George Kwasi Barimah

Background: International health research collaborations (IHRCs) between high-income countries (HICs) and low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) are essential in global health research, yet ethical challenges including the inequitable sharing of rewards and burdens among the research actors remain insufficiently addressed. We explored the notices of funding opportunities and official guidance documents of three major research funders to assess how funding agencies structure and promote the ethical conduct of IHRCs. Methods: We conducted a content analysis of publicly available notices of funding opportunities and official guidance documents from the National Institutes of Health, European Commission, and Wellcome Trust. Using a structured data collection instrument, we cataloged content within the notices related to equitable data sharing, scientific capacity development, authorship, and intellectual property ownership. Results: We reviewed 21 IHRC‐related documents issued between 2017 and 2021. Documents reviewed included funding opportunity announcements, grant compliance documents, and funders’ code of ethics. While all three funders had general provisions for data sharing, none had guidelines specific to data management within IHRC context including the potential use of data for secondary purposes without the prior consent of researchers in LMICs. Although all funders had general guidelines on the ownership of results, guidelines specifying the distribution of ownership rights among HIC and LMIC collaborators were absent. Specific guidelines on how researchers in LMICs and HICs would benefit from each other's expertise as well as authorship guidelines within the IHRC context were absent from all funder's notices of funding opportunities. Conclusions: Guidelines that promote ethical conduct of IHRCs were absent from documents reviewed from the three top funders of global health research. Development and inclusion of such guidelines in funding announcements could promote ethical IHRCs.

When laypersons are presented with scientific information which seeks to modify their way of life, they are expected to believe, suspend belief, or reject it. Second-order assessment of scientific experts helps laypersons to make an informed decision in such situations. This is an assessment of the trustworthiness of the person making the scientific claim. In this paper I challenge the optimistic view of Anderson (2011), regarding the ease with which laypersons can perform second-order assessment of experts, by pointing out some of the obstacles that may prevent laypersons from arriving at an informed decision through this means. By showing that laypersons cannot easily perform second-order assessment of experts, I make a case for sharing epistemic burdens in science communication by using Lackey's (2006) concept of dualism in the epistemology of testimony and Irzik and Kurtulmus’ (2019) work on public epistemic trust in science, as a guide. I invite experts to bear a greater share of the epistemic burden when communicating with laypersons because of their privileged epistemic condition vis-à-vis laypersons.

In this paper, I develop and defend a moralized conception of epistemic trust in science against a particular kind of non-moral account defended by John (2015, 2018). I suggest that non-epistemic value considerations, non-epistemic norms of communication and affective trust properly characterize the relationship of epistemic trust between scientific experts and non-experts. I argue that it is through a moralized account of epistemic trust in science that we can make sense of the deep-seated moral undertones that are often at play when non-experts (dis)trust science.