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'Public engagement with science' has become a 'buzzword' reflecting a concern about the widening gap between science and society and efforts to bridge this gap. This study is a comprehensive analysis of the development of the 'engagement' rhetoric in the pertinent academic literature on science communication and in science policy documents. By way of a content analysis of articles published in three leading science communication journals and a selection of science policy documents from the United Kingdom (UK), the United States of America (USA), the European Union (EU), and South Africa (SA), the variety of motives underlying this rhetoric, as well as the impact it has on science policies, are analyzed. The analysis of the science communication journals reveals an increasingly vague and inclusive definition of 'engagement' as well as of the 'public' being addressed, and a diverse range of motives driving the rhetoric. Similar observations can be made about the science policy documents. This study corroborates an earlier diagnosis that rhetoric is running ahead of practice and suggests that communication and engagement with clearly defined stakeholder groups about specific problems and the pertinent scientific knowledge will be a more successful manner of 'engagement'., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Madagascar's health system is highly dependent on donor funding, especially from the United States (US), and relies on a few nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) to provide contraceptive services in remote areas of the country. The Trump administration reinstated and expanded the Global Gag Rule (GGR) in 2017; this policy requires non-US NGOs receiving US global health funding to certify that neither they nor their sub-grantees will provide, counsel or refer for abortion as a method of family planning. Evidence of the impact of the GGR in a country with restrictive abortion laws, like Madagascar - which has no explicit exception to save the woman's life - is limited. Researchers conducted semi-structured interviews with 259 representatives of the Ministry of Health and NGOs, public and private health providers, community health workers and contraceptive clients in Antananarivo and eight districts between May 2019 and March 2020. Interviews highlighted the impact of the GGR on NGOs that did not certify the policy and lost their US funding. This reduction in funding led to fewer contraceptive service delivery points, including mobile outreach services, a critical component of care in rural areas. Public and private health providers reported increased contraceptive stockouts and fees charged to clients. Although the GGR is ostensibly about abortion, it has reduced access to contraception for the Malagasy population. This is one of few studies to directly document the impact on women who themselves described their increased difficulties obtaining contraception ultimately resulting in discontinuation of contraceptive use, unintended pregnancies and unsafe abortions.

This study highlights the need for analysis of online disclosure practices followed by non-governmental organizations; furthermore, it justifies the crucial role of potential correlates of online disclosure practices followed by non-governmental organizations. We propose a novel index for analyzing the extent of online disclosure of non-governmental organizations (NGO). Using the information stored in an auxiliary variable, we propose a new estimator for gauging the average value of the proposed index. Our approach relies on the use of two factors: imperfect ranked-set sampling procedure to link the auxiliary variable with the study variable, and an NGO disclosure index under simple random sampling that uses information only about the study variable. Relative efficiency of the proposed index is compared with the conventional estimator for the population average under the imperfect ranked-set sampling scheme. Mathematical conditions required for retaining the efficiency of the proposed index, in comparison to the imperfect ranked set sampling estimator, are derived. Numerical scrutiny of the relative efficiency, in response to the input variables, indicates; if the variance of the NGO disclosure index is less than the variance of the estimator under imperfect ranked set sampling, then the proposed index is universally efficient compared to the estimator under imperfect ranked set sampling. If the condition on variances is unmet, even then the proposed estimator remains efficient if majority of the NGO share online data on the auxiliary variable. This work can facilitate nonprofit regulation in the countries where most of the non-governmental organizations maintain their websites., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

This article considers a case in which a prominent researcher repeatedly made protocol deviations year after year while the institutional review board and university leadership failed to adequately address his continuing noncompliance. This article argues that, in addition to reporting this researcher's pattern of noncompliance to the Office for Human Research Protections, as required by federal regulations, the university should implement a remedial action plan., (© 2020 American Medical Association. All Rights Reserved.)

The Global gag rule (GGR), originally known as the Mexico City Policy, is a United States policy that limits the reproductive rights of women in many resource-poor countries. In 2018, the US administration of President Donald Trump reinstated this policy, which was first issued by President Ronald Reagan in 1984, and later annulled by two US presidents in the intervening years. The policy prohibits any non-governmental organisation (NGO) outside the US from providing women or couples with family planning information that includes access to abortion, as a condition of receiving US funding. Although the policy is designed to reduce the rate of abortion in countries where NGOs have adopted it, studies have shown the opposite effect. The policy violates fundamental ethical principles, as well as United Nations human rights treaties and action programmes.

An increasingly blurred understanding of the conditions under which clinicians may withhold HIV seropositive status from partners of patients who are sexually active and who do not intend to disclose suggests a critical need to revisit the relationship between the principle of confidentiality, the moral and legal duties to warn at-risk third parties, and the organisational ethics surrounding licit cooperation with wrongdoing in the effort to uphold professional moral responsibility. This essay grounds its argument in two, straightforward premises: (i) the ethical principle of cooperation is an indispensable measure of the moral licitness of instances of complicity with wrongdoing; (ii) some instances of material organisational complicity vis-à-vis confidential withholdings of HIV seropositive status from partners of sexually active patients both meet and successfully employ the standards of the ethical principle of cooperation. Drawing from this syllogism, the essay argues that, in Type II cases, healthcare organisations may (initially and on certain conditions) materially cooperate in withholding the HIV seropositive status of patients from partners with whom patients are sexually active, and to whom patients do not intend to disclose HIV seropositive status, in the effort to honour professional obligations of privacy, confidentiality, and fidelity in a manner that is both legally licit and morally justifiable.

Website of Non-governmental organization (NGO) is a focal medium of sharing information in response to transparency demands and addressing trust deficits between stakeholders. Many researchers have proposed accountability approaches to measure information sharing trends through websites. This article discusses a new index to measure online disclosure trends along with the theoretical properties of the index and a practical application of data from NGOs working in Pakistan. The websites have been coded in 2016. Results show that NGOs with branch offices have better disclosure scores than single-office NGOs, and international NGOs score better than local NGOs. NGOs that are more often the subject of newspaper reports have better disclosure trends.

All U.S. federal agencies administering environmental laws purport to practice adaptive management (AM), but little is known about how they actually implement this conservation tool. A gap between the theory and practice of AM is revealed in judicial decisions reviewing agency adaptive management plans. We analyzed all U.S. federal court opinions published through 1 January 2015 to identify the agency AM practices courts found most deficient. The shortcomings included lack of clear objectives and processes, monitoring thresholds, and defined actions triggered by thresholds. This trio of agency shortcuts around critical, iterative steps characterizes what we call AM-lite. Passive AM differs from active AM in its relative lack of management interventions through experimental strategies. In contrast, AM-lite is a distinctive form of passive AM that fails to provide for the iterative steps necessary to learn from management. Courts have developed a sophisticated understanding of AM and often offer instructive rather than merely critical opinions. The role of the judiciary is limited by agency discretion under U.S. administrative law. But courts have overturned some agency AM-lite practices and insisted on more rigorous analyses to ensure that the promised benefits of structured learning and fine-tuned management have a reasonable likelihood of occurring. Nonetheless, there remains a mismatch in U.S. administrative law between the flexibility demanded by adaptive management and the legal objectives of transparency, public participation, and finality., (© 2015 Society for Conservation Biology.)

Objective: Evaluate the capacity of the federal legal framework to govern financing of health institutions in the public sector through innovative schemes--otherwise known as functional integration--, enabling them to purchase and sell health services to and from other public providers as a strategy to improve their performance., Materials and Methods: Based on indicators of normative alignment with respect to functional integration across public health provider and governance institutions, content analysis was undertaken of national health programs and relevant laws and guidelines for financial coordination., Results: Significant progress was identified in the implementation of agreements for the coordination of public institutions. While the legal framework provides for a National Health System and a health sector, gaps and contradictions limit their scope. The General Register of Health is also moving forward, yet it lacks the necessary legal foundation to become a comprehensive tool for integration. The medical service exchange agreements are also moving forward based on tariffs and shared guidelines. However, there is a lack of incentives to promote the expansion of these agreements., Conclusions: It is recommended to update the legal framework for the coordination of the National Health System, ensuring a more harmonious and general focus to provide functional integration with the needed impulse.

This essay positions sport as a pedagogical social institution from which people learn about race, gender, power, and privilege. The National Basketball Association is examined closely with a critical race lens with regard to the commodification of Black masculinity. A critical race analysis reveals the sharp contradictions between the league’s progressive image as an “industry leader” of racial diversity (Lapchick, Bustamante, & Ruiz, 2007, p.1) and the actualization of league discourse, policy, and practice.

During the mid-1960s a few Catholic journals and individuals advised that a more active role should be taken in defeating abortion reform. In 1967 the National Conference of Catholic Bishops selected James Thomas McHugh, administrator of the United States Catholic Conference’s Family Life Bureau, to guide its National Right to Life Committee (NRLC). Several pro-life organizations, including Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life, emerged and affiliated with the NRLC national office. To appeal to a more broad-based, nonsectarian movement, key Minnesota leaders proposed an organizational model that would separate the NRLC from its founder. In early 1973 McHugh and his executive assistant, Michael Taylor, proposed a different plan, facilitating the NRLC’s move to independence.

The American response to Lysenkoism took place at a crucial moment in the evolving relationship between science and the public. Like many professional scientific organizations in the early Cold War, the Genetics Society of America (GSA) resisted involvement in political issues. In contrast to similar societies in the physical sciences, however, the geneticists' silence cannot be explained solely by the fear of financial or political repercussions. Rather, the GSA's reluctance to engage in political discussion reflected an ongoing debate within the scientific community on the proper role for professional societies in political controversy. Those geneticists who did become embroiled in the controversy did so as individuals rather than as emissaries of the profession. Geneticists H.J. Muller, L.C. Dunn, and Theodosius Dobzhansky attempted to reach the public through a variety of outlets, including books, magazines, newspapers, and the radio, but their interventions were shaped by their individual personal and political commitments. The GSA, in contrast, attempted to combat the spread of Lysenkoism with the help of a public relations firm and a Golden Jubilee celebration of the rediscovery of Mendel's laws. The messy story of the American response to the Lysenko crisis demonstrates the limits of scientists' political involvement during the early Cold War.

Objectives. Given the recent rise of poverty in U.S. suburbs, this study asks: What poor neighborhoods are most disadvantageous, those in the city or those in the suburbs? Building on recent urban sociological work demonstrating the importance of neighborhood organizations for the poor, we are concerned with one aspect of disadvantage—the lack of availability of organizational resources oriented toward the poor. By breaking down organizations into those that promote mobility versus those that help individuals meet their daily subsistence needs, we seek to explore potential variations in the type of disadvantage that may exist.Methods. We test whether poor urban or suburban neighborhoods are more likely to be organizationally deprived by breaking down organizations into three types: hardship organizations, educational organizations, and employment organizations. We use data from the 2000 U.S. County Business Patterns and the 2000 U.S. Census and test neighborhood deprivation using logistic regression models.Results. We find that suburban poor neighborhoods are more likely to be organizationally deprived than are urban poor neighborhoods, especially with respect to organizations that promote upward mobility. Interesting racial and ethnic composition factors shape this more general finding.Conclusion. Our findings suggest that if a poor individual is to live in a poor neighborhood, with respect to access to organizational resources, he or she would be better off living in the central city. Suburban residence engenders isolation from organizations that will help meet one's daily needs and even more so from those offering opportunities for mobility.

Human rights and public health advocates working to compel states to guarantee access to legal abortion services face obstacles. We describe the challenges faced by "Rosa", a nine-year old Nicaraguan girl, whose pregnancy following rape sparked international controversy. The health and human rights arguments utilized either to support or undermine her family's petition for access to legal abortion are explored. Rosa's case highlights how laws that narrowly restrict abortion and make access contingent upon health care providers' approval undermine human rights principles. The article analyzes the strengths, limitations, and complementarity of health and human rights approaches for achieving access to safe, legal services in restrictive contexts. The importance of strategic alliances and implications for future cases are considered.

This paper reports on a partnership between LEPRA, a non-governmental organization (NGO), and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) to explore the feasibility and appropriateness of incorporating operations research into the management and decision-making of a leprosy NGO. A pilot study in Orissa was used to determine the advantages and disadvantages of introducing operations research to assist in decision-making and programme implementation within the organization. The results highlight the difficulty and complexity of the process, but point to several important themes: partnership, changing perspectives, use of time and priority-setting, identification of gaps in systems, and building institutional and personal capabilities. The results of the study provide support to encourage NGOs to become actively involved in research. Because of their work and service to local communities, NGOs have the opportunity to collect information about the perceptions, resources and constraints of individuals, families and the communities themselves in accessing appropriate care. Their proximity to communities gives them a feeling of responsibility for ensuring that this information is translated to the district, national and ultimately international level. This will help to ensure the creation of appropriate infectious disease control policies that support the needs of patients. 'Outside' academic institutions can help NGOs to facilitate this up-stream flow of information from the local to the national and international level, to help to ensure that international disease control policies are appropriately serving local communities.

The Association of Academic Health Sciences Libraries' (AAHSL's) involvement in national legislative activities and other advocacy initiatives has evolved and matured over the last twenty-five years. Some activities conducted by the Medical Library Association's (MLA's) Legislative Committee from 1976 to 1984 are highlighted to show the evolution of MLA's and AAHSL's interests in collaborating on national legislative issues, which resulted in an agreement to form a joint legislative task force. The history, work, challenges, and accomplishments of the Joint MLA/AAHSL Legislative Task Force, formed in 1985, are discussed.