PERSONAL CONFLICTS OF INTEREST IN THE PUBLISHING ENTERPRISE: FOCUS ON JOURNAL EDITORS

Editors play a central role and form an essential link in the publication process. Consequently, they hold considerable influence as to how the literature is molded, and what eventually gets published. In addition to their standard editorial responsibilities, holding that amount of power, editors have extremely high responsibilities to declare any conflicts of interest (COIs) internal to, and external to, the peer review process, particularly those involving personal relationships and networks. This is because they also exist in the peer community, can be high-profile public figures, and form a very unique and restricted – in terms of size, membership and exclusivity – set of individuals. Consequently, editors need to declare their COIs openly, transparently, and publicly on their editor board profiles, and as part of their curriculum vitae. Without such declarations, the greater risk is that editors might have unregulated freedom to enforce their own individual or group biases, through hidden relationships and networks, including the possibility of hiding instances of favoritism, cronyism and nepotism. In the worst-case scenario, this might reflect editorial corruption. Hidden COIs in authors, which tend to be the focus of the academic publishing establishment, including in codes of conduct and ethical guidelines such as those by COPE and the ICMJE, tend to down-play editorial COIs, or restrict them to scrutiny during the peer review process. This opinion piece examines whether there is a systemic problem with under-reported editorial COIs, particularly personal and non-financial COIs, that extend beyond the peer review process and their editorial positions. Greater awareness, debate, and education of this issue are needed.

Learning Morality with Siblings: The Untold Tale of a Mid-Twentieth Century Taiwanese Family

This article uses a new theoretical and methodological framework to reconstruct a story of two children from fieldnotes collected by anthropologists Arthur and Margery Wolf in rural Taiwan (1958 to 1960). Through the case of a brother–sister dyad, it examines the moral life of young children and provides a rare glimpse into sibling relationship in peer and family contexts. First, combining social network analysis and NLP text-analytics, this article introduces a general picture of these siblings’ life in the peer community. Moreover, drawing from naturalistic observations and projective tests, it offers an ethnographic analysis of how children support each other and assert themselves. It emphasizes the role of child-to-child ties in moral learning, in contrast to the predominant focus of parent–child ties in the study of Chinese families. It challenges assumptions of the Chinese “child training” model and invites us to take children's moral psychology seriously and re-discover their agency.

Power in psychiatry. Soviet peer and lay hierarchies in the context of political abuse of psychiatry

Soviet political abuse of psychiatry in the Brezhnevite era offers a rich case study of entanglement between various layers, impact spaces, and actors of power. This article discusses two types of discursive power in Soviet psychiatry. One sprang from the madness-affirmative cultural canon, in which dissidents sought their self-legitimation. More prominently, there was the power of psychiatrists within their own hierarchic system. I analyse how the action scopes for psychiatric power varied, depending on whether the recipient was a patient or fellow professional. Here, the inherent hierarchy structured and regulated the peer community and secured the stability of medical practices – and of the political entanglement of these practices and actors with the state-owned places of power.

Rebuilding a US Federal Data Strategy After the End of the “Community Health Status Indicators”

For nearly 2 decades, the Community Health Status Indicators tool reliably supplied communities with standardized, local health data and the capacity for peer-community comparisons. At the same time, it created a large community of users who shared learning in addressing local health needs. The tool survived a transition from the Health Resources and Services Administration to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before being shuttered in 2017. While new community data tools have come online, nothing has replaced Community Health Status Indicators, and many stakeholders continue to clamor for something new that will enable local health needs assessments, peer comparisons, and creation of a community of solutions. The National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics heard from many stakeholders that they still need a replacement data source. (Am J Public Health. 2021;111(10):1865–1873. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2021.306437 )

Creating a Social Learning Environment for and by Older Adults in the Use and Adoption of Smartphone Technology to Age in Place

Smartphone technologies can support older adults in their daily lives as they age in place at home. However, they may struggle to use these technologies which impacts acceptance, adoption, and sustainable use. Peer to peer community learning has the potential to support older adults to learn using (smartphone) technologies. This paper studies such a learning community approach and how it can support older adults to learn using and adopt the smartphone application GoLivePhone. This technology assists older adults in their daily living by supporting them through fall detection and activity tracking. In particular, the interface of this application can evolve and adapt as older adults become more knowledgeable during the use process or as their abilities change. This paper shows a field study with seven older adults learning and using the GoLivePhone technology through a living lab approach. These older adults participated in this research in a technology learning community that was set-up for research purposes. For this we used ordinary Samsung A3 smartphones with the simplified GoLivePhone software, particularly designed for older adults. At the end of the learning class we conducted an additional focus group to both explore factors facilitating older adults to learn using this technology and to identify their main personal drivers and motivators to start and adopt this technology. We collected qualitative data via open questions and audio recording during the focus group. This collected data was subject to a thematic analysis, coding was primarily performed by the first author, and reviewed by the other authors. We provide insights into how peer to peer community learning can contribute, and found both super-users and recall tools to be helpful to support sustainable use of smartphone technology to support older adults to age in place.

Reshaping the publication process: Addiction Research & Theory joins Peer Community In Registered Reports

This Editorial outlines two Registered Report (RR) formats offered by Addiction Research and Theory (ART): the ‘traditional’ RR route and the new ‘Peer Community in RR’ initiative. In the former, authors submit their study protocol for pre-study peer-review, allowing for assessment and peer feedback regarding the validity of the research questions and the study methodology prior to data collection (or in the case of secondary data, data analysis). High quality proposals then receive In Principle Acceptance (IPA), meaning that the journal commits to publishing the study regardless of its findings, so long as the protocol is followed appropriately, and an evidence-based interpretation of the results is undertaken. In the latter, authors follow a similar workflow, but submit their study protocol through PCI RR; a community driven initiative that reviews and recommends RRs across the full spectrum of STEM, medicine, social sciences, and the humanities. As a ‘PCI RR friendly journal’, ART commits to publishing any recommended articles which receive acceptance via this route, without the need for additional peer review. We hope that these developments will contribute to addiction science more actively adopting open science principles and help mitigate reproducibility concerns within the published literature.

Bystander reluctance in the aftermath of collegiate sexual misconduct

Most collegiate sexual misconduct victims disclose their experience to a friend, whose reaction and subsequent action are vital for a victim’s social-emotional recovery. The current study focuses on this broader peer community that has learned about an assault and their motivation or reluctance to take action in its aftermath. Thirty-nine undergraduate students were interviewed about the one or more times they had heard of someone else’s uncomfortable sexual encounter, for a total of 86 recalled incidents. Overall, students who learned of misconduct were affected by their newfound knowledge: they were shaken when an assault was discussed lightly, they evaluated the severity of the assault, they prioritized the victim’s wellbeing when considering actions to take, or they were surprised to hear of the assault in the first place. Yet grounded theory analysis identified four main barriers—a belief that the situation is not serious enough, a desire to avoid harming the victim, a lack of knowledge and confidence with their role, and a preference to take action outside of formal channels—that often prevented these reactions from translating into responsive action, leaving victims with less social support and continuing the underreporting of sexual misconduct. Recommendations include expanding bystander intervention training to include an assault’s aftermath and adding educational programming that challenge rape myths.