Taking stock of the availability and functions of National Ethics Committees worldwide

Background National Ethics Committees (NECs) offer important oversight and guidance functions and facilitate public debate on bioethical issues. In an increasingly globalized world where technological advances, multi-national research collaborations, and pandemics are creating ethical dilemmas that transcend national borders, coordination and the joining of efforts among NECs are key. The purpose of this study is to take stock of the current NEC landscape, their varying roles and missions, and the range of bioethical topics on which they deliberated since their inception. Methods Data on the availability, functions, and ethical deliberations (publications) of NECs globally were gathered through a systematic search of NEC websites and through contacts known to the authors. The search was conducted in English, French, and Spanish. The data abstraction was done in Excel and included the NEC’s country, region, functions, and deliberations on bioethical issues. Deliberation topics were classified into thematic categories through an iterative process of regrouping to arrive at the main set of themes. Results 124 NECs in 100 countries were identified. 44% of the NECs are in Europe and 47% are in high-income countries. Out of the 1108 retrieved publications, 40% were on bioethics in the context of research, followed by the clinic (28%) and public health issues (22%). The top five topics of these publications were: research ethics (124; 9%), genetics and genomics (62; 6%), organ transplantation (58; 5%), assisted reproductive technology (49; 4%), and end of life (36; 3%). Conclusion Our study makes an important contribution to understanding the current interests and functions of NECs and the range of their bioethics deliberations. By making the data publicly available through this publication, it allows users to conduct tailored analyses and queries based on their interests, and to seek and strengthen collaboration and exchange. It also makes the case for the fruitfulness of developing and maintaining a global repository of current and new deliberations to more effectively advance this field for the greater good of humanity, research, and public health.

SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT TOWARDS GLOBAL CHALLENGIES OF HUMANITY RESEARCH

The evolution of modern scientific schools of global challenges research, in particular global climate change, are considered in the article. Concept of "limits of growth", "stabke development", "mitosis of biospheres" are considered as base scientific approaches of comprehension and settlement of modern global challenges. An author agrees, that an anthro-pogenic factor is one of key point of global climatic changes. There is shown in the article that developments within the framework of concepts of "limits of growth", "stable development", "mithosis of biospheres" and "controlled global development" stimulated experimental researches and designs of future humanity, declared about global ecological challenges to humanity, and put beginning to the programs of new humanism, criterion ‘‘to think globally". Also showed that for positive changes and prevention of collapse it is nesessary the quality changes of human thinking and joint efforts of all actor of international relations. An author shows that from the one side, scientific researches towards to the decision of global climate change problem, are the basis of political decisions of national governments and international organization, and from other side, despite the plenty of scientific approaches and practical developments, today there is no universal model of global climate change prevention, in particular, to the global warming.

Applications of collaborative annotation system in digital curation, crowdsourcing, and digital humanities

Purpose Collaboratively annotating digital texts allow users to add valued information, share ideas and create knowledge. Most importantly, annotated content can help users obtain a deeper and broader understanding of a text compared to digital content without annotations. This work proposes a novel collaborative annotation system (CAS) with four types of multimedia annotations including text annotation, picture annotation, voice annotation and video annotation which can embedded into any HTML Web pages to enable users to collaboratively add and manage annotations on these pages and provide a shared mechanism for discussing shared annotations among multiple users. By applying the CAS in a mashup on static HTML Web pages, this study aims to discuss the applications of CAS in digital curation, crowdsourcing and digital humanities to encourage existing strong relations among them. Design/methodology/approach This work adopted asynchronous JavaScript (Ajax) and a model-view-controller framework to implement a CAS with reading annotation tools for knowledge creating, archiving and sharing services, as well as applying the implemented CAS to support digital curation, crowdsourcing and digital humanities. A questionnaire survey method was used to investigate the ideas and satisfaction of visitors who attended a digital curation with CAS support in the item dimensions of the interactivity with displayed products, the attraction and the content absorption effect. Also, to collect qualitative data that may not be revealed by the questionnaire survey, semi-structured interviews were performed at the end of the digital curation exhibition activity. Additionally, the effects of the crowdsourcing and digital humanities with CAS support on collecting and organizing ideas and opinions for historical events and promoting humanity research outcomes were considered as future works because they all need to take a long time to investigate. Findings Based on the questionnaire survey, this work found that the digital curation with CAS support revealed the highest rating score in terms of the item dimension of attraction effect. The result shows applying CAS to support digital curation is practicable, novel and interesting to visitors. Additionally, this work also successfully applied the developed CAS to crowdsourcing and digital humanities so that the two research fields may be brought into a new ground. Originality/value Based on the CAS, this work developed a novel digital curation approach which has a high degree of satisfaction on attraction effect to visitors, an innovative crowdsourcing platform that combined with a digital archive system to efficiently gather collective intelligence to solve the difficult problems of identifying digital archive contents and a high potential digital humanity research mode that can assist humanities scholars to annotate the texts with distinct interpretation and viewpoints on an ancient map, as well as discuss with other humanities scholars to stimulate discussion on more issues.