Resources

Interdisciplinary Treatment Grants – deadline: 13th June 2024

Find out more about funding opportunities

If you are developing or delivering research in pancreatic cancer and would like to discuss ways we can support you, please get in touch with the Research team: research@pancreaticcancer.org.uk.

• Discovery and Translational Research Forum: The Forum brings the research community together to discuss the priority challenges faced by discovery and translational researchers in the UK and how we can work together to overcome them. Following on from the success of the 2023 Discovery and Translational Research Forum we are really pleased to confirm we will be running this again in 2024. This will be held on 20th and 21st May 2024 in Liverpool – details will be available on our website by the end of January 2024.

Pancreatic Cancer UK’s Research Involvement Network:

You can get in touch with us to access our Research Involvement Network made up of over 300 people affected by pancreatic cancer. This is a unique opportunity to work as equal partners with people who have lived experience of pancreatic cancer to help shape, improve and enrich your research.

Public and Patient Involvement Resources:

• Cancer Research UK has a very comprehensive Patient Involvement Toolkit which provides tips and advice to guide you through all stages of your involvement activity including planning, delivery and evaluation.
• The NIHR’s Involve website and learning for involvement page provides useful resources including ideas of how to involve members of the public and patients in research effectively and how to write lay summaries.
• Take a look at this practical guide to patient and public involvement in lab-based research.
• Listen to Cochrane’s training webinar on ‘Patient and public involvement in research: What, why and how?’
• The National Coordinating Centre for Public Engagement has put together a resource on Online Engagement: A guide to creating and running virtual meetings and events. This is a useful guide for anyone wanting to conduct online or virtual focus groups/workshops as part of their involvement activities.
• The NIHR has produced some updated guidance for researchers on payment for PPI

• Scientific writing short course – This course runs for 8 weeks (3 – 5 hours per week) and is led by Dr Kirsten Sainani, Stanford University. Topics covered include: principles of good writing, tricks for writing faster and with less anxiety, the format of a scientific manuscript, peer review, grant writing, ethical issues in scientific publication, and writing for general audiences (accessible to anyone free of charge).
• Pluralsight offer training on a range of topics including Foundation of Statistics and Interpreting data with R (The sight normally offers a 10 day free trial, however there is a charge once this is complete).
• Imaging Cytometry and Mass Cytometry Introduction training videos – These videos give you an introduction and brief overview of two techniques which are essential to the work of many researchers (accessible to anyone free of charge).
• Bioinformatics training videos – This series of 18 videos helps you to get started with learning about Bioinformatics (accessible to anyone free of charge).
• The Power of Data in Health and Social Care: Harness the power of data to improve health and social care services (free online course)
• Many institutions also offer online training sessions to their employees and students, please check their website or get in contact with the relevant team to see what is available to you.

• The Academy of Medical Sciences has recently developed a COVID-19 career support space with resources to help with looking after yourself and leading your team.
• NIHR Clinical Trials Toolkit – This resource provides you with practical advice in designing and conducting publicly funded clinical trials in the UK (accessible to anyone free of charge)
• The Health Research Authority have a number of online training modules focussing on topics such as HRA approval and research using human tissue (accessible to anyone free of charge who registers for an online account)
• Check if your Institution is a Vitae member and use your organisational email address to register for access to their online training modules. The modules focus on a variety of areas including career development, personal effectiveness, impact and engagement, and specific modules aimed at postgraduate researchers to support them during their doctorate. These supportive resources address the areas on Vitae’s Researcher Development Framework which describes the knowledge, behaviour and attributes of successful researchers.
• The Royal College of Radiologists offers a suite of online learning tools (please note that you need to be a member to access these)

Pancreatic Cancer UK are now members of EuropePMC and the AMRC open research platform. If you are funded by us, please see our new Open Access Policy to understand more about how you can make the outputs from your research accessible to the wider community. If you are unsure of how to use EuropePMC, you can watch a guide to using their system.

A webinar introducing AMRC open research and how to use the platform is also available here. 

Please note: For a time, AMRC waived article processing charges (APCs). However, from the 18^th October 2021 authors will, once again, be responsible for APCs.

You are also able to deposit your unpublished preprints on Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory’s free online archives bioRxiv and medRxiv. By posting preprints on these archives, you are able to make your findings immediately available to the scientific community and receive feedback on draft manuscripts before they are submitted to journals.

Please see a number of interesting blogs around open access publishing and data sharing below:

• Challenges and solutions to sharing health research data
•  Growing a culture of data sharing

Useful links:

• Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) – This set of recommendations was put together by a group of editors and publishers of scholarly journals to improve how outputs from scientific research are evaluated.
• Plan S – Plan S requires that, from 2021, scientific publications that result from research funded by public grants must be published in compliant Open Access journals or platforms.

Pancreatic Cancer UK Open Access Research Webinar:

In the webinar, we bring together a panel of experts from the different open research platforms to tell you more about what open research publishing is, how open research publication works and what the benefits are to this process. The panel discuss and compare the strengths and weaknesses and issues of open approaches and conventional journal-based publication.

You can watch the webinar on our YouTube account.