Virginia Barbour's blog

Last week the World Association of Medical Editors announced the new Declaration of Helsinki. This document, which was first drawn up in 1964, is essential reading for everyone doing research on human participants.

Last week saw the EQUATOR network launch meeting at the Royal Society of Medicine and its first inaugural lecture, given by Iain Chalmers. EQUATOR is the first systematic attempt to bring together all the myriad guidelines that are available for reporting studies. If you’ve been puzzled by CONSORT, STARD, MOOSE, etc then this is the place for you.

Though MSF is of course primarily a humanitarian organisation, it conducts a large amount of research, with the ultimate aim of improving the services they offer to the populations they work with.

At PLoS we have a number of ways of finding out about our readership but none are perfect: the fact that we are open access and so place no barriers on access to the content sadly, but necessarily, limits how much we can easily find out about our readers.

Médecins Sans Frontières today launches a new website MSF Field Research that will be a tremendous resource for everyone interested in the research that they do as part of their humanitarian work with vulnerable populations.