BIREME Bulletin n° 47

On August 28, BIREME held an online Ad Hoc Session to welcome the new members of its Scientific Committee, which together with the Advisory Committee, make up the Center’s Governance Committees, as established in the Statute of its institutional framework. The specific objectives of the session were to welcome the new members of the Committee; report on the current state of implementation of the main recommendations of previous members; strengthen BIREME’s institutional framework with countries in the region; obtain recommendations for the visibility of your products and services; and support your financial sustainability.

BIREME/PAHO/WHO coordinated the 1^st Meeting of the e-BlueInfo Regional Steering Committee on August 26, 2020, which was attended by representatives of Brazil, El Salvador, Guatemala and Peru, as members of the Committee, and from Argentina, Colombia and Paraguay, invited observers for being in the process of adopting e-BlueInfo in their countries.

The most recent version of the Health Sciences Descriptors/Medical Subject Headings (DeCS/MeSH) was made available for consultation in June this year. The main novelties are the revision of the hierarchical branch of MeSH concepts related to infections (now better combined in subcategory C01 of category C of Diseases) and the beginning of the review of the hierarchical structure of the exclusive categories of DeCS.

Another successful event in the series of webinars to strengthen the Health Information Networks – BiblioSUS and VHL Brazil -, took place on August 27 and was attended by 90 participants. There were three presentations that highlighted different points of view and experiences on the theme: “The Network’s role as a disseminator and intermediary of health scientific knowledge“.

From March to July 2020, besides the coordination meetings of the LILACS network, technical notes and calls to the network for cooperation with publications on COVID-19, meetings and training took place in virtual mode on the network. 23 virtual sessions were held on editorial processes of LILACS journals (5); on indexing of documents according to the LILACS Methodology (5); and on VHL information sources (7) for the Latin American network and 6 for the Brazilian network.

Revista Argentina de Salud Pública is a publication of the Ministerio de Salud de la Nación and has just announced the launching of a special supplement on Covid-19, which aims to disseminate scientific evidence and quality research results, fighting infodemia. Moreover, during the announcement, the journal Editorial Committee communicated important improvements in editorial management to provide it with the necessary agility to respond to the Covid-19 pandemic.