Over recent years, the research community has been increasingly using preprint servers to share manuscripts that are not yet peer-reviewed. Even if it enables quick dissemination of research findings, this practice raises several challenges in publication ethics and integrity. In particular, preprints have become an important source of information for stakeholders interested in COVID19 research developments, including traditional media, social media, and policy makers. Despite caveats about their nature, many users can still confuse pre-prints with peer-reviewed manuscripts. If unconfirmed but (...) already widely shared first-draft results later prove wrong or misinterpreted, it can be very difficult to “unlearn” what we thought was true. Complexity further increases if unconfirmed findings have been used to inform guidelines. To help achieve a balance between early access to research findings and its negative consequences, we formulated five recommendations: (a) consensus should be sought on a term clearer than ‘pre-print’, such as ‘Unrefereed manuscript’, “Manuscript awaiting peer review” or ‘’Non-reviewed manuscript”; (b) Caveats about unrefereed manuscripts should be prominent on their first page, and each page should include a red watermark stating ‘Caution—Not Peer Reviewed’; (c) pre-print authors should certify that their manuscript will be submitted to a peer-review journal, and should regularly update the manuscript status; (d) high level consultations should be convened, to formulate clear principles and policies for the publication and dissemination of non-peer reviewed research results; (e) in the longer term, an international initiative to certify servers that comply with good practices could be envisaged. (shrink)

Background: The importance of respecting patients and participants in clinical research is widely recognised. However, what it means to respect persons beyond recognising them as autonomous is unclear, and little is known about what patients find to be respectful. Objective: To understand patients’ conceptions of respect and what it means to be respected by medical providers. Design: Qualitative study from an academic cardiology clinic, using semistructured interviews with 18 survivors of sudden cardiac death. Results: Patients believed that respecting persons incorporates (...) the following major elements: empathy, care, autonomy, provision of information, recognition of individuality, dignity and attention to needs. Conclusions: Making patients feel respected, or valued as a person, is a multi-faceted task that involves more than recognising autonomy. While patients’ views of respect do not determine what respect means, these patients expressed important intuitions that may be of substantial conceptual relevance. (shrink)

The article considers the nature of legalistic, or formal, conceptions of the rule of law, focusing particularly on the work of Joseph Raz and Albert Venn Dicey. It asks how such apparently narrow conceptions are generated, and how far they can resist including broader social claims. It concludes that the rationale behind legalistic conceptions compels them to address issues of poverty and the literacy of the law's subjects. However, legalistic conceptions of the rule of law can still avoid sliding into (...) the wider non‐legalistic models advanced by writers such as T. R. S. Allan. (shrink)

Lewis and Charny have come under siege for suggesting remote questioning to decide appropriate medical care. While the criticisms are theoretically valid, the idea is so important practically that Lewis and Charny should be supported and their approach investigated as a way of making medical treatment at least more open and possibly more fair.

Multiculturalism is an imprecise concept with a variety of different meanings, but no matter how multiculturalism is defined, nearly all of its advocates share the common objective of reconstructing Western society in order to protect minority cultural groups from intolerance.1 The multiculturalist coalition has been highly successful in this undertaking because members of the majority culture generally accept the moral diagnosis that their traditional way of life is backward, irrational, and inherently prone to various forms of prejudice. Adopting multiculturalism as (...) official state policy has thus significantly increased the moral authority of the managerial government to therapeutically control and alter…. (shrink)

A good story bears retelling many times, and an appreciative audience will delight in debating its finer points; each participant is – of course – always convinced that only his memory, his understanding, of what the author said is the correct one.

PLATO'S UNIVERSE by Gregory Vlastos. Clarendon Press: O.U.P., 1975. xiii+130 pp. £3.75.