The Royal Society: NGO against COVID-19 ^{Non-funding Support}

Entity: The Royal Society
Category: Non-Governmental
Programme Title: ""COVID-19 Rapid Review Initiative""
Link: https://oaspa.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/COVID-19-WORKING-GROUP_v2.0.pdf

Contact (1): sarah.greaves@hindawi.com
Contact (2): phil.hurst@royalsociety.org

1. Programme Title: New standards to speed up the review scientific process.

Summary: A group of publishers and scholarly communications organisations – initially comprising eLife, Hindawi, PeerJ, PLOS, Royal Society, F1000 Research, FAIRsharing, Outbreak Science, and PREreview – is working on initiatives and standards to speed up the review process while ensuring rigour and reproducibility remain paramount. The group has issued an open letter of intent and launched an initiative to ensure a rapid, efficient, yet responsible review of COVID-19 content.

The initiative is asking for volunteer reviewers with suitable expertise relevant to COVID-19, from all career stages and disciplines, to add their names to a 'rapid reviewer list'. By doing so, these reviewers will be committing to rapid reviewing times, and upfront agreement that their reviews and identity can be shared among participating publishers and journals if submissions get rerouted for any reason.

2. Project: Bugbank

Summary: The Royal Society is funding parallel work developing data analysis methods for phase 3 in the project 'Bugbank'. Bugbank is a project that aims to link infection data from Public Health England to improve the study of infection in the UK Biobank cohort. Infection is a major cause of poor health and early death around the world. We are all exposed to infectious microbes, but what is unclear is why some people succumb to infection when others do not? And why some infected people become seriously unwell, when others do not? The Bugbank project is developing infrastructure to help researchers address these questions.

Bugbank is a collaboration between the Oxford Big Data Institute, Public Health England (PHE) and UK Biobank (UKB). PHE is responsible for surveillance of infections and antimicrobial resistance in England. UKB is an ongoing study of common diseases in a cohort of 500,000 people aged over 40 when they were recruited in 2006-2010. UKB allows researchers to study the effects of lifestyle, environment and human genetics on disease.

The objective of Bugbank is to link infection data from PHE to improve the study of infection in the UKB cohort. We have developed a system to dynamically link daily reports of infections in the PHE Microbiology database with the UKB system. This linkage of systems enables the identification of infections that have occurred in UKB participants.

In addition to data linkage, we are piloting the feasibility of retrieving microbial cultures from UKB participants through clinical diagnostic labs for further microbiological and genetic analysis. This could be used to fulfil the long-term Bugbank objective of performing joint human-microbe studies to better understand the lifestyle, epidemiological and genetic risks for common infections in a large cohort over time.