Wei Zhu

The PREPARED Code is a risk-based, values-driven framework that integrates research ethics and research integrity and is designed for a global audience. Developed over two years, this ambitious initiative required a collaborative, multidisciplinary effort led by an international team. The PREPARED team employed a range of methods to develop the code, including literature searches, scoping reviews, empirical studies, targeted consultations, ethical and legal analyses, and public consultation. This chapter explores the processes and methods used to develop the PREPARED Code, highlighting how real-world challenges in research ethics and research integrity during crises were identified, analysed and validated by stakeholders. It describes how these challenges were aligned with universally recognised moral values and grouped as risks, and how the risks were transformed into a clear, focused and jargon-free code of conduct. It also details the final stages of development, which involved iterative refinement of the code from Version 1 to Version 13, through extensive consultation and review.

“Suspension of judgment” is an ambiguous term that may refer either to a doxastic state (“suspended judgment”) or to a doxastic action (“suspending judgment”). Based on a simple non-belief account, this paper presents a formal study of both aspects of suspension. We first introduce the notion of a suspension set (a set of non-beliefs) and determine its logical structure. Then we present the classical AGM operations of belief revision and belief contraction and give characterizations of them that refer to suspension sets rather than belief sets. Finally, we study the suspension operation, a symmetric cousin of belief contraction, and characterize it both in terms of belief sets and in terms of suspension sets. Belief contraction and belief suspension thereby get reinterpreted as two different forms of the expansion of suspension sets. The project is interesting because in contrast to belief revision and belief contraction, the suspension operation is symmetric with respect to negation: suspending judgment on _A_ is the same as suspending judgment on $$\lnot A$$. Most of our results are premised on an assumption of modesty: For every person with consistent beliefs, there is always at least one proposition on which she suspends judgment.

Hintikka’s game theoretical approach to semantics has been successfully applied also to some non-classical logics. A recent example is Başkent (A game theoretical semantics for logics of nonsense, 2020. arXiv:2009.10878), where a game theoretical semantics based on three players and the notion of dominant winning strategy is devised to fit both Bochvar and Halldén’s logics of nonsense, which represent two basic systems of the family of weak Kleene logics. In this paper, we present and discuss a new game theoretic semantics for Bochvar and Halldén’s logics, GTS-2, and show how it generalizes to a broader family of logics of variable inclusions.

This paper describes a scoping review of China’s academic resource databases, relevant official websites, news reports and public accounts spanning a period from the end of 2019 to the end of 2022, to investigate the challenges in scientific integrity and ethical soundness of research conducted during and immediately after the COVID-19 pandemic in China. By conducting the scoping review with keywords related to the research questions in Chinese, relevant data were extracted and classified into four categories: challenges in research, challenges in ethics review, challenges in publishing academic work, and research ethics guidelines during and after the pandemic. The paper points out that problematic studies and findings increased with the escalation in medical research projects during the pandemic in China. The situation faced by researchers was more difficult than before the pandemic. The mode of informed consent, and ethics review and oversight systems also underwent changes. In addition, Traditional Chinese Medicine as an alternative medical treatment for COVID-19, attracted attention from the research community and became a topic of discussion. We conclude that the various challenges and concerns identified indicate a need for a proper and timely response system be formulated in preparation for possible future occurrences of new pandemics or other critical situations.

In the medical practice in China, giving and taking “red envelopes” is a common phenomenon although few openly admit it. This paper, based on our empirical study including data collected from interviews and questionnaires with medical professionals and patients, attempts to explore why “red envelopes” have become a serious problem in the physician-patient relationship and how the situation can be improved. Previous studies show that scholars tend to correlate the spread of “red envelopes” in health care sector to the commercialization trend, the general erosion of traditional values, and the lowering of the moral level in the medical field. However, in this paper, the authors argue that medical professionals’ choice of taking “red envelopes” is actually more a way to compensate for their problematic self-image and marred dignity in real practice. Medical professionals in China as a whole are in an embarrassing situation where the work pressure and income, and the sense of pride that used to be part of their profession are not comparable to each other. Under this circumstance, we believe that the effective way to deal with the “red envelopes” issue does not lie solely in introducing more stringent regulations or granting medical professionals higher payments, but rather in protecting and enhancing the professional dignity of all those working in healthcare. And on top of that, there must also be effort to cultivate a more favorable moral environment.