Originally launched during CRICS10 in 2018, e-BlueInfo is an application available for Android and iOS that puts in the hands of health professionals reliable and up-to-date information selected by experts from Ministries of Health and educational and research institutions, as well as including PAHO/WHO guidelines and scientific evidence available in the VHL information sources.
The National Medical Sciences Information Center and the National Council of Scientific Health Societies held the VII National Workshop on Scientific Publication in Health Sciences, which aimed to discuss the implementation of models in favor of Open Science in Cuba. The event was attended by speakers from Latin American and Caribbean countries, as well as PAHO and BIREME, one of its Specialized Centers.
Expansion, strengthening, and training actions in Brazil and Latin America are on the agenda of the Reference Network – RefNet in 2021. The Network aims to promote cooperation between VHL librarians, universities, research centers, hospitals, and health organizations, through the development of search strategies that can be reused, shared, and adapted to the health context, and that have the VHL Search Strategy Repository as an information source.
To mark World Cancer Day 2021, the Cancer Prevention and Control VHL – the result of a technical cooperation project between PAHO Brazil through BIREME and INCA – provides researchers, health professionals, and society with a series of innovative products and services that seek to disseminate relevant information and strengthen the creation of networks for information management in the area of cancer prevention and control.
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.
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 18th, 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.
The 2nd Term of Adjustment to the Term of Cooperation 93 (TA2/TC93) between the Ministry of Health of Brazil and PAHO aims at developing actions linked to the development and improvement of BIREME, in the context of information and knowledge management in the 2030 Agenda and Universal Health. TA2/TC93 was formalized on November 20, 2020.