Correction: Public communication by research institutes compared across countries and sciences: Building capacity for engagement or competing for visibility?

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0235191.].

Public communication by research institutes compared across countries and sciences: Building capacity for engagement or competing for visibility?

Leading academic institutions, governments, and funders of research across the world have spent the last few decades fretting publicly about the need for scientists and research organisations to engage more widely with the public and be open about their research. While a global literature asserts that public communication has changed from a virtue to a duty for scientists in many countries and disciplines, our knowledge about what research institutions are doing and what factors drive their 'going public' is very limited. Here we present the first cross-national study of N = 2,030 research institutes within universities and large scientific organisations in Brazil, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Portugal, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America. We find that institutes embrace communication with non-peers and do so through a variety of public events and traditional news media-less so through new media channels-and we find variation across countries and sciences, yet these are less evident than we expected. Country and disciplinary cultures contribute to the level of this communication, as do the resources that institutes make available for the effort; institutes with professionalised staff show higher activity online. Future research should examine whether a real change in the organisational culture is happening or whether this activity and resource allocation is merely a means to increase institutional visibility.

Investigating the health care delivery system in Japan and reviewing the local public hospital reform.

Japan's health care system is considered one of the best health care systems in the world. Hospitals are one of the most important health care resources in Japan. As such, we investigate Japanese hospitals from various viewpoints, including their roles, ownership, regional distribution, and characteristics with respect to the number of beds, staff, doctors, and financial performance. Applying a multivariate analysis and regression model techniques, we show the functional differences between urban populated prefectures and remote ones; the equality gap among all prefectures with respect to the distribution of the number of beds, staff, and doctors; and managerial differences between private and public hospitals. We also review and evaluate the local public hospital reform executed in 2007 from various financial aspects related to the expenditure and revenue structure by comparing public and private hospitals. We show that the 2007 reform contributed to improving the financial situation of local public hospitals. Strategic differences between public and private hospitals with respect to their management and strategy to improve their financial situation are also quantitatively analyzed in detail. Finally, the remaining problems and the future strategy to further improve the Japanese health care system are described.