Making health research results more accessible
The European Union (EU) supports research on health and health services through a series of Framework Programmes (FP). CORDIS, an interactive information platform, has been designed to facilitate access to EU-funded research through a publically available website. The EU-funded ‘Mapping health research in Europe’ (HR4E) project sought to bring together EU project results in an attempt to enable their accessibility. Health and health services-related projects were screened among thousands of European projects funded under the FP5 and FP6. These were categorised according to different themes and key findings were extracted. Following a questionnaire-based study, project researchers concluded that access and data management are of vital importance following completion of research projects. Additionally, the information on CORDIS did not represent the lengthy reports generated from EU projects and was considered insufficient for proper dissemination of research findings. The HR4E project felt there was a need to review the current system used for managing EU project results on the CORDIS platform. It was suggested that greater emphasis should be placed on research output and project achievements rather than the initial goals. The HR4E project findings pointed out the pitfalls of the currently available platform of EU research information. Improving this platform with new resources will enable access to EU-funded research. This will be beneficial at the national and regional levels, with significant impact on health decision making across Europe.
