Slides from Monica Duke’s presentation on the Patients Participate! Project entitled The Crowd-Sourced Lay Summary for Medical Research and delivered at the 6th Bloomsbury Conference held at University College London on 28-29 June 2012 are now available from the Conference Web site.
Presentations from the programme of distinguished speakers are also available from the Conference programme page.
The Patients Participate! Project has released two documents for open community review. The first is a guide to writing Lay Summaries, and forms part of the DCC series of How-To Guides, pitched at an intermediate level, offering practical advice. The second draft released for comment is a Briefing Paper on Citizen Science, also being released as part of the DCC Briefing Papers series. Both documents can be reviewed using the A.nnotate Web site which supports interactive commenting. The papers can be navigated through the page index which appears after hovering with the mouse underneath the pdf link at the top left of the A.nnotate page.
An item entitled Lay summaries could help public understand health research on the Patients Participate! Project appeared recently in the ‘Industry Trends’ section of the online publication Research Information. The publication reports that the lay summaries produced alongside every health-related research article would bring about greater understanding among the general public, as indicated in the findings of the project. Liz Lyon, Director of UKOLN which works with the British Library and the Association of Medical Research Charities on the project, commented to Research Information on the value of the Patients Participate! Guide to researchers in making their output more approachable to patients and public alike.
Research Information is also a bi-monthly printed full-colour publication produced by Europa Science Ltd, a UK-based company which also publishes four other scientific and technical titles.
The Patients Participate! Project, led by UKOLN in collaboration with the British Library and the Association of Medical Research Charities is holding a workshop on bridging the gap between information access and understanding in health research on Friday 17 June 2011 (10.30 – 16.30) at the British Library Conference Centre, London. There are still some places remaining and full details on the workshop programme, venue, booking, etc., are available from the UKOLN Web site.
Information on an upcoming Patients Participate! Project workshop on bridging the gap between information access and understanding in health research, to take place on 17 June 2011 at the British Library, is available in the latest UKOLN News feature.