Panoply of Policy and Procedure Changes
Our meetings are always filled with science and discovery. But they also include important decisions and planning for the future. Last week’s meeting in Chicago was no exception.
Today I want to tell you about discussions that took place on the last day of the meeting, when SWOG’s board of governors convened over breakfast. The BOG agenda was packed – including a slew of policy and procedure changes aimed at modernizing the group’s work, and making it more rigorous and transparent.
Here are some of the highlights:
- Reviewed SWOG’s first social media policy, which encourages its use among members and staff, and provides guidelines so members can use social channels in ways that protect their own privacy and confidentiality, as well as that of their patients. Fitting with our guiding principles, we want members to engage online in ways that are respectful and transparent.
- Beefed up the job description for research committee chairs, including responsibility for better coaching and evaluating the committee’s patient advocate(s). The job description also now includes embracing diversity in committee membership, and pursuing appropriate disparities research.
- Clarified the mechanism underlying the mid-term performance review for the group chair.
- Provided consistent representation on the board of governors to members of the SWOG Latin America Initiative, independent of accrual.
- Expanded authorship guidelines, including means of dealing with secondary endpoints, translational medicine, and dataset analyses papers; addressing our formula for accrual authorship; inclusion of disease/discipline committee vice chair, organ site, or subcommittee co-chairs in authorship; defined procedure for crediting editorials authored by SWOG investigators; and addressed dual or co-primary/lead or dual or co-senior authors.
- Clarified terminology underlying the data submission rules for all SWOG sites.
- Expanded the press release and media relations policy to explain how news value is determined, in an effort to ensure consistency and accountability in reporting group news. The policy also defines the group chair and communications manager as official spokespeople for SWOG.
You can see the policy and procedure changes here. They will also be posted soon on the new SWOG.org.
We’re not done yet. Board of governor’s members discussed revising our very first policy – our mission statement. There was a spirited discussion of how we should frame our work going forward. A handful of possible mission statements will go out to the board for an email vote by year’s end. So, stay tuned. And thanks to all who made it to the fall meeting. It was quite memorable.
SWOG's new website launches in November, and you'll need to be sure you have proper credentials to log-in. Check for details.
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