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

在过去的两年里，根据世卫组织《烟草控制框架公约》中的建议，巴斯大学的烟草控制研究小组(TCRG)一直在开发和应用一个框架，以监测烟草行业及其盟友的活动及其对英国卫生政策的影响。2012年6月，TCRG推出了一个名为TobaccoTactics的创新在线资源。TobaccoTactics使用与维基百科相同的软件，及时提供有关烟草行业和与烟草行业合作的人的最新信息，有时是秘密提供的，并详细说明他们的游说战略和策略。TobaccoTactics最初收到的反响非常积极。该网站的点击量或点击量稳步增长。关于烟草战术的研究成果已在不同的媒体和政策环境中公布。这些包括主流媒体上的一些故事，学术期刊上的新闻文章，下议院的演示文稿和给报纸的信。总体而言，这些努力帮助向寻求破坏烟草控制政策的更广泛的受众揭示了行业策略和与行业有关联的个人和组织，而不是通过传统的学术成果。为此，我们得到了整个公共卫生界的赞扬，包括世卫组织和吸烟与健康行动(ASH)，他们都使用了烟草策略。对烟草策略的热烈欢迎鼓励我们进一步发展它，将其作为传播我们对烟草行业行为的广泛研究结果的工具。我们相信烟草战术可以达到四个主要目的。它将使我们能够系统地存储和检索我们的初步研究成果，使我们能够随着时间的推移，更深入地分析这些初步发现，以产生传统的学术论文。同时，TobaccoTactics将我们的初步调查结果公之于众，以便他们能够及时为重要的政策辩论做出贡献。一旦我们的学术论文发表，它就可以作为一种手段，向广大受众传播他们的研究成果。最后，TobaccoTactics使我们能够以一种对政策制定者有用的方式汇编研究结果，这是通过学术出版物不易实现的格式。例如，我们汇编了个人和组织的深入简介，这些个人和组织出现在公共卫生政策辩论中，确定他们的联系和资金来源。因此，TobaccoTactics代表了一种新的学术研究传播模式。它特别解决了我们研究中遇到的一个问题：政策过程比研究和出版过程更快。我们现在希望将TobaccoTactics作为一种创新的方式来传播关于烟草行业行为的当代研究，确保它成为那些寻求烟草行业信息的人的“首选”网站。我们希望增加用户数量，并确保与政策制定者高度相关的页面获得比目前更大的流量。为了实现这一目标，我们聘请了一名知识交流专家来制定详细的传播计划，该计划现已准备好付诸实施。与英国和海外的关键个人建立联盟是该计划的核心，与公共卫生政策中的各种利益攸关方联系以及使用Twitter、博客和时事通讯更新等社交媒体也是该计划的核心。随着英国政府关于香烟普通包装的公众咨询最近结束，加上欧盟目前正在修订其关键的烟草控制立法之一，未来两年可能会出现激烈的行业活动。这使得该项目非常及时。

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.