Fostering research inclusiveness through the promotion of fairness, equity, and diversity: A working group statement on science innovation in the South of Cape Town

Science is steeped in injustice and exploitation. Natural history data has been taken without consent, and genetics data has been manipulated to back eugenics movements. Many people from minority ethnic groups don’t feel welcome in universities due to the legacy of low trust in science and the fact that they don’t like science.

There is a call for more equitable partnerships written by Dolors Armenteras Pascual, a biodiversity researcher in the country of Columbia. “By that, I mean researchers or institutions add superficial, in-name-only equity efforts to their departments, events or collaborations — and nothing changes.” Her recommendations for researchers are to avoid tokenism, build long-term collaborations and not to be extractive.

The publication of guidelines or principles is a result of three of the previous world conferences. We are part of a working group (including bioethicists, researchers, institutional leaders and journal editors) that now presents the Cape Town Statement on Fostering Research Integrity Through the Promotion of Fairness, Equity, and Diversity. (See Supplementary information for a list of working-group members.)

For example, here is a typical funding rejection I receive: “The applicant has strong credentials. She has an excellent publication record. However, compared to highly cited researchers, her output seems below the standards of the call.” I don’t have the resources available to colleagues in wealthier countries in the global north. To compare researchers’ impacts fairly, I think we should change how metrics, such as h-index, are calculated. For example, one could multiply one’s impact score by the percentage difference of gross domestic product spent on science between countries.

Decolonizing agricultural research: Is the world a better agricultural society? A case for global decolonization and inclusiveness through authorship

It’s difficult when colleagues with privilege view those of us who vocalize our frustrations as complainers. If you want to collaborate with me here in Colombia to help you build a brand in France or the United Kingdom, forget it. I only accept invitations that will allow my group to be on a level playing field and for us to take a leadership role. It’s not easy, and there is a cost, but I find it helpful to set these boundaries.

I’ve studied rain-fed cropping systems alongside colleagues in sub-Saharan Africa, notably Malawi, Zimbabwe and Tanzania, throughout my career. Those colleagues are not invited by their white, Western collaborators to speak at big conferences or to co-author high-profile papers in agriculture. We hope to change this trend by advocating for decolonization through authorship. As a start, my team of researchers will include a paragraph about what each author did, and how the team paid attention to gender and global-south inclusivity in publications.

Most of the research Centres and gene banks in the global research partnership use the h-index for performance evaluations. It is a way of measuring the influence of a scientist. Alternative indices, such as Google Scholar, which includes outputs such as book chapters, can be less elitist and include a wider range of viewpoints.

Agricultural research is steeped in colonial attitudes in many ways, too. For example, many programmes focus solely on higher crop yields, rather than including the nuances of resource stewardship, such as how using perennial crops improves soil health at the cost of lower yields. By using scholars from the global south to conduct agricultural research, we will be better able to address a larger range of production and sustainable goals.

I’m making the case that performance evaluations reward sharing of data sets and information between communities quicker. I am excited to see Digital Green, a Microsoft product that shares everything from weather to market data with farmers and farmer educators equitably and swiftly. This is part of decolonization. This way of connecting people gives them more access to information in a local context.

Researchers are using satellites to collect data that will support the anti-plastic pollution treaty. There is a future for animal-to-human transplants and preventive antibiotics for sexually transmitted infections.

A health department in the United States has become one of the first to recommend that people who are at high risk of getting a sexually transmitted infection (STI) take a preventive dose of antibiotics after unprotected sex. Clinical trials show that the strategy can reduce infections. It’s thought that it will contribute to antibiotic resistance. Researchers say guidelines about use are important for informing people about the safety of a strategy they might already be using. If the tool makes sense for people and their lifestyles, then they should be able to use it.

The number of deaths from bugs was close to 8 million in 2019, making them second largest killer after heart disease. Death rates differed widely by region, from 230 deaths per 100,000 people in sub-Saharan Africa to 52 deaths per 100,000 across western Europe, North America and Australasia. Christopher Murray says the new data for the first time shows the full extent of the public health challenge posed by bacterial infections.

Changing the world: The first human xenotransplantation or transplant into an Egyptian man with a genetically modified kidney goes to the clinic

In the wake of the 27th United Nations climate conference (COP27) in Egypt, diplomats, activists and scientists are pondering how to make such events more impactful. Some believe that theCOPs could focus more on how to incentivize drastic reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions, with richer countries leading the way.

The first pig transplants into humans have raised expectations for the practice. In January, a man who was too ill to qualify for a human or artificial heart was granted emergency authorization to receive a pig heart. He lived for more than a month after the procedure. Other tests have shown that people who had been declared legally dead were genetically modified pig kidneys. Proponents of more clinical trials say xenotransplantation could help to make a large dent in the list of the thousands of people in need of organ transplants. “I think we need to take that step forward and go to the clinic,” says transplant surgeon Wayne Hawthorne. The mood is cautious. “If there’s a problem, you could set the whole field back.”

Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04128-y

A multi-sensor navigation system based on OFDM and Bruno Latour’s book “The Paris tragedy of a European plastic crisis”

In March of this year, 175 nations voted to create an international treaty on plastics, decades after researchers warned that they were a global problem. Negotiations start in earnest in Uruguay on 28 November. To ensure that a treaty is completed by the end of the century, it is important to know where the plastic comes from, where it goes and who is responsible. Researchers are contributing by collecting tiny plastic particles from beaches, measuring light -reflecting off debris with satellites and dropping GPS-tagged bottles into India’s Ganges River.

Steve Woolgar wrote an important book about Bruno Latour and his work in science and technology studies. “He wrote about profound issues with a disarming lightness,” writes Woolgar. “At a lecture at the University of Oxford in 2003, a junior researcher dared to interrupt Bruno to point out a logical inconsistency. Bruno shouted “But I am French!” to rapturous applause. Latour has died aged 75.

A prototype navigation system makes it possible for it to reach centimetre level accuracy. The system uses a telecommunications technique known as orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) to combine multiple mobile-phone signals. The transmitters are connected by optical cables to make sure that they are perfectly synchronized.

The zero draft of the United Nations Convention on Diseases, Hypergenes and Diseases aims to increase equity and reduce costs for pandemic prevention and response

The draft also seeks to “strike a grand bargain” in sharing data, says Moon. Moon says rich states want countries to share data on diseases quickly, while low-income states want access to the biological information that can be used to create products. Within hours of a new pathogen being identified, the draft requires signatories to donate it to a WHO lab and to make its genomes available to the public. The WHO will receive 20% of the vaccines, diagnostics and drugs that states produce in return for donating half and paying the rest at an affordable cost. But the text falls short of requiring states to share IP rights as part of such an agreement, says Moon.

Researchers say that the document is an ambitious effort to address searing inequities that occurred during the pandemic, but that it doesn’t do enough to force countries to share scarce resources or punish those that don’t comply.

“It has more heart and brain than I expected,” says Kelley Lee, scientific co-director at the Pacific Institute on Pathogens, Pandemics and Society in Burnaby, Canada. “But it still has insufficient teeth and an insufficient spine to ensure that we’ll definitely have a better response next time.”

WHO member states will now begin debating the terms of the document — known as the zero draft — at a series of meetings, the first of which will begin later this month. Researchers expect the negotiations to be contentious, and some of the language is likely to be watered down before the agreement is adopted in 2024.

It’s a tight timeline for creating a new legal instrument, but some researchers say it could still be too late for the next major outbreak. There are many infectious diseases that can spread quickly from animals to humans, and there is an outbreak of H5N1 bird flu that is quickly spreading among mammals. The time is not on the side of the Global Health Lawyer at the school in Baltimore.

Equity is a focus of the zero draft. Establishing a global network to supply and distribute ingredients used to produce drugs is one of the articles in the treaty.

Under the terms of the treaty, parties should also commit to allocating no less than 5% of their annual health budget for pandemic prevention and response. And they should earmark an as-yet-unspecified percentage of their gross domestic product, in particular to support developing countries in preparing for pandemics. If agreed, Moon says this would be the first instance she knows of in which governments commit to setting aside a specific amount of money for international aid in a treaty. I don’t think it will happen, but it is a bold proposal.

It is problematic that talks about how to make sure compliance is addressed after the treaty comes into force according to Layth Hanbali, a health policy analyst in the occupied Palestinian territories. The treaty document will have no meaning unless a mechanism is in place to hold states accountable.

But Phelan says it is important not to underestimate the value of the treaty-building process itself. Discussions and debates over the provisions will help to build trust between governments, change behaviour and establish international norms of solidarity.

The COVID-19 collaboration challenge for researchers in low- and middle-income countries: How African researchers are choosing their publications versus where they come from

The world conferences on research integrity has been a leading place for discussion regarding ways to promote responsible behavior in research. The events held in Lisbon have helped to establish an academic field focused on research integrity.

LMICs have institutions that do not have sufficient research management and financial systems. They need little or no assistance in meeting the due diligence requirements of funders in high-income countries. (Frequently this involves answering hundreds of questions in multi-page documents about institutional and research governance processes and policies.)

According to the impact ratings of the 10 top medical and global-health journals, which are listed below, more than half of the authors of the COVID-19 papers were from Africa or any African country. One in five articles had no author from Africa at all. What’s more, of those papers with African authorship, 59% of first authors and 81% of last authors were not from Africa, and only 14% of papers had both an African first and last author.

Often, what happens is that after securing a grant for a project, a research team from a high-income country looks for local researchers in the low- or middle-income country of interest to collaborate with. Local researchers might be offered some grant money and co-authorship on a paper (usually with their name appearing in the middle of the list). Invariably, the lead research team conducts the analyses, with the local researchers only reviewing manuscripts, often to ensure that they are culturally and politically acceptable3.

The push for openness and transparency in science publishing has created more obstacles for investigators in low-resource environments.

Unforeseen difficulties are arising around publishing, too. Currently, the costs to publish an article in gold open-access journals (which typically range from US$500–$3,000) are prohibitive for most researchers and institutions in LMICs. The University of Cape Town has an annual budget of about 185,000 dollars for article-processing costs. This covers only about 120 articles per year.

Papers can often be found in subscription-based journals in these countries. Many scientists working in similar situations can not access some journals because the libraries in their institutions can’t fund subscriptions to all of them. All this makes it even harder for researchers to build on locally relevant science.

The calls for grant applicants need to include diversity stipulations. In 2020 the second European and Developing Countries Clinical Trials Partnership programme asked applicants to apply for funding for projects geared towards addressing gender and diversity gap in clinical research capacity in sub-Saharan. The European Union supports the partnership between countries in Europe and sub-Saharan Africa.

The Cape Town Statement differs from these other guidelines and tools, however, in that it recognizes that unfair practices can harm the integrity of all research, no matter the discipline or context. Specifically, it focuses on the following four broad actions.

The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine has been involved in global-health research for many decades. The organization’s members have often held unacknowledged positions of advantage through its Decolonising Global Health initiative and a group of staff and students are trying to address this. So far, this has involved various undertakings, including a series of educational lectures.

Stakeholders, from researchers to journal editors and publishers, must take actions to ensure that power is not put in too many hands in research collaborations.

Many need to follow suit but some funders are making progress. The majority of the grants go directly to institutions in Africa. Data Science for Health Discovery and Innovation in Africa (DS-I Africa) was launched by the US National Institute of Health. This is being led by African scientists, and is creating a pan-African data network designed to address African research priorities4.

If data has been gathered in a low-income country, but lead and collaborating authors are from high-income countries, then the submissions from authors need to be questioned.

Some are already taking steps in this direction. The papers submitted by researchers from outside Africa with data collected from Africa, but have no mention or acknowledgement of a single African partner, have been rejected by the Lancet. Nature journals encourage authors to provide disclosures on ethics when they submit manuscripts.

Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00855-y

Research Ethics in Low- and Middle-Income Countries: From South-East Asia to the Middle-Asia and the Middle East

The development of research support systems in LMICs must be made possible by both funders and collaborating institutions. This could mean paying for computing infrastructure, mentorship programmes, open-access publishing, or the training and salaries of project and financial managers, for example.

Several controversies in research ethics, which occurred as a result of HIV research projects undergoing ethical scrutiny during the height of the HIV epidemic in the 1980s and early 1990s, prompted the Fogarty International Center at the NIH to launch the International Bioethics Education and Career Development Award in 1999. The aim was to ensure that there were strong research ethics committees in LMIC institutions, with adequately trained members, to review studies and meet international ethics and regulatory standards required by US funders. Thanks to this and subsequent efforts hundreds of people in Africa and Asia have received training and continue to serve on review boards.

During the 2000s, researchers from the United Kingdom and other high-income countries obtained blood samples from people of the San community in Namibia for genetic research without always adequately explaining what those samples would be used for, or reaching any benefit-sharing agreements with the community.

The values of the ethics developed by the San people are very similar to what researchers must abide by before attempting to obtain samples or information from them. This code can be used by researchers in other Indigenous communities if codes specific to a particular community aren’t already exist.

Another way in which local knowledge can be incorporated equitably is by ensuring that community members with no formal qualifications are included in research teams.

Climate change is disproportionately impacting people living in LMICs. Many of the challenges arise because of the long history of colonial exploitation and inequitable use of Earth’s resources. It was reported last year that researchers from LMICs were not respected in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.