Project submission

The STCS welcomes all types of research projects related to transplantation. Projects are more likely to be approved, if they address important research questions in the area of organ transplantation and/or strengthen the collaborative research within the STCS, national or international networks. The goal of the STCS is to foster studies involving more than one center.

Generally, scientists have to submit a proposal of their research project to the STCS to gain access to the STCS database. The proposal will undergo a review process by the Scientific Committee (SC) of the STCS.

As an exception, data generated by the individual centers and transplant programs within the STCS is available for internal use by the respective transplant programs.

Any STCS research project shall comply with ethical principles and legislation. Ethical committee procedures according to HFG (Human Research Act) and HFV (Human Research Ordinance) have to be followed. Upon acceptance by the Scientific Committee, each STCS project must be submitted to the lead ethics committee and requires approval before the start of the project.

Depending on the scope of the planned project, different types of application procedures apply.

Regular proposals follow the standard procedure.

The application procedure for regular proposals consists of two steps:

1. Letter of Intent (LOI)
2. Full Proposal (FUP)

The simplified application procedure applies for international collaborations, nested projects planned as BSc, MSc or MD theses, monocentric studies, amendments of existing projects or single patient data and sample requests.

All details and further information can be found in the STCS How-to-Manual, see below.

The STCS SC Guidelines and How-to-Manual

A concise overview about the types of projects, their requirements, submission and evaluation process can be found here: STCS How-to Manual.

A full list and detailed information about the project submission, evaluation and publishing procedures are published in the STCS Scientific Committe Guidelines.

STCS Universe - Project Management Platform

The STCS Universe is the association's own scientific project management platform. Investigators are able to submit their letter of intents and full proposals, manage their projects during the evaluation and review process, receive their decision online and complete their STCS project by uploading their scientific output to the platform.

Project investigators are able to communicate with the STCS SC office directly via messaging and they have access to all project documents even after completion of their project. It allows the investigator to keep a record or ongoing and past STCS projects.

Investigators are asked to provide a list of scientific output related to individual projects regularly by submitting information about publications, conference presentation, abstracts or other forms of outreach in the STCS Universe.

How to access?

Access to the STCS Universe is managed by the STCS administrators and granted after account registration.

In case the investigator already has an STCS account for other STCS services, new access to the platform can be requested in your personal profile management on Digicore.

Follow here to open the scientific project management platform: STCS Universe

Not yet an STCS user?

Please register via our login page here.

Letter of intent

A letter of intent is required before submission of a full proposal and informs the SC about a plan for a scientific project.

The letter of intent must include list of current and potential authors including their affiliations and a short general description of the research question with 1-5 key references.

Respecting the official deadlines, the Letter of Intent has to be submitted to the Scientific Committee in the STCS Universe.

The letter of intent will be distributed to all members of the SC and the Steering Committee (STCS) of the STCS. Afterwards the STCS SC office will provide a statement to the investigator, which includes the comments by the SC and STCS members, and whether the project can be submitted as a full proposal.

Invitation to submit a full proposal does not imply acceptance of the full proposal.

Full proposal

The detailed description of the project should concisely present all the information necessary to permit a complete assessment of the proposal.

The full proposals can be submitted after the STCS SC office requests it (for regular projects and monocentric studies) and the evaluation of the Letter of Intent is completed. Proposals for international projects and theses can be submitted without SC office request, since no letter of intent is necessary for these type of projects.

The proposal has to be submitted within the Scientific Committee deadlines and only projects submitted in the STCS Universe are considered for evaluation.

Available STCS data

The STCS provides metadata of the collected and available dataset via a web-based codebook. It consists of a curated catalogue of collected variables and corresponding value sets, definitions, ranges and versions.

Follow here to open the STCS codebook.

Access to the STCS Codebook is managed by the STCS administrators and granted after account registration. In case you already have an STCS account for other STCS services, new access to the codebook can be requested in your personal profile management on Digicore.

Access to STCS data and samples

STCS data (in the form of a comprehensive downloadable file or as a result of post-processed ad-hoc selection) or biological blood samples (viable cells, plasma and DNA) are available for use in research projects. The data and samples are available under the condition that the project has been submitted and approved by the STCS Scientific Committee (SC) and by the competent research Ethics Committee.

The STCS Data Center and the Head of the biobank require the following documents for your data or samples request to be processed:

• Approval letter of the project issued by the STCS Scientific Committee
• The final proposal as approved by the STCS Scientific Committee
• Approval letter of the project issued by the responsible Ethics Committee
• The final proposal as approved by the responsible Ethics Committee

The local bio banking labs will only release STCS samples based on the sample ordering list generated and verified by the STCS Data Center and the head of the STCS biobank.

Data and sample requests have to be submitted in STCS Universe.

Authorship rules

Authorship requires a relevant contribution to the study and manuscript according to international rules and must be in accordance with the 2013 recommendations of the Swiss Academies of Arts and Sciences.

Authorship in a STCS project includes active participation in the design and writing of the full proposal.

The PI is responsible for a complete list of collaborators at time of submission of the full proposal to the STCS SC office and ensures that all co-authors have seen, revised and approved the proposal. The last author is considered to be the senior author.

These rules have to be followed, when a STCS administered project is submitted and published:

• The order and names must be defined at the time of submission of a full proposal
• Minimum one study site representative per center has to be included (One member of the clinical and surgical division should participate)
• First and last author are the initiators of the project and clearly labeled as such in the full proposal
• To acknowledge the STCS association in all publication use the wording “XYZ, and the Swiss Transplant Cohort Study” or “XYZ, Swiss Transplant Cohort Study”
• STCS Author ORCID Number: 0000-0002-6369-819X
• Footnote members (Names of people with a particularly high involvement in the STCS structure must be listed in each manuscript as group co-authors of the paper)

The current list of STCS footnote member names is available for download in the Research Documents.

Publication requirements

Prior to publication, it is mandatory that any manuscript or conference abstract, using data originating from the STCS, is submitted to the chairman of the SC sc.stcs@usz.ch for formal approval. Refusal for publication can be given, if rules of the STCS access to data and/or publication policies have not been adequately followed.

For all publications using data from the STCS, the acknowledgement of all funding sources is mandatory and should be mentioned as follows:

This project (FUP #) has been facilitated by the Swiss Transplant Cohort Study.

The Swiss Transplant Cohort Study is supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation, Unimedsuisse and the Transplant Centers.

For international collaborations using data of the STCS, investigators must ensure that the contribution of the STCS is appropriately reflected either by co-authorships or by listing the STCS in the study appendix. This has to be clearly established and mentioned at the time the full proposal is submitted to the STCS SC office.

The SNSF requires that STCS publications are made available in an open access (OA) publication or database either by the green or gold standard.

Furthermore, depending on the journal, APCs of publications resulting from STCS projects can be covered by the Chronos hub.

Accepted manuscripts

The Scientific Committee must be notified of any accepted manuscript by providing the citation details in the STCS Universe.

The project responsible has to add the publication to their project and a lay summary must be filled out.

The lay summary of the project and the publication will be published online on the STCS website for the broader public.

Archiving project data

After termination of the project the raw data have to be kept. For archiving and re-use purposes, all primary data including add-on data plus program code have to be transferred to the STCS data center for storing. The applicable procedure is determined by the STCS data center.

Data resulting from an STCS project must be shared with other researchers upon request in a collaborative effort.

Sample procedures are regulated by separate guidelines issued by the laboratory working group.