TobaccoTactics.org: a dynamic model of knowledge exchange to help academic research inform public health policy

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For the past two years, in line with recommendations in WHO's Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, the Tobacco Control Research Group (TCRG) at the University of Bath has been developing and applying a framework for monitoring the activities of the tobacco industry and its allies and their influence on UK health policy. In June 2012, the TCRG launched an innovative on line resource called TobaccoTactics. Using the same software as Wikipedia, TobaccoTactics provides timely up-to-date information on the tobacco industry and those working with it, sometimes covertly, and details their lobbying strategies and tactics. The initial reception TobaccoTactics has received has been very positive. The number or hits the website has received has grown steadily. The research findings outlined on TobaccoTactics have been presented in different media and policy environments. These include a number of stories in the mainstream press, news articles in academic journals, presentations in the House of Commons and letters to newspapers. Collectively these efforts have, inter alinea, helped to reveal industry tactics and industry affiliated individuals and organisations seeking to undermine tobacco control policy to a wider audience than would have been reached via traditional academic outputs. For this, we have received praise across the public health community, including from WHO and Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) who have both used TobaccoTactics.The enthusiastic reception for TobaccoTactics has encouraged us to develop it further as a tool for disseminating findings from our extensive research on tobacco industry conduct. We believe TobaccoTactics can serve four main purposes. It will enable us to systematically store and retrieve our preliminary research findings in a way which enables us, over time, to analyse these initial findings in more depth to produce traditional academic papers. Simultaneously TobaccoTactics makes our preliminary findings publicly available so that they can contribute to important policy debates in a timely manner. Once our academic papers are published, it can serve as a means of disseminating their findings to a large audience. Finally, TobaccoTactics enables us to compile research findings in a way that is useful to policy-makers in a format which is not easily achieved via academic publications. For example, we compile in-depth profiles on individuals and organisations that feature in public health policy debates, identifying their links and funding sources. As such, TobaccoTactics represents a new model of academic research dissemination. It specifically addresses a problem encountered in our research: that the policy process moves more quickly than the research and publication process. We now want to develop TobaccoTactics as an innovative way to disseminate contemporary research on tobacco industry conduct, ensuring it becomes the "go-to" website for those seeking information on the tobacco industry. We want to increase the number of users and ensure that the pages with high relevance to policy makers receive greater traffic than they do at present. To achieve this end, we engaged a knowledge exchange expert to develop a detailed dissemination plan which is now ready to be operationalised. Building alliances with key individuals both in the UK and abroad is at the core of this plan, as is liaising with a large variety of stakeholders in public health policy, as well as using social media such as Twitter, blogging and newsletter updates. With the UK Government's public consultation on plain packaging of cigarettes having recently closed and with the EU currently revising one of its key pieces of tobacco control legislation, the next two years are likely to see intense industry activity. This makes the project extremely timely.