - To enable numerous experts to co-author timely SRs.

We aim to develop informatics methods for OSR and web-based tools to enable experts to effectively and efficiently collect, assemble, reorganise, analyse, evaluate, and synthesise (integrate) the required information for writing and updating the SRs. Most of the standardised procedures for OSR will be automated and optimised by the developed informatics methods and tools. Hopefully, the experts just need to spend minimal time on their portable devices to refine the information organisation and to collaborate with their co-authors in writing and updating the SRs. OSR will deliver collaboratively authored and continually updated SRs.

OSR Project - Stepwise implementation

Knowledge management -- InfoLab as the reviewer's workbench
Experimentation and optimisation of intelligent search and collaboration protocols
Literature analysis and its report generation
Ontology-based information integration
Reviewer selection protocols

OSR People - Aktors, OKers, et al.

Siu-wai Leung and Dave Robertson initiated and run this project as an extension of OpenKnowledge (http://www.openk.org) project since 2006. Others will come from the pool of researchers doing AKT (http://www.aktors.org) and OpenKnowledge projects. Some medical researchers will also participate into this research and use the OSR tools.