Background: The Cochrane Information Management System (IMS) has provided technological infrastructure for The Cochrane Collaboration's since its inception. For the first decade, the IMS was mainly stand-alone software running on PCs, with authors sharing their files with each other and their editorial bases by email. The time has come to advance the IMS to a new level that makes it easier to do more.

There are more than 10,000 people participating in The Collaboration and there are Cochrane entities in all continents except Antarctica. Fifty Collaborative Review Groups (CRGs) and more than 5000 active Cochrane authors in more than 80 countries have together produced the more than 2000 full reviews and 1400 protocols that currently appear in The Cochrane Library, and they are working on thousands more. The increasing number of published full reviews clearly shows the growth of the last decade: from 36 at the start of 1995, through 500 in 1999, 1000 in 2001 and 2000 this April. At least 10,000 reviews are needed to cover the interventions that have been assessed in randomised trials. This creates large challenges for efficient communication and preparation, maintenance and publication of high quality reviews.

This presentation will describe how The Cochrane Collaboration is meeting some of the challenges by redeveloping its technological infrastructure - the new IMS.

Objectives: By allowing CRGs and Cochrane authors to share relevant material more easily over the Internet, and to act on the most accurate and up-to-date information available, the new IMS will support more efficient preparation, maintenance and publication of Cochrane reviews. The new IMS will: -Give you access to the information you need -Let you work from anywhere in the world -Remind you of your next task -Help you update the latest version of your review -Help validate your reviews -Generate various reports in suitable formats -And much more

Conclusions: If The Cochrane Collaboration is to survive - and continue to grow - thousands of new reviews are needed, and existing reviews need to be maintained and kept up-to-date. The new IMS will be a key component in this. It will couple the power of the Internet with the power of CRGs, other entities and the many people involved in the preparation, maintenance and publication of Cochrane reviews. Just as the Internet has made it easier for people making health care decisions to access the output of The Collaboration and for authors and CRGs to share their work by email, the new IMS will transform things further. It will still allow those people who wish to continue to work off-line to do so, but, most importantly, it will encourage and support people in sharing their work through a central system. We will all benefit from the integration and the efficiencies that this will bring.

Acknowledgements: The majority of the funding for the IMS is provided by the Copenhagen Hospital Corporation with the core funds of The Cochrane Collaboration being used to supplement this. There are many people involved in the development of the IMS, including the IMS development team (Peter Friis, Rasmus Moustgaard and Jacob Riis) and more than 40 people in the IMS Group and its advisory groups (http://www.cc-ims.net/IMSG).