The Rapid Eczema Trials project has so far concentrated on patient and public involvement by having citizen science co-production groups to develop and design the trials, as well as members of the eczema community taking part in the trials themselves. However, a key part of the Rapid Eczema Trials approach is to ensure that we are open and share our methodology with other researchers, so that other research can follow our approach to quick and effective online trials.
We have tried to do this in 2 ways:
Our Information for Researchers page on the Rapid Eczema Trials website
A Figshare Repository for all our master documents
The Information for Researchers page on the Rapid website details how we decided what to research through our engagement activities and surveys of our eczema community. This helped us to prioritise topics that the community most wanted answering. It also helps to demonstrate to other researchers the extent to which Rapid Eczema Trials has worked with citizen scientists to shape the course of the research we do within the project.
Figshare is an online, open-access repository which allows researchers to publish parts of their research that traditionally wouldn’t be published. Rapid Eczema Trials is trying to ensure that our work is accessible to the research community as well as the public, so we have used the Figshare repository for all our master documents. This means they can be accessed by anyone wanting to use them. Figshare gives individual documents, such as protocols or questionnaires, a DOI (Digital Object Identifier) and a citation so they can be properly cited by researchers who use them. It also means we can track and understand how they are being used and adapted for other research.
So far, we have had over 2,700 item views and almost 1000 downloads.
Making our documents publicly available was always part of the Rapid plan, however this aspect was made even more significant after we were approached by several researchers interested in our methods and wanting to adapt what we were doing for their own research. By doing this and having a page on our website dedicated to Researchers, we are working towards another of Rapid’s aims, reducing research waste.
We are also keen to make sure people hear about our study results as quickly as possible and always share results with our eczema community as soon as they are known. This is unusual in research. It can often take up to a year for results to be published in academic journals.
For example, results of the Rapid Bathing Study were known by December 2024.However the academic article detailing the study results, wasn’t published until November 2025! Sharing the headline results with our eczema community before the full article was published meant that people were able to benefit quickly from the new knowledge that they helped to create.
We are pleased to say that the Rapid Eczema Trials’ Eczema Bathing Study has made a difference to patient care. Clinical advice on bathing has been updated on the Eczema Care Online (ECO) website as well as in the NICE Guidelines for Atopic Eczema in under 12s.
The Rapid Eczema Trials project is working hard to bridge the gap between research and patients by co-producing our trials and making sure patients are at the forefront of research that affects them. By making our methodologies and ways of working accessible to researchers, and highlighting the benefits of doing research this way, we are hopeful that co-production and citizen science will become the norm in clinical research.
Kate Clement
Information Specialist for the Rapid Eczema Trials Project