Read this before it’s out of date: Zika Open Access Project in @NatureIndex

Jon Brock reports that our first systematic review examining evidence for the causal link between Zika virus and neurological complications of microcephaly and Guillain-Barré syndrome was out of date by the time it was published. ‘The team set to work again and just over a year later published a second Zika systematic review. Knowing that this would also be immediately obsolete, they announced that they were transitioning to a «living systematic review».’

Our project on the Zika virus causality evidence is an open access, open science project. The living systematic review follows the definition developed by Prof. Julian Elliott of the Transforming Evidence project in Australia as «high quality, up-to-date online summaries of health research, updated as new research becomes available, and enabled by improved production efficiency and adherence to the norms of scholarly communication.» Prof. Elliott, an ISPM collaborator and former seminar speaker, is also featured in the article.