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In 2020, the G20 proposed a solution for the debt-related issues affecting the world's poorest countries due to the Covid-19 pandemic. However, their initiatives have failed to meet their objectives. The author argues that the reason for this failure is an inability to bring sovereign countries to the table to re-negotiate their debt agreements with private creditors, as they fear the credit rating agencies and the prospect of a downgrade. He refers to this as the 'Credit Ratings impasse'. This book proposes a novel solution. The author asserts that there is a need in the literature to unpick the dynamic that exists and creates that impasse, namely the pressures that exist between sovereign states, private creditors, credit rating agencies, and the geo-political backdrop that is massively influential in the dynamic, i.e. the adversarial relationship between China and the U.S. The book addresses the recent history of debt treatment for poorer countries and related success and failures;the Covid-19-related issues and the development of the Debt Service Suspension Initiative and the Common Framework for Debt Treatment. The book examines the reasons for their failure by analysing the positions of the sovereign states;the division between Private and Official creditors - and multilateral institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank;the Credit Rating Agencies;and the competing political entities of China and the U.S. It presents a wider picture of the systemic underpinnings to such debt-related issues and, when examined through a geo-political perspective, the subsequent chances of future debt treatment-related successes
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COVID-19 is determining a "new normal"in research, guidelines, and publishing. Traditional methods for research and systematic reviews are overcome by "living systematic reviews"and, during the pandemic, institutional boards release interim guidelines, standards of care, and authorizations for emergency use without the usual time and control. Publishing is deeply modified by open access journals, diffusion of preprints, accelerated peer-review processes such as Transparent Peer Review, Open Peer Review, Post-Publication Peer Review. These initiatives, taken together, are determining an explosion of open information. Nevertheless, a note of caution is needed. The peer-review process has to allow a reliability of information, particularly necessary in pandemic when it is immediately transferred in the clinical practice, which the accelerated processes or the skip out of them cannot guarantee. The public debate on COVID-19 is the proof of this.Copyright © 2020 EDIZIONI MINERVA MEDICA.
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Clinical guidelines are evidence-based clinician decision-support tools that improve health outcomes, reduce patient harm, and decrease healthcare costs, but are often underused in emergency departments (EDs). This article describes a replicable, evidence-based design-thinking approach to developing best practices for guideline design that improves clinical satisfaction and usage. We used a 5-step process to enhance guideline usability in our ED. First, we conducted end-user interviews to identify barriers to guideline usage. Second, we reviewed the literature to identify key principles in guideline design. Third, we applied our findings to create a standardized guideline format, incorporating rapid cycle learning and iterative improvements. Fourth, we ensured the clinical validity of our updated guidelines by using a rigorous process for peer review. Lastly, we evaluated the impact of our guideline conversion process by tracking clinical guidelines access per day from October 2020 to January 2022. Our end-user interviews and review of the design literature revealed several barriers to guideline use, including lack of readability, design inconsistencies, and guideline complexity. Although our previous clinical guideline system averaged 0.13 users per day, >43 users per day accessed the clinical guidelines on our new digital platform in January 2022, representing an increase in access and use exceeding 33,000%. Our replicable process using open-access resources increased clinician access to and satisfaction with clinical guidelines in our ED. Design-thinking and use of low-cost technology can significantly improve clinical guideline visibility and has the potential to increase guideline use.
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Background: Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) was originated first in Wuhan, Chi-na, in December 2019, and it is known to be caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coron-avirus-2 (SARS CoV-2). The management of COVID-19 could be achieved by means of the usage of the repurposed drugs, inhibiting the viral entry and/or viral fusion such as umifenovir, Barici-tinib, Camostat mesylate, Nafamostat mesylate, and the drugs blocking the viral replication, which include favipiravir, remdesivir, Lopinavir/ritonavir, Ribavirin, Sofosbuvir, chloroquine and Hydrox-ychloroquine. Objective(s): Along with the drugs that target the SARS-CoV-2 virus, adjunctive therapies are also employed. This review focuses on the adjuvant therapies employed to manage the COVID-19-asso-ciated complications, such as cytokine storm, acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), respiratory failure, cardiac injury, coagulopathy, and multi-organ failure. Method(s): The literature was searched in databases such as Medline/PubMed Central/PubMed, Goo-gle Scholar, Science Direct, EBSCO, Scopus, EMBASE, Directory of open access journals (DOA-J), and reference lists to identify relevant articles. Result(s): Various studies have been identified for the use of corticosteroids, interferons, monoclon-al antibodies, etoposide, ruxolitinib, anticoagulants, convalescent plasma, immunoglobulins, mes-enchymal stem cells, natural killer (NK) cells, and inhaled nitric oxide (NO) as adjuvant therapy to manage the patients with COVID-19 along with the repurposed drugs targeting SARS-CoV-2. Conclusion(s): The safety and efficacy of adjuvant therapy are needed to be confirmed by various ongoing randomized controlled clinical trials.Copyright © 2021 Bentham Science Publishers.
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Purpose: This study aimed to investigate the changes that occurred in journal and article publishing during the noncontact period that started in 2020 due to COVID-19. Methods: The integrated journal list in Journal Citation Reports (JCR) 2017–2021 and the search results of Web of Science were analyzed using pivot tables in Microsoft Excel. The articles, citations, impact factor (IF), publishers, open access (OA) status, and compound annual growth rate (CAGR) were investigated using the data. Results: The CAGRs of articles, citations, and IFs in JCR journals increased throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, the increase in OA articles was accompanied by a decreasing share of subscription articles. The top 20 journals in JCR-SCIE (Science Citation Index Expanded), based on the number of articles, accepted OA policies and showed a strong influence, accounting for 7% to 9% of all articles. MDPI and Frontiers were OA publishers included among the top 10 publishers. Large publishers maintained their competitiveness through mergers and acquisitions with OA publishers. Due to the rapid distribution of OA and early access articles as part of the international response to overcome COVID-19, the CAGRs of citations and IFs increased more than that of articles, and the publication and use of journal articles have become more active. Conclusion: The publication and use trends in JCR journals analyzed herein will provide useful information for researchers' selection of journals for article submission, analyses of research performance, and libraries' journal subscription contracts. © 2023 Korean Council of Science Editors
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This article presents a new typology for humanitarian-military relations (HMR). This typology can serve as an analytical framework for assessing, during humanitarian emergencies, how civilian responders can and should engage with armed actors. The typology considers two factors: (1) the nature of crisis-affected population's perceptions of an armed actor, and (2) the extent of alignment of civilian responders' and armed actors' interests and objectives. This typology is empirically rooted in an in-depth analysis of HMR across four humanitarian response contexts: (1) the Kivu Ebola Epidemic in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, (2) the Rukban forced displacement crisis along the Jordan-Syria border, (3) the Taal volcano eruption in the Philippines, and (4) the COVID-19 pandemic in the Philippines. The analysis presented in this article is based on 175 qualitative interviews conducted with civilian responders, armed actors, and crisis-affected individuals across these contexts.
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COVID-19, which has plagued the world since 2020, has brought changes in the order of human life globally, and ultimately has an impact on the psychological state of individuals, including teenagers. The aim of this study is to find the differences between students' gratitude score before and after the implementation of writing gratitude journal regularly. Participants on this study was 20 adolescents in Ambon City Maluku Indonesia, consists of 6 boys and 14 girls. The participants age was between 15-16 years old. Quantitative Method with experimental design used in this study. From the results, it was found that the significant value in the table paired samples correlations was 0.418, meaning that there are relationship between the results of the pre-test and post-test because the value was > sig. 0.05. Although the increase in the value of gratitude among adolescents in Ambon is not too large and increases their classification to be included in the criteria for groups that have sufficient gratitude scores, the important thing explained in implementing gratitude education actually lies in its aim to inspire students that it is important to be grateful in all circumstances. and it's not just about saying thank you or showing grateful behavior. This is an open access article under the CC BY-SA license.Copyright © 2022, Anka Publishers. All rights reserved.
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Launching a new open access journal of European law in times of COVID-19, economic slumps and widespread financial pressures on higher education is not a decision to be taken lightly, and it has not been taken lightly. [...]we want to give scholarship space to breathe- literally, by encouraging long, long articles, and figuratively, by privileging ‘slow', well crafted, fully matured work. [...]European Law Open will confront the normative principles, institutional structures, decision-making processes and substantive values that purportedly found the Union and shape its law. Not only is the European Union a major actor that has significant impacts – both positive and negative – on all the mentioned concerns and problems, but its laws and institutions have played an important role in both ushering some of the current challenges and can hopefully contribute to solving them.
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Background: The Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) affects different organs and systems of the human organism. However, the main target remains the respiratory system and lungs in particular. Systemic sclerosis (SSc) is one of the systemic autoimmune diseases that can cause severe lung impairment. Considering the existence of common points of influence on the human organism, the overlapping of these two pathologies can signifcantly increase the negative impact on the patient's health. Objectives: This study was aimed to analyze the common features of articles covering the link between COVID-19 and systemic sclerosis. Methods: We retrieved the literature items in the Scientific bibliometric database Scopus conducting our search on the 26th of January. We didn't set any time limits and did use the following keywords: 'systemic sclerosis' OR 'scleroderma' AND 'Covid-19' OR 'COVID-19' OR 'coronavirus'. The exclusion criteria were: absence of an , literature items in form of conference papers, and articles dedicated to the rheumatological pathology in general with scarce mention of SSc. All selected papers were analyzed in view of the following characteristics: documents' type, authorship, journal, citations score, the origin of an article, language, and keywords. For data visualization, we have used software tool VOSviewer version 1.6.15 which make possible to build authors' and keywords' network (Figure 1 A and B) (the minimum keywords' threshold was 3 and the minimum author occurrence was 5). Results: In the result of our comprehensive literature search only 206 items were obtained. After screening of title, and keywords we omitted 166 articles as they met our exclusion criteria and were irrelevant for our study. The most (87.5%) of remained 40 articles were open access publications, which improves the articles' visibility and simplifes data sharing. The top journals covering this topic were: Annals Of The Rheumatic Diseases (n=7), Journal of Psychosomatic Research (n=4), Journal Of Scleroderma And Related Disorders (n=4), Clinical Rheumatology (n=3), Lancet Rheumatology (n=3) and Scandinavian Journal Of Rheumatology (n=3). The post productive authors originated from Italy (n of articles = 20);other countries with highest number of publications were: UK-10;USA-7;France-7 and Netherlands-6). The majority of papers were written in English and just one was in Chinese. The most prevalent research type among analyzed articles was Letter (47.5%), about a third of the articles were designed as Original Articles (35%), 7.5% were Notes, the number of Reviews and Editorials was 5% for each type. Based on the citations score, the most relevant article was dedicated to COVID-19 course in patients with SSc associated interstitial lung disease (SSC-ILD) using tocilizumab. The second highly cited paper highlighted a disease course of COVID-19 pneumonia in SSc patients treated with rituxi-mab and the third actively cited article was World Scleroderma Foundation preliminary advice for patient management. It should also be noted that a lot of articles (n=7, 17.5%) were dedicated to the emotional wellbeing of SSc patients in time of COVID-19 pandemic. Conclusion: Based on our literature analysis, it is the frst attempt to overview comprehensively the papers focusing on SSc and COVID-19 overlap. The biblio-metric studies offer an essential opportunity to emphasize the main features and trends in the particular topic and could be used by scientists as a guidance for forthcoming research.
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Speed read Smallholder farmers ‘absolutely critical’ in food security fight Invasive species biggest threat to biodiversity after habitat loss CABI programmes to focus on prediction, prevention The need for objective coverage of science is greater now than ever before, according to Daniel Elger, who took over last month as the chief executive of the Centre for Agriculture and Bioscience International (CABI, the parent organisation of SciDev.Net). If women farmers have access to the same resources as men, among smallholder farmers in particular, that would immediately reduce the number of hungry people worldwide by 150 million or so, which gives you an idea of some of the important social dimensions beyond food production. See PDF] When we think about the science base of the organisation now, we think about both natural sciences and social sciences, because so much of what we are trying to do is to achieve impact not only at the level of farmers being able to grow more crops and improve their productivity, but embedding that in positive broader social change, particularly in some of the really important, cross-cutting themes — climate, gender equity, and other themes that are crucial to our member countries.
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The Journal of Medical Internet Research is pleased to offer "Research Letter" as a new article type. Research Letters are similar to original and short paper types in that they report the original results of studies in a peer-reviewed, structured scientific communication. The Research Letter article type is optimal for presenting new, early, or sometimes preliminary research findings, including interesting observations from ongoing research with significant implications that justify concise and rapid communication.
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Biomedical Research , Publishing , Communication , Humans , Peer ReviewABSTRACT
This book investigates the role of religion in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic in Southern Africa. Building on a diverse range of methodologies and disciplinary approaches, the book reflects on how religion, politics and health have interfaced in Southern African contexts, when faced with the sudden public health emergency caused by the pandemic. Religious actors have played a key role on the frontline throughout the pandemic, sometimes posing roadblocks to public health messaging, but more often deploying their resources to help provide effective and timely responses. Drawing on case studies from African indigenous knowledge systems, Islam, Rastafari and various forms of Christianity, this book provides important reflections on the role of religion in crisis response.
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Remote learning is not a new concept. The first major correspondence program was established in the late 1800s at the University of Chicago in the United States, in which the teacher and learner were at different locations. Remote learning, sometimes referred to as “Distance Learning”, “e-Learning”, or “Virtual Learning” has evolved rapidly with the advent of the internet and accelerated with the pandemic. Historically, learning has occurred through didactic methods, delivered through textbooks and in-person lectures. With travel and group meeting restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic, educators have been forced to search for novel solutions to continue robust academic training programs, continuing professional development, and international exchange programs. For all the benefits of remote learning, there remain improvement opportunities. Learners and instructors alike have many logistics and resource demands, to enable meaningful engagement in remote learning. Making online content more accessible, innovative, and interactive through user-friendly tools, can future-proof education systems. An invaluable educational tool for all engaged in medical education and training, the use of remote learning will necessitate equity in access to technology and information. This article will review the benefits and limitations of remote learning, highlighting its evolution, obstacles with logistics and future directions. © World Federation of Societies of Anaesthesiologists 2022.
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Introduction: Pacific University Libraries has had an institutional repository since 2009, when it selected Digital Commons to host a collection of theses and dissertations. Since then, the scope of the services has grown to include publishing open access journals as well as housing the books published by Pacific University Press—a library-born, hybrid, open access press. As our needs have changed, and with Elsevier’s acquisition of bepress in 2017, the University migrated from bepress’ Digital Commons platform to an open source Hyku platform hosted by Ubiquity Repositories. Description of Program: As the first academic institution working with Ubiquity Repositories on migration and implementation, we were involved in the process of data extraction, normalization, mapping, ingest, and validation. Lessons Learned: We learned the importance of having a mutual understanding of a platform’s goals, data structure and mapping, and standards in implementation decisions. Next Steps: As higher education continues to adapt to the changes brought by COVID-19, it has never seemed more important to utilize platforms that share the values of libraries worldwide. We hope that migrating to an open source platform will be a step toward more open scholarship, despite the current challenges and resource scarcity brought about by the pandemic.
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Introduction: This article discusses the changes to overall goals, direction, and services that were made to two library publishing programs at Pacific University and the University of South Florida when they were no longer able to grow their programs due to an inability to hire additional staff and COVID-19-instigated staff reassignments. Description of Programs: Pacific University’s publishing program grew out of its institutional repository and, at its peak, published seven open access journals. In addition, Pacific University Libraries founded a University Press in 2016, which has published six books as of 2021. The University of South Florida’s publishing program began publishing open access journals in 2008, and it has grown to include over 20 journals. Lessons Learned: Both the Pacific University and the University of South Florida publishing programs have faced scalability and sustainability issues, which were further exacerbated by COVID-19. The focus of our library publishing programs, as well as many others, has been on continual growth, which is not sustainable without the ability to hire additional staff or allocate staff time differently. We argue that standardizing services as well as creating a business plan can help ensure that publishing programs are sustainable and scalable. Next Steps: We hope to begin a conversation among library publishers about acknowledging limits and creating achievable definitions of success outside of continual growth.
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Have you ever sought to use metagenomic DNA sequences reported in scientific publications? Were you successful? Here, we reveal that metagenomes from no fewer than 20% of the papers found in our literature search, published between 2016 and 2019, were not deposited in a repository or were simply inaccessible. The proportion of inaccessible data within the literature has been increasing year-on-year. Noncompliance with Open Data is best predicted by the scientific discipline of the journal. The number of citations, journal type (e.g., Open Access or subscription journals), and publisher are not good predictors of data accessibility. However, many publications in high–impact factor journals do display a higher likelihood of accessible metagenomic data sets. Twenty-first century science demands compliance with the ethical standard of data sharing of metagenomes and DNA sequence data more broadly. Data accessibility must become one of the routine and mandatory components of manuscript submissions—a requirement that should be applicable across the increasing number of disciplines using metagenomics. Compliance must be ensured and reinforced by funders, publishers, editors, reviewers, and, ultimately, the authors.