Transparent Access Research Articles

A case study on the Recovery Experiences of Problematic Online Gamblers

ABSTRACT This study analysed the recovery experiences of problematic online gamblers in South Korea using the case analysis method proposed by Padgett (1998). Ten cases participated in this study. Analysis revealed four types of difficulties in recovery from problematic gambling (prevalent conditions of online gambling, the dilemma of access blocking, anonymity’s role in enabling secret relapses, and constant temptation from betting companies) and four types of recovery strategies (access blocking, transparent online access, temptation blocking, and traditional recovery strategies). Moreover, the spiral process of recovery was discovered.

The influence of digital divide frames on legislative passage and partisan sponsorship: A content analysis of digital equity legislation in the U.S. from 1990 to 2020

Government funding is essential for digital equity. Scholarship on policies to improve internet access often examines the funding mechanisms behind subsidies, or the quality and reach of services provided. However, a better understanding of the issues and constituencies to receive government support to date may help digital equity activists more strategically lobby for new digital divide policies in the future. To do this, we take a macro-level approach to Van Dijk's resources and appropriation theory and examine how the framing of all digital divide–related U.S. Congressional legislation introduced between 1990 and 2020 may be associated with a bill's passage or the political party of its sponsor. Content analysis revealed that bills highlighting privacy literacy programs, educational outcomes, and corporate transparency were more likely to be passed into legislation. Bills sponsored by Republicans were 422% more likely of being passed into legislation. Certain frames were also associated with partisan sponsorship: Republican-sponsored bills were more often framed around deregulation, privacy programs, corporate transparency, and rural access, whereas Democrat-sponsored bills were more often framed around digital skills such as digital literacy and educational outcomes. Findings serve as a historical record of digital equity priorities in the U.S. and highlight possible strategies for future policy design.

RWD39 Who Is Using Data from the French Health Data Hub?

The Health Data Hub (HDH) provides “easy, unified, transparent and secure access” to national health data in France. Since August 2017, health data in France has been accessible to researchers – our study analyses the data requests for French Health data by researcher profile and type of data requested from HDH.

Decentralised Application on Charity Using Blockchain

Abstract: The public and private sectors are both in control of a wide range of security-related issues, and Blockchain is a promising technology that is gaining popularity for doing so. Charitable organizations are growing more and more interested in Blockchain technology. Due to the lack of transparency in the transactions involving donations, which hinders donors from understanding whether their contributions are being used properly, people have lost faith in charity. A decentralized Blockchainbased donation tracking system is proposed in the article, which will provide total transparency,accountability, and direct access to the intended receivers. It will be used in Ethereum Blockchain implementation.

Biopharmaceutical Financialization and Public Funding of Medical Countermeasures (MCMs) in Canada During the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Analysing the Canadian government's efforts to support the development of COVID-19 "medical countermeasures" (MCMs), this article seeks insights into political economy as a driver of pandemic response. We explore whether Canadian public funding policy during the pandemic involved departures from established practices of financialisation in biopharmaceutical research and development (R&D), including the dominance of private sector involvement in an intellectual property (IP) intensive approach to innovation underscoring profit, and governance opacity. We interrogate public funding for MCMs by analyzing how much the Government of Canada (GoC) spent, how those funds were allocated, on what terms, and to whom. We identify the funding institutions, and the funds awarded between February 10, 2020, and March 31, 2021, to support the research, development, and manufacturing of MCMs, including diagnostics, vaccines, therapeutics, and information about clinical management and virus transmission. To collect these data, we conducted searches on the Internet, public data repositories, and filed several requests under the Access to Information Act (1985). Subsequently, we carried out a document-based analysis of electronically accessible research contracts, proposals, grant calls, and policy announcements. The GoC announced CAD$ 1.4 billion for research, development and manufacturing of COVID-19 MCMs. Fully 68% (CAD$ 959 million) of the announced public funding was channelled to investment in private sector firms. Canadian public funding showed a consistent focus on early and late stage development of COVID-19 MCMs and the expansion of biopharmaceutical manufacturing capacity. Assessing whether Canada's investments into developing COVID-19 MCMs safeguard affordable and transparent access to the products of publicly funded research, we found that access policies on IP management, sharing of clinical data, affordability and availability were not systematic, consistent, or transparent, and few, if any, mechanisms ensured long-term sustainability. Beyond incremental change in policy goals, such as public investment in domestic biomanufacturing, the features of Canadian public policies endorsing financialization in the biopharmaceutical sector remained largely unchanged during the pandemic.

To see, or not to see: Online job advertisement and EU non-discrimination law

The recruitment process has largely moved online. Job advertisements which used to be bound to newspapers and other print media have become an online service as part of a growing trend towards a more digitalised hiring process. Alongside increased flexibility and cost-cutting, this trend brings so previously unseen challenges. The technology behind online job portals and social media allows job ads to be shown to targeted groups of people using machine learning techniques to filter through the available data and search for the most suitable audience. The correlations that are inferred by algorithms between content and audience, however, can lead to biased outcomes. This is a serious problem since the specific risk with online job ads is that jobseekers who are considered less suitable by the algorithm will not see the ad at all. Such a result effectively hinders access to the labour market and poses the risk of perpetuating existing biases and discrimination. Those discrimination risks raise questions about the legal framework of online job advertisements. This article examines the requirements of the new EU initiatives to regulate artificial intelligence and the digital market and EU non-discrimination law regarding online job advertisements. It also proposes a low-tech solution to the high-tech problems associated with online job advertisements by introducing a legal requirement to publicly tender job ads on an online noticeboard, thus ensuring transparency and effective access to employment.

Donation after Cardiocirculatory Death: A program that we must implement. Experts Argentinean meeting report

The global organ transplant activity remains satisfying less than 10% of the total number of patients in the waiting list. Brain dead donors and living donors have been the most common source of organs used worldwide. Nevertheless, as part of the different measures and policies implemented to increase donation, the use of donors after cardio-circulatory death (DCD), has been propitiated and expanded in the last couple of years. In Europe and North America, DCD programs had increased the number of available donors in up to 30%; but in many countries, the absence of DCD is mainly due to the lack of laws to legislate the process. We aim to report here the result of legal, ethical, procurement and specific organ working groups which met to assess the current regulatory framework, to evaluate the preliminary local experiences; and to produce a document to inform physicians and the community the current status of this program in our country.Argentina, a pioneer country in procurement and donation has the regulatory and ethical frameworks to enable the transparent use and access to DCDs’, as well as its implantation for organs and tissues in the whole country. In spite of a very preliminary experience, we are proud to present that the process for using DCD has already started. But this novel process requires to be well understood and perceived by the general public and medical community. Education becomes essential.

The application of spatial measures to analyse health service accessibility in Australia: a systematic review and recommendations for future practice

BackgroundAustralia's inequitable distribution of health services is well documented. Spatial access relates to the geographic limitations affecting the availability and accessibility of healthcare practitioners and services. Issues associated with spatial access are often influenced by Australia's vast landmass, challenging environments, uneven population concentration, and sparsely distributed populations in rural and remote areas. Measuring access contributes to a broader understanding of the performance of health systems, particularly in rural/remote areas. This systematic review synthesises the evidence identifying what spatial measures and geographic classifications are used and how they are applied in the Australian peer-reviewed literature.MethodsA systematic search of peer-reviewed literature published between 2002 and 2022 was undertaken using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) methodology. Search terms were derived from three major topics, including: [1] Australian population; [2] spatial analysis of health service accessibility; and [3] objective physical access measures.ResultsDatabase searches retrieved 1,381 unique records. Records were screened for eligibility, resulting in 82 articles for inclusion. Most articles analysed access to primary health services (n = 50; 61%), followed by specialist care (n = 17; 21%), hospital services (n = 12; 15%), and health promotion and prevention (n = 3; 4%). The geographic scope of the 82 articles included national (n = 33; 40%), state (n = 27; 33%), metropolitan (n = 18; 22%), and specified regional / rural /remote area (n = 4; 5%). Most articles used distance-based physical access measures, including travel time (n = 30; 37%) and travel distance along a road network (n = 21; 26%), and Euclidean distance (n = 24; 29%).ConclusionThis review is the first comprehensive systematic review to synthesise the evidence on how spatial measures have been applied to measure health service accessibility in the Australian context over the past two decades. Objective and transparent access measures that are fit for purpose are imperative to address persistent health inequities and inform equitable resource distribution and evidence-based policymaking.

BEYOND PERFORMATIVE TRANSPARENCY: LESSONS LEARNED FROM THE EU CODE OF PRACTICE ON DISINFORMATION

The EU Code of Practice on Disinformation has attempted to approach the issue of disinformation through a self-regulatory model, but this has seen limited success. We analyse 1114 self-reported actions from Code signatories (Google, Meta, Microsoft, Mozilla, TikTok and Twitter) taken from 47 monthly transparency reports addressing Covid-19 related disinformation. While the transparency reports were designed to provide clear, meaningful reporting, in reality the process of assessing each platform’s disinformation actions was difficult due to repetition, vague descriptions and a lack of quality data. Platform actions were often reported using a promotional tone and some were irrelevant to COVID-19 or disinformation. We argue that the way in which we understand the role that social media platforms play in both the collection of data and the social outcomes that result from these data extraction processes needs to be questioned. Drawing upon the concept of data colonialism, we call for transparent access to data based on the idea that what platforms view as property is based on a “commercially motivated form of extraction” rather than a “naturally occurring form of social knowledge”. European debates about regulating online disinformation need to be set against a broader perspective on regulating the digital environment as a public infrastructure. Policymakers can achieve better civic and democratic outcomes by focusing on regulating the digital environment through, for example, robust competition, data portability, and interoperability rules. Such actions have the potential to break the dominance of Big Tech while incentivising better and new services for citizens.

The Transparency of Automatic Web Accessibility Evaluation Tools: Design Criteria, State of the Art, and User Perception

Several Web accessibility evaluation tools have been put forward to reduce the burden of identifying accessibility barriers for users, especially those with disabilities. One common issue in using accessibility evaluation tools in practice is that the results provided by different tools are sometimes unclear, and often diverging. Such limitations may confuse the users who may not understand the reasons behind them, and thus hamper the possible adoption of such tools. Hence, there is a need for tools that shed light on their actual functioning, and the success criteria and techniques supported. For this purpose, we must identify what criteria should be adopted in order for such tools to be transparent and to help users better interpret their results. In this paper, we discuss such issues, provide design criteria for obtaining user-centred and transparent accessibility evaluation tools, and analyse how they have been addressed by a representative set of open, license-free, accessibility tools. We also report on the results of a survey with 138 users of such tools, aimed at capturing the perceived usefulness of previously identified transparency requirements. Finally, we performed a user study with 18 users working in the Web design or accessibility fields with the goal of receiving more feedback about the transparency of a selected subset of accessibility tools.

TriCache: A User-Transparent Block Cache Enabling High-Performance Out-of-Core Processing with In-Memory Programs

Out-of-core systems rely on high-performance cache sub-systems to reduce the number of I/O operations. Although the page cache in modern operating systems enables transparent access to memory and storage devices, it suffers from efficiency and scalability issues on cache misses, forcing out-of-core systems to design and implement their own cache components, which is a non-trivial task. This study proposes TriCache, a cache mechanism that enables in-memory programs to efficiently process out-of-core datasets without requiring any code rewrite. It provides a virtual memory interface on top of the conventional block interface to simultaneously achieve user transparency and sufficient out-of-core performance. A multi-level block cache design is proposed to address the challenge of per-access address translations required by a memory interface. It can exploit spatial and temporal localities in memory or storage accesses to render storage-to-memory address translation and page-level concurrency control adequately efficient for the virtual memory interface. Our evaluation shows that in-memory systems operating on top of TriCache can outperform Linux OS page cache by more than one order of magnitude, and can deliver performance comparable to or even better than that of corresponding counterparts designed specifically for out-of-core scenarios.

GesturalOrigins: A bottom-up framework for establishing systematic gesture data across ape species

Current methodologies present significant hurdles to understanding patterns in the gestural communication of individuals, populations, and species. To address this issue, we present a bottom-up data collection framework for the study of gesture: GesturalOrigins. By “bottom-up”, we mean that we minimise a priori structural choices, allowing researchers to define larger concepts (such as ‘gesture types’, ‘response latencies’, or ‘gesture sequences’) flexibly once coding is complete. Data can easily be re-organised to provide replication of, and comparison with, a wide range of datasets in published and planned analyses. We present packages, templates, and instructions for the complete data collection and coding process. We illustrate the flexibility that our methodological tool offers with worked examples of (great ape) gestural communication, demonstrating differences in the duration of action phases across distinct gesture action types and showing how species variation in the latency to respond to gestural requests may be revealed or masked by methodological choices. While GesturalOrigins is built from an ape-centred perspective, the basic framework can be adapted across a range of species and potentially to other communication systems. By making our gesture coding methods transparent and open access, we hope to enable a more direct comparison of findings across research groups, improve collaborations, and advance the field to tackle some of the long-standing questions in comparative gesture research.

Fake News and Content Manipulation Under Russian Information Aggression

The article explores the information aggression of Russian mass media in the hybrid war against Ukraine by analyzing cases when Russian media spread distorted or fake information in their coverage of the annexation of Crimea, the military conflict in Donbas, and political events inside and outside Ukraine. The research employs content and comparative analyses to study the structure of fake news as well as methods to use and disseminate the news among readers. In particular, attention is paid to manipulation technologies in social media. The article examines the concept of hybrid war that Russia managed to actualize during its occupation of Crimea and a part of Eastern Ukraine, its methods to expand into external information space during the Ukrainian presidential election and its increasing tension in relations with the United States and Iran. The results of the research consist of the analysis of techniques used in Russian mass media texts to spread fake news and influence audiences; the article also puts forward a classification of fake news as well as offers recommendations on ways to counteract disinformation in crisis communication. It is also argued that Russia is waging the war not only in the content environment of Ukraine but also that of many other countries. It is urgent that various forms and methods of Russian influence on the public opinion, its attempts to shape pro-Russian views in the democratic Western world, imposition of one-sided interpretation of international treaties should be resisted by teaching media literacy to audiences as well as by granting them with transparency and unimpeded access to original information sources.

“The great chain of being sure about things”: blockchain, truth, and a trustless network

ABSTRACT Often associated with the volatile cryptocurrency Bitcoin, a blockchain is a distributed ledger, an additive record of digitally networked transactions. On the assumption that technologies are cultural practices as much as they are instrumental, this essay contributes to the special issue on big data in communication by examining texts that constitute blockchain in a shared political imaginary and, in so doing, participate in blockchain's future. The essay analyzes how materials produced by IBM orient blockchain within contemporary ideals such as transparent access, immutability, and a single source of truth. Drawing on Sean Phelan's study of neoliberal politics and global media, including the naturalization of ideological values, the essay proposes that public discourses about blockchain evidence fundamental human desires to access truth and establish an infrastructure immune to corruption. The study finds that blockchain's decentralized infrastructure comports with a historical moment in which sociality itself is under intense pressure, and wherein the idea and practice of interconnected yet distrustful nodes make sense in the absence of functional governance. The essay concludes that in the routinized social practices of the blockchain's executive protocols, political potential is undercut by the absence of prospective and fundamental change.

Towards outstanding innovation: priorities of innovation within centres for research-based innovation in Norway

ABSTRACT In response to the persistent indeterminacy – and the salient discontents – surrounding the innovation-centred reporting in the global university-industry collaborations, this study seeks to investigate the reporting of innovation results in Norwegian centres for research-based innovation (SFIs). Based on a large amount of recent public-access documentary evidence (SFI annual reports 2020) which have never been synthesized or systematically analysed before, this study seeks to document and evince the range of innovation initiatives which are reported from SFIs and to raise awareness of the public value innovation propositions that exist within the innovation reporting of these SFIs such as intangible value creation – social and public values of more normative texture, such as internationalization values, transparency, and open access to information, as well as gender balance.

Design propositions for nudging in healthcare: Adoption of national electronic health record systems.

Electronic health records (EHRs) are considered important for improving efficiency and reducing costs of a healthcare system. However, the adoption of EHR systems differs among countries and so does the way the decision to participate in EHRs is presented. Nudging is a concept that deals with influencing human behaviour within the research stream of behavioural economics. In this paper, we focus on the effects of the choice architecture on the decision for the adoption of national EHRs. Our study aims to link influences on human behaviour through nudging with the adoption of EHRs to investigate how choice architects can facilitate the adoption of national information systems. We employ a qualitative explorative research design, namely the case study method. Using theoretical sampling, we selected four cases (i.e., countries) for our study: Estonia, Austria, the Netherlands, and Germany. We collected and analyzed data from various primary and secondary sources: ethnographic observation, interviews, scientific papers, homepages, press releases, newspaper articles, technical specifications, publications from governmental bodies, and formal studies. The findings from our European case studies show that designing for EHR adoption should encompass choice architecture elements (i.e., defaults), technical elements (i.e., choice granularity and access transparency), and institutional elements (i.e., regulations for data protection, information campaigns, and financial incentives) in combination. Our findings provide insights on the design of the adoption environments of large-scale, national EHR systems. Future research could estimate the magnitude of effects of the determinants.

Awareness about Clinical Establishment Act among Dentists – A Cross-sectional Study

Background: The Kerala Clinical Establishment Act (CEA) provides for registration and regulation of clinical establishments from all recognized systems of medicine in the public and private sectors. The dental profession, where most services are rendered by private practitioners is also included in this Act. It follows that dentists must stay abreast of the laws that govern the profession of dentistry. Objectives: This study aimed to assess the awareness and apprehensions about the Act among dentists in Kerala. Materials and Methods: A cross-sectional online survey was conducted using a questionnaire among 400 dentists from June 2020 to August 2020. The participants comprised dental practitioners with undergraduate/postgraduate degrees, faculties in dental colleges, and postgraduate dental students. Statistical analysis was done using Chi-square and logistic regression method. Results: A total of 78% of respondents were aware about the Act. More than half of the participants (58%) had a high awareness score regarding the Act. Low levels of apprehension were exhibited by 65% of the study participants. The determinants for awareness were significant in relation to age, gender, education level, type of practice, duration of practice, and location of practice (P < 0.05). Conclusion: The results of this study indicate the need for improved clarity of clauses in the Act associated with transparency and public access to information at Clinical Establishments. The implementation of the Act would contribute greatly to shaping a reliable health-care service for the public as the findings of this research suggest that dentists in Kerala think that mandatory registration and regular inspections as envisioned in the Act would identify and isolate the quacks in the profession.

Digital Technologie and Corruption Control Mechanism

Nowadays, corruption is a serious issue in Malaysia and international levels. Digital technology that can detect and prevent fraud and corruption is particularly important to manage processes in public sector activities more transparently. The availability of information and the application process to support the delivery system in certain public sectors is more transparent to the public if through digital technology. Therefore, this paper aims to understand the use of digital technology in an effort to eliminate the symptoms of corruption, overcome fraud, and increase transparency in the government service delivery system for the well-being of the community. The method used is literature review analysis. The paper's results can provide information to the government about the importance of improving digital technology for more efficient control mechanisms in Malaysia. Therefore, the government should focus on efforts to streamline better regulatory affairs and standards by using additional anti-corruption technology in service delivery processes with more transparent access to the public through digital technology.

Transparent Access to Heterogeneous IoT Based on Virtual Resources

The Internet of Things (IoT) inspires industries to deploy a massive number of connected devices to provide smart and ubiquitous services to influence our daily life. Edge computing leverages sufficient computation and storage at the edge of the network to enable deploying complex functions closer to the environment using Internet-connected devices. According to the purpose of the environment including privacy level, domain functionality, network scale and service quality, various environment-specific services can be provided through heterogeneous applications with sensors and actuators based on edge computing. However, for providing user-friendly service scenarios based on the transparent access to heterogeneous devices in edge computing, a consistent interface shall be provided to deliver services from edge computing to clients. In this paper, we propose transparent computing based on virtual resources to access heterogeneous IoT devices without considering the underlying network configuration at the edge of the networks. For supporting transparent access to different edge computing environments through a consistent interface, the virtual resource of edge gateway is proposed to bridge the Internet and devices which are deployed on the edge of the network. The proposed edge gateway exposes the services of the Internet of Things devices to the Internet using virtual resources that represent the resources of physical devices. The virtual resources provide a consistent interface to enable clients to access devices in edge computing without considering underlying protocols. The virtual resource is generated by the resource directory in the edge gateway through the registration of a device. Based on the device registration, the device information is stored in the gateway to link virtual resources and devices for translating messages according to the destination protocols and identifying physical devices that are represented by virtual resources. Moreover, through collaboration with the service provider, the function of device discovery and monitoring is provided to clients.

A Smart Contract-Based Access Control Framework For Smart Healthcare Systems

Abstract Security faces huge challenges in Internet of Things (IoT) environments. In particular, conventional access control standards and models tend to be less tailored for IoT due to the constrained nature of smart objects. Usually, a powerful third party is used to handle the access control logic. However, this third party is lacking in transparency and could harm user privacy. Therefore, providing a distributed access control solution, while considering transparency and privacy-preserving awareness in IoT smart systems, is of paramount importance. The described issue can be addressed using the emergent Blockchain technology that provides a promising choice to build a new generation of decentralized and transparent access control solutions. This paper proposes a smart contract-based access control framework for IoT smart healthcare systems, which is based on smart contracts to provide a distributed and trustworthy access control, combined with the GTRBAC model to express fine-grained access control policies while considering temporal authorization constraints. To prove the feasibility and validity of the proposed framework, this paper also provides a detailed technical description and an initial implementation and execution. An experimental evaluation shows that security properties’ analyses on smart contracts achieved the best possible evaluation with no vulnerabilities found, and the cost of access control operations increases linearly as the number of policy constraints increases. Besides, a comparative analysis reveals that the proposed approach can achieve good results with low gas costs and latency.