BIREME Bulletin n° 52

BIREME, as a specialized center of the Pan American Health Organization/World Health Organization, closed out 2020 with multiple important successes and challenges, which were continuously supported by its network of collaborating institutions and a team that works seriously, committedly, and that always transforms obstacles into opportunities. The BIREME management team made their work plans for the development and institutional strengthening of BIREME, which they shared in the early days of the new year.

PAHO/WHO operates in the countries of the Region through technical cooperation programs and projects that formalize and operationalize the dissemination of information, the sharing of experiences, and guarantee the transparency and control of resource management and accountability among all those involved. Through Cooperation Terms (CT) with the Organization’s Country Offices, BIREME develops and improves products and services to improve the quality of production, access, and publication of information and scientific and technical health evidence for all countries in the Latin American and the Caribbean Region. Learn more about the CTs with PAHO/WHO in Brazil.

El Salvador, one of the countries that has been a member of the BIREME Advisory Committee (2018-2020), maintains close technical cooperation ties with BIREME, which made possible the development of various products and services in health information, like the country’s Virtual Health Library and the e-BlueInfo application, as well as strengthen the network of Cooperating Centers that contribute content to the LILACS database.

BIREME maintains a long-standing technical cooperation relationship with the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz), which has enabled the development of numerous events, products, and projects in information and knowledge management. This partnership is present in the daily operations of the institutions, in activities of technological and methodological support provided by BIREME for the collection of instances of the Virtual Health Library managed by the Foundation. In 2020, BIREME and Fiocruz agreed on a project proposal in the area of information and scientific evidence in health and open science.

The process of evaluation and selection of Brazil’s journals for the LILACS database is carried out annually, an activity in the context of TC93 with the Ministry of Health, and relies on the performance of an ad-hoc Evaluation Committee that constitutes the LILACS Committee since 2009 and that counts on eight specialists from areas that integrate the health sciences. This committee met last December 18^th, at the XXI Meeting of the LILACS Brazil Journal Evaluation and Selection Committee, to carry out the last stage of the journal selection process for the LILACS database, which started in August 2020

BIREME’s new institutional website in the Pan American Health Organization/World Health Organization (PAHO/WHO) system was inaugurated in October 2020, at the same web address. The migration of the platform to a new online content management system – Drupal – was determined by the PAHO/WHO ITS Department for a number of technical and economic reasons. The resulting interfaces in Spanish, Portuguese and English are much more secure, dynamic, and flexible, and allow one to produce visually more attractive and accessible resources, in addition to improving the search engines.