Long live the Open Access Movement ... Not!

And here we go again, true story, I received this email today from an Open Access 'publisher'. Obviously I am not qualified to assess this manuscript, yet the administrators of this publisher see fit to invite me to review a manuscript that clearly I am not qualified to review. As far as email mass mailings are concerned, this crap shoot takes the crown. I hope you appreciate the 'journal' title, 'Science Journal of Medicine and Clinical Trial'. You could not make it up. The worst thing is that academics in a number of countries are forced by government edict to submit to Open Access 'publishers'. Quality requirements: zero, as long as it is Open Access. So, please do submit to 'Science Journal of Medicine & Clinical Trial' to get your governmental brownie points. Academic freedom be damned. Make sure to swipe your credit card though, otherwise 'Science Journal of Medicine and Clinical Trials' and its infinite number of sister publications won't be interested in your output any longer.

Dear Colleagues

How are you? I am sure you are busy with many activities right now. However, I hope you could help us review a manuscript, entitled"Quantiferonassay versus tuberculin skin test in detection of latent TB in hemodialysis patients" that has been submitted for publication in SCIENCE JOURNAL OF MEDICINE & CLINICAL TRIAL if you are able to take on this task as well as whether you can return the Review Form by 15TH May, 2013 or earlier.

The Manuscript, Reviewer's Guide and Author Guidelines will be E-mail to you if you are interested.

In particular, please make sure that the paper addresses issues of value to our broad-based audience, and that it cuts through the thick layers of theory and verbosity for them and makes sense of it all in a clean, cohesive manner.

On behalf of the Editorial Team of the Science Journal Publication, I thank you very much in advance for your effort in this endeavor.

ABSTRACT:
Background:Patients with end-stage renal disease (ESRD) and Mycobacterium tuberculosis infection pose a high risk of developing active TB disease. It is therefore important to detect latent TB infection (LTBI) to be able to offer treatment and prevent progression to TB disease.
Objective: to compare the performance of Quantiferon-TB Gold test (QFT-G)in the diagnosis of latent tuberculosis infection with tuberculin skin test (TST) among patients undergoing hemodialysis.
Patients and methods: sixty patients undergoing hemodialysis at Al-Azhar and Assiut university hospitals were subjected to TSTand QFT-G. Theagreement between both tests was evaluated with respect to age, sex, BCG vaccinationand history of contact to a known TB case.
Results: The percentage of positive TST results (induration cut off 10 mm) and positive QFT-G test results was found to be 45% & 31.7% respectively. The overall agreement between the QFT-G and the TST in hemodialysis patients was 44/60 (73.3%) and it was found to be statistically significant (P=0.001). BCG vaccination had no effect on either TST or QFT- G results in hemodialysis patients. Positive TST and QFT-G results were found to be 90% and 100 % respectively in hemodialysis patients with history of contact to known TB cases. Both QFT-G and TST results were not significantly related to age or sex. In conclusions, Both QFT-G and TST may be complementary to each other in the diagnosis of latent tuberculous infection in hemodialysis patients.

Infanticide Symposium in the Journal of Medical Ethics

To those interested in the continuing aftermath of the Journal of medical ethics decision to publish a paper endorsing infanticide, the current issue of the journal has a plethora of articles for and against the substance of said paper, as well as arguments on the question of whether the paper should ever have been published. It's a well-worth-reading collection of articles, including some of the best-known folks in bioethics and moral philosophy, among them (in alphabetical order) Tony Coady,  John Finnis, Robert George, John harris, Jeff MacMahan, Anita Silvers, Peter Singer, and a whole gaggle of other authors, yours truly included. Check it out, here. In case you are coming to this blog entry a bit late in the day, note that the link I've just displayed likely will lead you to what is then the current issue. Try to track the May 2013 issue of the journal on its website. My own paper, for what it is worth, reflects on the implications significant political pressures on bioethics journal editors have for the exercise of academic freedom. The piece is here.

Odd piece of flawed anti-utilitarian research

Hmm, PLoS One has published the results of a social science research project claiming to show that utilitarian moral choices are predictive of low empathic concern. Moral philosophers will be aware of the scenarios that the investigators tested: There's Philippa Foot's trolley example, and a related example using a crying baby in wartime whereby the only way to preserve a whole bunch of people's lives is to smother the crying baby in order to prevent it from alerting enemy soldiers to one's location.

The researchers also had the participants complete Interpersonal Reactivity Inventories. Turns out, the folks making the choices that would have preserved more lives (ie the 'utilitarians') showed lack of empathic concern, courtesy of the IRI.  Now, utilitarians in both scenarios would, of course, opt to preserve the larger number of lives. What's odd is that the PLoS One researchers claim that this this is evidence for their contention that utilitarians lack empathic concern. Obviously, there is a different interpretation, namely that utilitarians, driven by empathic concerns choose to sacrifice (yes, proactively) a smaller number of humans in order to preserve a much larger number of other humans. Considering that the choice makers would be operating in emergency circumstances, this seems entirely plausible to this utilitarian. So, even if, according to IRI survey results, utilitarian responders showed typically a lack of empathy, it ain't clear that that is what drove in the end their choices in the scenarios put to them by the investigators.

It's just odd that the reviewers of this piece didn't realize that the researchers' labelling of a particular set of choices as lacking empathy doesn't prove that empathy is actually lacking by someone who makes such choices that they clearly disapprove of (despite protestations to the contrary - aka neutrality).

Independent of this, even if this experiment had shown that utilitarian moral choices lack empathic concern - which it hasn't! - it failed to show that such choices, given the dire circumstances painted in those scenarios, were not the lesser of two bad choices.

Addendum: A day after I wrote this, a survey of philosophers' views on core philosophical questions was released. Here are some interesting data on the trolley scenario the authors of the PLoS piece celebrated so much:
Normative ethics: deontology 25.9%; consequentialism 23.6%; virtue ethics 18.2%; other 32.3%.
Trolley problem: switch 68.2%; don’t switch 7.6%; other 24.2%.
Seems you don't have to be a utilitarian/consequentialist to flip the switch, as the authors of the PLoS piece mistakenly believe.

Brief Up-date on Projects

Friends, just a quick up-date on my various writing and editing writing projects. The Wiley-Blackwell book '50 Great Myths About Atheism' that Russell Blackford and I wrote is now at proof stage. Russell and I have received the proofs yesterday and we've got about 4 weeks to check about 300 pages of content, as well as create a good index.

Helga Kuhse, Peter Singer and I have also agreed on the contents to be included in the 3rd edition of 'Bioethics - An Anthology'. We are currently waiting for Wiley-Blackwell to sort out the contract before we hand the goods over to them.

I alsop managed to write the first three chapters of 'This is Bioethics', hopefully forthcoming with Wiley-Blackwell toward the end of next year.

On HuffPost Live on 1971 Toronto Marijuana Research

Just click the image to the left to get to the video.

In case you are interested and in or around Brockville

Are paywalls the newspaper industry's salvation?

Ever more newspapers establish paywalls in order to get money out of netizens who happen to check for latest news. To be fair, when Rupert Murdoch started this craze (at the London Times), there was much mockery around, people promising to abandon the site etc etc. Murdoch started charging, of course, many years ago. Since then many newspapers who mocked him for his approach ('you are going from millions of visitors access your website to a few thousand or hundred thousand') are copying him. The thing is, while the newspaper is now read by significantly less people than it was prior to the paywall going up, the paywall is generating more money than the digital ads ever managed to.

Since then man other newspapers have begun doing the same. The Globe and Mail in Canada, The Telegraph in Britain, The Age in Australia are just a few examples for this emerging trend. Many more are following them as I write this. Usually you get a limited number of articles that you may read without paying for access, but then you've got to pay if you want more. Currently there is an easy way around paying. You simply clean your browser history (ie eliminate 'cookies') and you are back to zero as far as the article count is concerned. Realistically, however, some computer wiz employed by the newspapers will stop this subversive behaviour. And frankly, so they should.

Obviously, it is not unreasonable for newspapers to charge for what they deliver. There's a difference between investigative journalism produced by the New York Times and opinion journalism delivered free of charge by the Huffington Post. The problem I foresee, however, is that most people, when deciding to pay for access to a news website, will probably go for the best quality news outlet out there. Accordingly, the New York Times is rapidly racking up on-line subscribers. I cannot imagine the same would occur with regard to papers not delivering the same level of quality. To give you a good example of this: The New York Times has a habit of firing known plagiarists. Compare that to a Toronto based daily paper where a known plagiarist is still in full employ. If you had to decide where to spend your hard earned cash, would you swipe your credit card at the New York Times with its still impeccable standards or an alternative such as the Toronto paper. It seems to be a no-brainer to me. You might grab the few locally relevant pieces from the Toronto paper, but for in-depth journalism you'd spend your money at the New York Times or papers like it (and there are very few).

The other problem for the unnamed Toronto newspaper (and its equivalents in Britain, Down Under, Berlin, and wherever else), is that they are under-resourced, and it is widely known that they are under-resourced. Why would you want to spend your money to access the website of a newspaper that you now already isn't on top of its game due to a lack of journalistic resources?

To me, that seems to be the next problem in the paywall revolution. Many mainstream national newspapers, I suspect, will be going down, because they don't deliver the quality required to stay in the game any longer. Funnily, niche players such as the German taz newspaper (an unorthodox leftish daily paper) might have a decent shot at survival, because they have a dedicated audience not interested in reading only what the New York Times has on offer.

Either way, the paywall revolution might well be the last hurrah of many mainstay newspapers before they disappear altogether. We all will be worse off for it, I suspect. Will this regret make me subscribe to the plagiarist-employing Toronto paper. Who am I kidding?

and a late comer to the Open Access Party ... the New York Times

Just about every outlet in the universe has written about the pitfalls of Open Access digital only 'academic publishing'. Today the New York Times joined the party. It's not a bad piece actually, written by veteran health reporter Gina Kolata. Check it out when you have a minute! It's centered around Beall's list of predatory on-line 'publishers'. What's lacking are reasonable explanations of what made this fiasco possible. Low barriers to market entry anyone?

Meanwhile ever more research funders are rushing headlong into forcing researchers they fund to publish their content in open access outlets. All of this, of course, is giving rise to ever more dodgy 'publishers' opening up their business, aka uploading submitted content to their webserver for a steep fee. Worse, upcoming research assessment exercises force academics in some places to publish their research outputs in open access outfits without providing funding for the uploading activity (aka open access publishing). You better forget about the idea of having reliable publishing histories attached to academic content. Courtesy of Open Access the powers that are have fully embraced a wild west version of what was once known as academic publishing. It'll no doubt come to bite them in their backside, but I suspect those responsible will long have left when the consequences of these ill-considered policies hit the proverbial fan.

Words from the production line

It's been a good couple of weeks, productivity wise. Our upcoming '50 Great Myths About Atheism' is with the typesetters. Russell Blackford, the book's other author, and I should be getting the proofs back by the end of the month. Excellent news. We had the pleasure of working with a copy editor who was absolutely amazing. I can't stress enough her diligence and efficiency. She certainly prevented quite a few mistakes on our part finding their way into print.

Well, the other good productivity news, after working for a few months with Helga Kuhse and Peter Singer on the line-up of the 3rd edition of our textbook 'Bioethics - An Anthology' we are pretty close to sending our proposed new line-up off to the publisher. Helga and Peter kindly invited me to join them as the third editor of what was until they asked me to join them their 'baby'. It's been fun looking for suitable content, trying to think what would, what would work better, and what would not work in the classroom.

Last but by no means least, I've managed to write the first two chapters of 'This is Bioethics', and I've started the eleventh chapter.

Excited About Nudging?

A reasonably recent fad in public health is the idea of nudging folks to do the right - ie healthy - thing. The idea is basically that you incentivize people to live healthy. Whether such a strategy can work over time probably depends on a whole range of factors, so I'm not here to pass judgment on 'nudging' as such.

What annoys me is lousy reporting (and arguably pointless social science research) in the service of the nudging agenda. The New York Times, one of my preferred daily reads, recently reported about a study involving Mexican gay men at high risk for HIV infection.

The Times tweeted the findings of this study like this, 'Gay Men in Mexico City Would Stay HIV Free for $288, Study Shows'. The study, of course, found nothing of that sort! And that is what annoys me. 

All that the eager social scientists discovered was that gay men they interviewed in Mexico City said they would 'pledge to stay H.I.V.-free, attend a monthly safe-sex talk and take regular H.I.V. tests to prove they were uninfected — all in return for just $288 a year.' That is a far cry from actually staying HIV negative, as the Times tweet misleadingly summarizes. 

Imagine the excitement of our public health people! It costs about 8000 $ to treat HIV-infected folks per year, so getting that deal at 288 $  per year is a bargain, isn't it? 

 Well, what's the catch then: For starters, just because people promise to stay HIV negative doesn't mean they actually will stay HIV negative. Surely living a healthy life instead of going on life-preserving chemotherapy is a better incentive than 288 $ per year! The thing about safe sex is that it requires a tad bit more to succeed than 288$ per year, something that seems to have escaped our social science nudgers. It doesn't seem terribly sensible to base any public policy in this context on such research. It might be possible to get people to test more frequently for HIV, and to pop more frequently into clinics, but it seems far fetched to suggest that a measly 288$ per years would impact greatly on actual sexual behaviours. Answers to hypothetical questions with $$ signs attached to them don't quite cut it, at least in my view. It's one thing to say the right thing in response to a hypothetical question, it's quite another to actually live up to what one's answer suggests one would do if it came to the crunch.

Are Bioethics and Developing World Bioethics institutionally racist?

The answer appears to be 'yes' if you believe a Letter to the Editor published recently by our colleagues at the Journal of Bioethical Inquiry. Three authors (one from India the other two from the USA and the Netherlands respectively -  ie two thirds from the global north, I'll get back to that!) decided one way to ascertain whether there's institutional bias toward the rich world's problems in bioethics journals would be to investigate the country location provided for the journals' editors as well as their editorial board members. They picked 14 journals, looked at their overall number of editorial board members and divided them into groups based on the Human Development Index into Very High and High, Medium and Low. To no one's surprise they discovered that the vast majority of Editorial Board members hail from Very High and High HDI countries. You might wish to note that High HDI includes countries such as Jamaica, Malaysia, Grenada, Brazil, Iran and so on and so forth. The current list is here. So, by lumping countries such as Germany and Jamaica into one category (ie by lumping together Very High and High HDI) the authors of the letter have arguably created the particular outcome they needed to mount their criticism, namely the underrepresentation of bioethicists from developing countries on bioethics journals editorial boards. They discovered that 95% of editorial board members hail from these countries. These countries, of course, include countries as far apart in terms of development as are Germany and Libya.

Surprisingly this question begging bean counting activity must have passed peer review at the Journal of Bioethics Inquiry. Well, or it passed the editorial judgment of whoever is currently in charge at that journal. 

Now, fair enough, it is reasonable to be concerned about bioethics focus on the - often times decadent - problems of folks in the global north while ignoring more serious issues confronting people in the global south. I certainly feel passionately about this and have done my best during my years as one of the Editors of Bioethics and as one of the Founding Editors of Developing World Bioethics to remedy this situation. Let me show you how this pans out in the Letter writers analysis. I mentioned already that they're lumping - unreasonably - together folks from Germany and Jamaica or Australia and Dominica to generate the scandal they are keen on exposing. Bioethics is listed here as a journal with zero representatives from medium and low HDI. Brilliant insight. Here is the context the Letter writers ignored - were too busy investigating. 

On my initiative, more than a decade ago, while I was working full-time as an academic in South Africa, we made a considered decision to 'sacrifice' some of the Bioethics print real estate (ie the number of print issues we could produce in a given year) by starting a companion journal dedicated exclusively to developing world issues, and so Developing World Bioethics was born. Its distribution is identical to that of Bioethics, so wherever Bioethics is available in a personal or institutional subscription, there is also Developing World Bioethics. You could argue now that that surely was just a means to shunt aside issues affecting the global south, but incidentally the success of Developing World Bioethics in competitive journal impact rankings (where it does better than many mainstream bioethics journals) suggests otherwise. Criticizing Bioethics then for not having editorial board members from medium to low-income HDI countries completely misses the point of this arrangement. It constitutes unfair and uninformed criticism. Incidentally, 2/3rds of the Letter's authors hail from countries of the global north. Their own logic applied to their own letter would suggest that that somehow isn't a good thing. 

A more serious omission by the authors is their decision not to undertake actual serious qualitative research.  After all, the Letter writers have not even bothered to undertake an actual content analysis to investigate (and demonstrate) that the problem they are concerned about exists. Instead they say this, 'Scanning 4,029 research articles in nine bioethics journals, Borry, Schotsmans, and Dierickx (2005) found that developing country scholars contributed fewer than 4 percent of publications (the other 96 percent coming from authors working in developed countries). It is no surprise, then, that bioethics pays more attention to esoteric ethical problems facing wealthy nations than it does to issues such as poverty, hunger, and health inequities that are global in nature.'

You might wish to note that the study they cite ignored Developing World Bioethics. There's something amusing about scholars trying really hard to show how badly the global south is done by by mainstream bioethics, yet they have to resort to unnecessary acts of omissions, such as ignoring journals dedicated exclusively to this issue. They also ignore something else: many journals focusing strongly on these issues (in China, in Brazil, in Iran and so on and so fourth) do not feature on their list.  Why should non-English speaking academics working in the global south submit content to English language journals that are not widely read in their home countries? Are they doing wrong, in the eyes of our Letter writers, when they focus on journals in their mother tongue that are actually locally read by their fellow country men and women? 

My bone of contention with the authors of this Letter (and the Editors of the journal that published it) is that the research that it is based on is shoddy at best; that even if it wasn't as shoddy as it is it would still not have been able to show what needs to be shown, namely that the absence of editorial board members from the countries in question is the cause of bioethics lack of focus on issues the Letter writers are rightly concerned about.

Arguably today more content than ever before is produced by bioethicists on these issues. Perhaps not enough, but since Developing World Bioethics has come into being a lot has changed for the better. Journals such as the Journal of Global Ethics, Metaphilosophy, Public Health Ethics and others continue to produce high-quality outputs on the issues the Letter writers are concerned about. 

Open Access Issue: Special Issue: Field workers at the interface between research institutions and local communities

Developing World Bioethics © Blackwell Publishing Ltd Volume 13, Issue 1 Pages ii - iv, 1 - 56, April 2013 Special Issue: Field workers at the interface between research institutions and local communities The latest issue of Developing World Bioethics is available on Wiley Online Library EDITORIAL Field Workers at the Interface (pages ii–iv) Sassy Molyneux, Dorcas Kamuya, Philister Adhiambo Madiega, Tracey Chantler, Vibian Angwenyi and P. Wenzel Geissler Article first published online: 22 MAR 2013 | DOI: 10.1111/dewb.12027 ARTICLES Evolving Friendships and Shifting Ethical Dilemmas: Fieldworkers’ Experiences in a Short Term Community Based Study in Kenya (pages 1–9) Dorcas M. Kamuya, Sally J. Theobald, Patrick K. Munywoki, Dorothy Koech, Wenzel P. Geissler and Sassy C. Molyneux Article first published online: 21 FEB 2013 | DOI: 10.1111/dewb.12009 Engaging Communities to Strengthen Research Ethics in Low-Income Settings: Selection and Perceptions of Members of a Network of Representatives in Coastal Kenya (pages 10–20) Dorcas M. Kamuya, Vicki Marsh, Francis K. Kombe, P. Wenzel Geissler and Sassy C. Molyneux Article first published online: 21 FEB 2013 | DOI: 10.1111/dewb.12014 ‘She's My Sister-In-Law, My Visitor, My Friend’ – Challenges of Staff Identity in Home Follow-Up in an HIV Trial in Western Kenya (pages 21–29) Philister Adhiambo Madiega, Gemma Jones, Ruth Jane Prince and Paul Wenzel Geissler Article first published online: 22 MAR 2013 | DOI: 10.1111/dewb.12019 Ethical Challenges that Arise at the Community Interface of Health Research: Village Reporters’ Experiences in Western Kenya (pages 30–37) Tracey Chantler, Faith Otewa, Peter Onyango, Ben Okoth, Frank Odhiambo, Michael Parker and Paul Wenzel Geissler Article first published online: 22 MAR 2013 | DOI: 10.1111/dewb.12023 Working with Community Health Workers as ‘Volunteers’ in a Vaccine Trial: Practical and Ethical Experiences and Implications (pages 38–47) Vibian Angwenyi, Dorcas Kamuya, Dorothy Mwachiro, Vicki Marsh, Patricia Njuguna and Sassy Molyneux Article first published online: 22 MAR 2013 | DOI: 10.1111/dewb.12015 Feedback of Research Findings for Vaccine Trials: Experiences from Two Malaria Vaccine Trials Involving Healthy Children on the Kenyan Coast (pages 48–56) Caroline Gikonyo, Dorcas Kamuya, Bibi Mbete, Patricia Njuguna, Ally Olotu, Philip Bejon, Vicki Marsh and Sassy Molyneux Article first published online: 21 FEB 2013 | DOI: 10.1111/dewb.12010

Bullet Point Ethics as Policy Advice?

Bioethics as well as various specialties within the field (research ethics and public health ethics among them) is more often than not policy oriented. This is not terribly surprising, seeing that sound ethics aims at providing action guidance as well as action justification. It remains, of course, a bone of contention among ethicists and philosophers whether this can actually be achieved in the absence of final answers to fundamental meta-ethical questions. Let us leave this thorny issue aside for the moment.  A consensus seems to exist at least among bioethicists and others engaged in applied ethics that we can and should press ahead regardless of those intractable final answers and that we should utilize the tools of ethical analysis to address real-world problems.

Ever since Tom Beauchamp and James Childress hugely successful Principles of Biomedical Ethics entered the textbook market place principles have become a popular teaching tool in many a medical school. Among philosophers these principles have not been as successful as they are among teachers in medical schools, mostly because of concerns about their lack of action guidance and action justification.  Debates among bioethicists about the viability of the Georgetown Mantra will undoubtedly continue, and these debates certainly are to be welcomed. If nothing else, they have already led to marked improvements to the Principles of Biomedical Ethics through its various editions.

However, in the aftermath of the Principles ever more policy guidance documents disguised as ethics guidelines have entered the market place. While I have not undertaken a proper survey of all of these documents, it is my impression that they are particularly prevalent in public health ethics. What is disconcerting about these documents is that they have taken the Principles approach to a whole new level of arbitrariness. Arbitrariness in the sense that while they aim to assist policy-makers in developing action plans for anything from SARS to clinical research to obesity they actually permit arbitrary actions. Vacuous criteria are abound in this new enterprise. A quick search of the literature offers anything from respect for ‘human dignity’ to special attention that must be paid to never clearly explicated ‘vulnerable’ people. Conceptual ethical frameworks are replaced by bullet point lists of the pleasant-sounding. Take all the pleasant-sounding somehow into consideration and you will reach an ethically defensible end-point, or at least an end-point that will give you another shot at high office when the next elections come around.

To be fair, there are a few good reasons for these bullet point lists. Policy makers must take into account the plurality of normative views held in the societies they represent, hence a straightforward consequentialist, deontological or virtue ethical approach would not persuade many. It is also worth noting that many professionals who are not ethicists tend to like bullet point style principles. They use them as guiding lights (deontic constraints, name it) in their search for an ethically defensible answer.

However, considering that these sorts of bullet point lists are frequently supposed to function as an ethical backstop in times of, for instance public health emergencies, it seems unacceptable - to me at least - that they can be used to justify any and no action at all.  Given that their strong selling point is that they are more practical, and that they can be easier operationalized and used by professionals hailing from other disciplines, I cannot help but wonder why there is no evidence that they work better in terms of providing action guidance and action justification than old-fashioned ethical analysis in times of crisis or indeed in preparation for a public health crisis.

Should we not aim higher than this lamentable status quo?

The Junk 'Food' Wars Continue

Belatedly policy makers have woken up to the fact that the largest disease burden in the world is caused by chronic diseases. They have begun to zoom in on 'food' products known to contribute to obesity. The thing about obesity is that it is linked to a whole gaggle of expensive-to-treat diseases, including diabetes, heart disease and so on and so forth. It is also linked to lower life expectancy and other such niceties. It turns out, soft drinks are a known significant contributor to obesity. Politicians such as New York City's mayor Michael Bloomberg have come up with a plan to reduce the maximum size of the containers that soft drink products are delivered in. They clearly hope that that might reduce soft drink consumption, to some extent at least. Public health experts have lauded Bloomberg's initiative. Others have suggested limiting advertisements for such products to times when children and teenagers ain't watching TV any longer.

When you think about it, Bloomberg's policy proposition isn't that different to what we do with regard to other known health hazards such as smoking and alcohol. If anything his policies are probably not far reaching enough. However, it is reassuring that voluntariness on part of the soft drink producing industry isn't relied on any longer. It cannot possibly deliver the required results, simply because these companies must be interested to sell as much of their products as is feasible in order to satisfy their owners' (ie their shareholders) financial interests, lest they will be punished by the financial markets.

Here are some fun facts related to the issue, 'Several studies have shown that the rate of type-2 diabetes has soared at just the same rate as intake of high-fructose corn syrup -- the favored sweetener in many soft drinks -- has risen. Soft drinks such as Coca-Cola were sold in 6.5-ounce bottles in the 1920s. Now the 12-ounce can is standard but fountain drinks are sold in sizes up to 64 ounces -- or the equivalent of eight of these cans of soda. One 64-ounce drink carries more than 800 calories.'

Well, yesterday Bloomberg's new regulations for New York City were halted in their tracks in court. Nothing new on that front either, cigarette companies also dragged the inevitable out by means of seemingly never-ending court proceedings. Even the arguments deployed during the cigarette wars and those deployed now are eerily similar. One would hope Bloomberg and - more importantly - his successor will keep their nerves on this. I saw Bloomberg last night on the Letterman show (yep, guilty as charged, I watch the Late Show) and he mentioned some staggering figure like 5,000 New Yorkers die every year as a result of obesity related complications. The cost of treating - just in that city - obese people's avoidable health problems reaches multi billion $$ each year.

Here comes the inevitably Onion style response from US Republicans. NPR reported that in Mississippi, a state where 1 out of every 3 adults is about 30 pounds (!) heavier than what would be a healthy weight, state Republicans are moving to legislate that counties and towns must not enact rules like those proposed by Michael Bloomberg, including rules that require calorie counts of meals and drinks to be posted, that cap portion sizes, or that keep toys out of kids' meals. It goes without saying that the restaurant, beverage and chicken producing industry was behind this initiative. Which arguably supports again the point that it ain't public-private partnerships and voluntary industry action that is called for, but government regulation. That industry should lobby to withhold basic information from its customers, in order to prevent them from making informed choices at least about the food products they digest, tells you truly all that you need to know.

Stop demanding that academics 'resign' just because you dislike what they have to say!

There is something strikingly odd about activists asking academics they disagree with to 'resign'. This happens ever more frequently (look out for an up-coming issue of the Journal of medical ethics dedicated to an affair that led to a worldwide effort aimed  at removing junior academics from their jobs because of an academic paper they wrote!) In the particular case that I will be writing about the academic in question is actually an emeritus professor (ie the academic is retired and cannot actually resign in any meaningful way, not even when bullied by a rabid activist outfit). 

Well, Gareth Jones, a well-regarded bioethicist at the University of Otago Bioethics Centre, published a piece in the New Zealand Medical Journal. Check out the article, it's available as an Open Access document at the time of writing. The article, co-authored by Jones with a student at the Centre, Robert Cole, defends prenatal screening for Down Syndrome. They defend essentially the introduction of Non-Invasive Prenatal Diagnosis (NIPD) instead of a more invasive technique that is currently used. The piece, by any stretch of the imagination, is uncontroversial. All that Cole and Jones point out is that as a society New Zealand is at ease with prenatal testing for Down Syndrome. Testing enables pregnant women to make reproductive choices according to best clinical information and according to their own reflective values. Enabling them to do this earlier on during pregnancy, courtesy of technological advances, seems a no-brainer, that is unless you are an anti-choice (aka 'pro-life activist') of the variety that led to Monty Python's every sperm is sacred song in their movie Meaning of Life. 

There are several arguments that have been deployed against testing by disability rights activists and assorted supportive anti-choice folks. These arguments essentially propose that disability doesn't necessarily impact negatively on someone's quality of life. I do think this argument is difficult to sustain on an all other things being equal basis of comparison. They also argue, and this is something any decent society should be concerned about, that an attitude suggesting that it is ok to abort defective fetuses (in their lingo they usually are described as 'unborn children' - you know, like unborn Nasa pilots, unborn painters, that sort of contradiction in terms) would eventually lead to forms of unfair discrimination against people with Down Syndrome.  This could include outright discriminatory attitudes including making fun of disabled people, blaming them unfairly for their condition and so on and so forth. It could also include a reduction in funding society would make available to the smaller number of disabled people coming into being despite screening efforts.

Well, in a liberal society the final word on whether or not the pregnancy is carried to term rests with the pregnant woman (and possibly her partner). There should not be unfair pressures from health care professionals to abort. Cole and Jones also note that there is no evidence that fewer disabled people would necessarily lead to a reduction in societal support services. NIPD could be used very early on in pregnancy (7-10 weeks). That is wonderful news, because fetuses are unable to experience pain before the 24th week of pregnancy. If one holds the view, as I do, that sentience is a necessary condition for moral standing, NIPD is great news, because it would permit women to choose an abortion knowing that their choice would not cause actual pain and suffering to the developing fetus. 

Strangely activists are up in arms about Cole and Jones, demanding that emeritus professor Jones 'resigns'. It goes without saying that their arguments are wrong headed, even if one ignores that retirees have some difficulty resigning from their posts. As always when it comes to this sort of activism there's nice rhetorical games that are being played with language. Accordingly we find statements such as this, 'People with Down syndrome must be accorded the full respect and acknowledgement of human rights that are afforded to other New Zealanders.' Of course, this is precisely what Cole and Jones state in their article. One shouldn't confuse fetuses with real people though! On said activist website there are also statements pronouncing that testing may only be done if it is ideologically anti-choice (ie 'pro-life'), 'To ensure that antenatal screening exists only to provide unborn children with Down syndrome and their parents with life-affirming, unbiased care through education, support and understanding.' That, of course, is unacceptable. One could have an argument about the question of whether or not there should be non-directive counselling, but to suggest that pregnant women should be subjected to anti-choice (ie 'pro-life') agitprop is clearly unacceptable in a liberal society. The objective must always be to provide pregnant women with unbiased, factual information and ensure that they can make their reproductive choices in a non-judgmental environment. This is not quite what the anti-choice activists have in mind on this subject. They have already made up her mind on behalf of the pregnant woman. 

May I suggest to our activists friends out there the following: deal with the arguments Cole and Jones (and many others like them) put forward for discussion by means of countering with sound arguments of your own. Your kind of resignation-demanding bullying is truly uncalled for.

Comments

Friends,

please refrain from commenting at this point in time please. Google hasn't figured out how to actually display comments that were posted. At this point in time their software displays below a given post the profile name of whoever posted a comment, but displays no actual comment. I hope they'll come to grips with this sooner rather than later, or else I shall change the template that I'm using. My apologies for any inconvenience caused.

udo schuklenk

Ps: Note added Mach 06: Google's dynamic blogs do not seem capable of displaying comments posted, so I decided to disable to much cleaner dynamic blog design I chose and revert back to an old-fashioned, static design.

The Dangers of Open Access Online Only

I know that I sound a bit like a broken record when I continue to go on and on and on about the problems associated with the current Open Access frenzy. The problems are all too obvious. For starters: low barriers to entry are an invite to fly-by-night operators. These days it is fair to say that dodgy Open Access outfits outnumber by far the very few decent Open Access publishers. Open Access as it is currently conceived constitutes also a direct threat to the ability of academics to publish their work in professional journals. If Open Access replaces subscription based models, an author's ability to pay the Open Access fees determines whether an academic is able to afford publishing her work. The fees in question range anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars per article. To be fair, a VERY limited number of universities has begun shelling out $$ for Open Access fees for their academic researchers. Say, if you were an academic working in one of those exceptional institutions and you decided to publish in an Open Access outlet you'd go to your university's research office or its library and ask that it transfer the cash required for getting your article published to the Open Access publisher. The more you publish the more expensive you become to your cash strapped employer. No doubt some such institutions will begin to love the old days again when academics didn't publish that much, simply because that would be cheaper. Or there might be a $$ limit on the number of papers you may publish, you might also find yourself suddenly strongly encouraged by the powers that are in your university to publish where it is cheapest. - Talking about cheaper, the true free riders in this system would, of course, be institutions the academics of which publish preciously little (think Phoenix and similar outfits). They're the true beneficiaries of OA. It is noteworthy though, that free riding is encouraged in this system. Whoever produces research pays for the luxury of seeing it published. Anyone else is in for a free ride. Yep, that is Open Access justice. - Most institutions, of course, have neither the money nor the inclination to spend $$ on the article processing fee the Open Access business model depends on. Hence the threat to academic researchers' ability to publish their academic content in an Open Access world.

Still, this is all old news, except, of course, to the having-your-cake-and-eating-it Open Access proponents. What is news is that one of my dire predictions has since come to pass. I warned on various occasions that these fly-by-night operators have no back-up systems in place for the point in time where they switch off their little web-servers and shut down their operations. Articles 'published' on their servers, I warned, would disappear into the internet's never-never-land. This danger is one reason for why I am such a Luddite with regard to the need for print versions of published peer reviewed content. It is the only guarantee that we have that  peer reviewed content can be easily traced via university libraries. It is the only watertight guarantee we have, in so far as protecting the integrity of the published academic outputs are concerned. If there's no print copy, we might sometimes be able to find individual article pdf's of authors who published on Open Access platforms that vanished over night, but there is no guarantee. This has all sorts of undesirable consequences for articles that have been cited (say by a doctoral student in her research thesis - how could a reviewer tasked with evaluating said thesis do that job if some of her cited articles don't exist any longer due to the collapse of the Open Access outfit that published them?)

Well, here's a link to a bona fide report about such an Open Access fly-by-night outfit having closed operations, with the complete loss of all its published contents. The virtual journals gone, it is not only the loss of articles published there that is of concern, it also means that crucial information about the journal is gone, too. Did it undertake peer review? Was there an editorial board? -

And yes, I told you so... -  QED as they say.

Canada's Conservative government delivers to religion

Canada's conservative PM Stephen Harper finally delivers on a promise made to his conservative religious constituency. He establishes today an Office of Religious Freedoms. Thankfully it seems to be a window dressing activity, soon to be forgotten, given its measly 5 mio C$ annual budget. There ain't much it can do with that amount of money.

What's wrong with a taxpayer funded outfit designed to protect religious freedoms in other parts of the world? Nothing in principle, but... there is no good reason to privilege people's interest in holding religious views (that are fundamentally ideological views about the world) over other ideological views of the world. Why not establish an office aimed at protecting moral views of the world, conscience views or whatnot, if one sees the urgent need to protect people's (however implausible) views about how the world came about, or if one sees the need to protect their medieval takes on sexual mores or any number of other issues.

Clearly this outfit serves to realize a promise the current Canadian government made to its religious hard core of voters. While its 5 bio C$ budget suggests that even this government doesn't quite see the point of putting a lot of money into protecting people's religious freedoms in other parts of the world, it is still money that could have gone to better causes (eg the protection of people's human rights, including their right to hold ideological views of the world).

Addendum: Turns out my suspicions about this outfit were well justified. It is headed by a Catholic 'Dean' of a religious college graduating reportedly some 16 or so students. The college reportedly praises itself as an institution celebrating a model of 'education' that was in operation prior to the enlightenment age. I can't help but wonder whether Mr Harper was keen on discrediting his religious freedom operation before it even got into action. If that's what he aimed for, he certainly succeeded.