Who Decides? In Whose Name? For Whose Benefit? Decoloniality and Its Discontents

Text Data Mining from the Author's Perspective: Whose Text, Whose Mining, and to Whose Benefit?

Researchers have sought technical access to proprietary databases of published materials since the earliest days of online databases in the latter 1970s, yet publishers continue to write university contracts based only on human readership. By the time of Google Books and the associated author lawsuits, ca 2005, we learned that publishers wished to restrict “nonconsumptive use” of scholarly cont...

Year one dental visit--for whose benefit?

Who decides who decides?

what counts as wise? Second, does the public, after considerable thought, think that our society has a moral obligation to pursue lines of research which may benefit present and future generations? I say “moral obligation” because it is sometimes implied by advocates of recombinant D N A research that science would be guilty of a sin of omission if it did not continue and promote research so pr...

Whose voice? Whose choice? Whose power?

Coercion in psychiatry stems from the historic inequality between the psychiatrist and the person who is designated as the "patient," even though he/she may not have chosen this role, and may not see him/herself as needing psychiatric attention. The psychiatrist has the power to define an individual as mentally ill, and then to confine and treat the person based on that definition. The user/sur...

Whose Copy? Whose Rights?

This is the third installment in a series of editorials on the implications of open-access publishing for established publishing practices and stakeholders in scientifi c and medical research. T he questions, tensions, and social concerns surrounding copyright and the Internet are very different for scientifi c and medical literature than for other kinds of easily reproducible digital works. Pe...