Editors' statement on the responsible use of generative AI technologies in scholarly journal publishing.

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to transform many aspects of scholarly publishing. Authors, peer reviewers, and editors might use AI in a variety of ways, and those uses might augment their existing work or might instead be intended to replace it. We are editors of bioethics and humanities journals who have been contemplating the implications of this ongoing transformation. We believe that generative AI may pose a threat to the goals that animate our work but could also be valuable for achieving those goals. In the interests of fostering a wider conversation about how generative AI may be used, we have developed a preliminary set of recommendations for its use in scholarly publishing. We hope that the recommendations and rationales set out here will help the scholarly community navigate toward a deeper understanding of the strengths, limits, and challenges of AI for responsible scholarly work.

Attitudes about withholding or withdrawing life-prolonging treatment, euthanasia, assisted suicide, and physician assisted suicide: a cross-sectional survey among the general public in Croatia.

BACKGROUND: There has been no in-depth research of public attitudes on withholding or withdrawing life-prolonging treatment, euthanasia, assisted suicide and physician assisted suicide in Croatia. The aim of this study was to examine these attitudes and their correlation with sociodemographic characteristics, religion, political orientation, tolerance of personal choice, trust in physicians, health status, experiences with death and caring for the seriously ill, and attitudes towards death and dying. METHODS: A cross-sectional study was conducted on a three-stage random sample of adult citizens of the Republic of Croatia, stratified by regions, counties, and locations within those counties (N = 1203). In addition to descriptive statistics, ANOVA and Chi-square tests were used to determine differences, and factor analysis (component model, varimax rotation and GK dimensionality reduction criterion), correlation analysis (Bivariate correlation, Pearson's coefficient) and multiple regression analysis for data analysis. RESULTS: 38.1% of the respondents agree with granting the wishes of dying people experiencing extreme and unbearable suffering, and withholding life-prolonging treatment, and 37.8% agree with respecting the wishes of such people, and withdrawing life-prolonging treatment. 77% of respondents think that withholding and withdrawing procedures should be regulated by law because of the fear of abuse. Opinions about the practice and regulation of euthanasia are divided. Those who are younger and middle-aged, with higher levels of education, living in big cities, and who have a more liberal worldview are more open to euthanasia. Assisted suicide is not considered to be an acceptable practice, with only 18.6% of respondents agreeing with it. However, 40.1% think that physician assisted suicide should be legalised. 51.6% would support the dying person's autonomous decisions regarding end-of-life procedures. CONCLUSIONS: The study found low levels of acceptance of withholding or withdrawing life-prolonging treatment, euthanasia, assisted suicide and physician assisted suicide in Croatia. In addition, it found evidence that age, level of education, political orientation, and place of residence have an impact on people's views on euthanasia. There is a need for further research into attitudes on different end-of-life practices in Croatia.

An Ethical Exploration of Increased Average Number of Authors Per Publication.

This article explores the impact of an Increase in the average Number of Authors per Publication (INAP) on known ethical issues of authorship. For this purpose, the ten most common ethical issues associated with scholarly authorship are used to set up a taxonomy of existing issues and raise awareness among the community to take precautionary measures and adopt best practices to minimize the negative impact of INAP. We confirm that intense international, interdisciplinary and complex collaborations are necessary, and INAP is an expression of this trend. However, perverse incentives aimed to increase institutional and personal publication counts and egregious instances of guest or honorary authorship are problematic. We argue that whether INAP is due to increased complexity and scale of science, perverse incentives or undeserved authorship, it could negatively affect known ethical issues of authorship at some level. In the long run, INAP depreciates the value of authorship status and may disproportionately impact junior researchers and those who contribute to technical and routine tasks. We provide two suggestions that could reduce the long-term impact of INAP on the reward system of science. First, we suggest further refinement of the CRediT taxonomy including better integration into current systems of attribution and acknowledgement, and better harmony with major authorship guidelines such as those suggested by the ICMJE. Second, we propose adjustments to the academic recognition and promotion systems at an institutional level as well as the introduction of best practices.

Ethical Issues in Social Science Research Employing Big Data.

This paper analyzes the ethics of social science research (SSR) employing big data. We begin by highlighting the research gap found on the intersection between big data ethics, SSR and research ethics. We then discuss three aspects of big data SSR which make it warrant special attention from a research ethics angle: (1) the interpretative character of both SSR and big data, (2) complexities of anticipating and managing risks in publication and reuse of big data SSR, and (3) the paucity of regulatory oversight and ethical recommendations on protecting individual subjects as well as societies when conducting big data SSR. Against this backdrop, we propose using David Resnik's research ethics framework to analyze some of the most pressing ethical issues of big data SSR. Focusing on the principles of honesty, carefulness, openness, efficiency, respect for subjects, and social responsibility, we discuss three clusters of ethical issues: those related to methodological biases and personal prejudices, those connected to risks arising from data availability and reuse, and those leading to individual and social harms. Finally, we advance considerations to observe in developing future ethical guidelines about big data SSR.

A scoping review of the literature featuring research ethics and research integrity cases.

BACKGROUND: The areas of Research Ethics (RE) and Research Integrity (RI) are rapidly evolving. Cases of research misconduct, other transgressions related to RE and RI, and forms of ethically questionable behaviors have been frequently published. The objective of this scoping review was to collect RE and RI cases, analyze their main characteristics, and discuss how these cases are represented in the scientific literature. METHODS: The search included cases involving a violation of, or misbehavior, poor judgment, or detrimental research practice in relation to a normative framework. A search was conducted in PubMed, Web of Science, SCOPUS, JSTOR, Ovid, and Science Direct in March 2018, without language or date restriction. Data relating to the articles and the cases were extracted from case descriptions. RESULTS: A total of 14,719 records were identified, and 388 items were included in the qualitative synthesis. The papers contained 500 case descriptions. After applying the eligibility criteria, 238 cases were included in the analysis. In the case analysis, fabrication and falsification were the most frequently tagged violations (44.9%). The non-adherence to pertinent laws and regulations, such as lack of informed consent and REC approval, was the second most frequently tagged violation (15.7%), followed by patient safety issues (11.1%) and plagiarism (6.9%). 80.8% of cases were from the Medical and Health Sciences, 11.5% from the Natural Sciences, 4.3% from Social Sciences, 2.1% from Engineering and Technology, and 1.3% from Humanities. Paper retraction was the most prevalent sanction (45.4%), followed by exclusion from funding applications (35.5%). CONCLUSIONS: Case descriptions found in academic journals are dominated by discussions regarding prominent cases and are mainly published in the news section of journals. Our results show that there is an overrepresentation of biomedical research cases over other scientific fields compared to its proportion in scientific publications. The cases mostly involve fabrication, falsification, and patient safety issues. This finding could have a significant impact on the academic representation of misbehaviors. The predominance of fabrication and falsification cases might diverge the attention of the academic community from relevant but less visible violations, and from recently emerging forms of misbehaviors.

The Ethics of Geoengineering: A Literature Review.

Geoengineering as a technological intervention to avert the dangerous climate change has been on the table at least since 2006. The global outreach of the technology exercised in a non-encapsulated system, the concerns with unprecedented levels and scales of impact and the overarching interdisciplinarity of the project make the geoengineering debate ethically quite relevant and complex. This paper explores the ethical desirability of geoengineering from an overall review of the existing literature on the ethics of geoengineering. It identifies the relevant literature on the ethics of geoengineering by employing a standard methodology. Based on various framing of the major ethical arguments and their subsets, the results section presents the opportunities and challenges at stake in geoengineering from an ethical point of view. The discussion section takes a keen interest in identifying the evolving dynamics of the debate, the grey areas of the debate, with underdeveloped arguments being brought to the foreground and in highlighting the arguments that are likely to emerge in the future as key contenders. It observes the semantic diversity and ethical ambiguity, the academic lop-sidedness of the debate, missing contextual setting, need for interdisciplinary approaches, public engagement, and region-specific assessment of ethical issues. Recommendations are made to provide a useful platform for the second generation of geoengineering ethicists to help advance the debate to more decisive domains with the required clarity and caution.

Responsibility-Enhancing Assistive Technologies and People with Autism.

This paper aims to explore the role assistive technologies (ATs) might play in helping people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and a concomitant responsibility deficit become more morally responsible. Toward this goal, the authors discuss the philosophical concept of responsibility, with a reliance on Nicole Vincent's taxonomy of responsibility concepts. They then outline the ways in which ASD complicates ascriptions of responsibility, particularly responsibility understood as a capacity. Further, they explore the ways in which ATs might improve a person's capacity so that responsibility can be properly ascribed to them. After demonstrating that although assistive technologies are likely to be able to enhance a person's capacity in such a way so that responsibility can be ascribed to them, the authors assert that these technologies will have a number of additional effects on the other aspects of the concept of responsibility.

Ethics of crisis sedation: questions of performance and consent.

This paper focuses on the practice of injecting patients who are dying with a relatively high dose of sedatives in response to a catastrophic event that will shortly precipitate death, something that we term 'crisis sedation.' We first present a confabulated case that illustrates the kind of events we have in mind, before offering a more detailed account of the practice. We then comment on some of the ethical issues that crisis sedation might raise. We identify the primary value of crisis sedation as allowing healthcare professionals to provide some degree of reassurance to patients, their families and the professionals who are caring for them. Next we focus on the issue of informed consent. Finally, we ask whether continuous deep sedation might be preferable to crisis sedation in scenarios where potential catastrophic events can be anticipated.

The Ethics of Smart Stadia: A Stakeholder Analysis of the Croke Park Project.

The development of "smart stadia", i.e. the use of "smart technologies" in the way sports stadia are designed and managed, promises to enhance the experience of attending a live match through innovative and improved services for the audience, as well as for the players, vendors and other stadium stakeholders. These developments offer us a timely opportunity to reflect on the ethical implications of the use of smart technologies and the emerging Internet of Things (IoT). The IoT has the potential to radically transform society and is representative of the ways that novel technologies will alter human life. We use Dublin's Croke Park stadium smart project as a case study for examining the development of smart stadia.

Methods for Practising Ethics in Research and Innovation: A Literature Review, Critical Analysis and Recommendations.

This paper provides a systematic literature review, analysis and discussion of methods that are proposed to practise ethics in research and innovation (R&I). Ethical considerations concerning the impacts of R&I are increasingly important, due to the quickening pace of technological innovation and the ubiquitous use of the outcomes of R&I processes in society. For this reason, several methods for practising ethics have been developed in different fields of R&I. The paper first of all presents a systematic search of academic sources that present and discuss such methods. Secondly, it provides a categorisation of these methods according to three main kinds: (1) ex ante methods, dealing with emerging technologies, (2) intra methods, dealing with technology design, and (3) ex post methods, dealing with ethical analysis of existing technologies. Thirdly, it discusses the methods by considering problems in the way they deal with the uncertainty of technological change, ethical technology design, the identification, analysis and resolving of ethical impacts of technologies and stakeholder participation. The results and discussion of our literature review are valuable for gaining an overview of the state of the art and serve as an outline of a future research agenda of methods for practising ethics in R&I.