So-called \"middle authors,\" being neither the first, last, nor corresponding author of an academic paper, have made increasing relative contributions to academic scholarship over recent decades. No work has specifically and explicitly addressed the roles, rights, and responsibilities of middle authors, an authorship position which we believe is particularly vulnerable to abuse via growing phenomena such as paper mills. Responsible middle authorship requires transparent declarations of intellectual and other scientific contributions that journals can and should require of co-authors and established guidelines and criteria to achieve this already exist (ICMJE/CRediT). Although publishers, editors, and authors need to collectively uphold a situation of shared responsibility for appropriate co-authorship, current models have failed science since verification of authorship is impossible, except through blind trust in authors\' statements. During the retraction of a paper, while the opinion of individual co-authors might be noted in a retraction notice, the retraction itself practically erases the relevance of co-author contributions and position/status (first, leading, senior, last, co-corresponding, etc.). Paper mills may have successfully proliferated because individual authors\' roles and responsibilities are not tangibly verifiable and are thus indiscernible. We draw on a historical example of manipulated research to argue that authors and editors should publish publicly available, traceable contributions to the intellectual content of an article-both classical authorship or technical contributions-to maximize both visibility of individual contributions and accountability. To make our article practically more relevant to this journal\'s readership, we reviewed the top 50 Q1 journals in the fields of biochemistry and pharmacology, as ranked by the SJR, to appreciate which journals adopted the ICMJE or CRediT schools of authorship contribution, finding significant variation in adhesion to ICMJE guidelines nor the CRediT criteria and wording of author guidelines.

BACKGROUND: Equitable inclusion of low-income and middle-income country (LMIC) researchers and women in research authorship is a priority. A review of progress in addressing WHO-identified priorities provided an opportunity to examine the geographical and gender distribution of authorship in herpes simplex virus type-2 (HSV-2) research.
METHODS: Publications addressing five areas prioritised in a WHO workshop and published between 2000 and 2020 were identified. Data on author country, gender, authorship position and research funding source were collected by manuscript review and internet searches and analysed using IBM SPSS V.26.
RESULTS: Of, 297 eligible papers identified, (n=294) had multiple authors. Of these, 241 (82%) included at least one LMIC author and 143 (49%) and 122 (41%) had LMIC first and last authors, respectively. LMICs funded studies were more than twice as likely to include an LMIC first or last author as high-income country-funded studies (relative risk 2.36, 95% CI 1.93 to 2.89). Respectively, 129 (46%) and 106 (36%) studies had female first and last authors. LMIC first and last authorship varied widely by HSV-2 research area and increased over time to 65% and 59% by 2015-2020.
CONCLUSIONS: Despite location of the research itself in LMIC settings, over the 20-year period, LMIC researchers held only a minority of first and last authorship positions. While LMIC representation in these positions improved over time, important inequities remain in key research areas and for women. Addressing current and historical power disparities in global health research, research infrastructure and how it is funded may be key addressing to addressing these issues.

Historically, countries have primarily relied on policy rather than legislation to implement Maternal and Perinatal Death Surveillance and Response systems (MPDSR). However, evidence shows significant disparities in how MPDSR is implemented among different countries. In this article, we argue for the importance of establishing MPDSR systems mandated by law and aligned with the country\'s constitutional provisions, regional and international human rights obligations, and public health commitments. We highlight how a \"no blame\" approach can be regulated to provide a balance between confidentiality of the system and access to justice and remedies.

UNASSIGNED: Medication non-adherence is a major contributor to suboptimal disease treatment across medical specialties and is a particular hurdle with topicals. While adherence is a patient behavior affected by many socioeconomic and health system factors, physicians can play an important role in encouraging good adherence.
UNASSIGNED: We discuss methods for measuring adherence, including ethics of such research, provide select examples of dermatology-specific adherence studies, and conclude with physician-focused practices to improve patients\' adherence. Articles were selected from a PubMed search spanning 2003 to 10 December 2023, using the following terms: \'dermatology,\' \'medication,\' \'treatment,\' \'adherence,\' \'compliance,\' and \'intervention.\'
UNASSIGNED: Poor adherence to treatment is a major cause of poor treatment outcomes. As the goal of medical care is to achieve successful treatment outcomes, encouraging good adherence may be as much a foundation of care as making the right diagnosis and prescribing the right treatment. Taking a doctor-centric perspective on reasons for non-adherence may be more productive than simply finding fault with the patient. Establishing trust and accountability is a foundation for good adherence; after establishing the provider-patient relationship, physicians can improve adherence by incorporating behavioral and counseling strategies, communicating through technology, and advocating for distribution of validated educational information.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has long been recognised as a challenge to responsibility. Much of this discourse has been framed around robots, such as autonomous weapons or self-driving cars, where we arguably lack control over a machine\'s behaviour and therefore struggle to identify an agent that can be held accountable. However, most of today\'s AI is based on machine-learning technology that does not act on its own, but rather serves as a decision-support tool, automatically analysing data to help human agents make better decisions. I argue that decision-support tools pose a challenge to responsibility that goes beyond the familiar problem of finding someone to blame or punish for the behaviour of agent-like systems. Namely, they pose a problem for what we might call \"decision ownership\": they make it difficult to identify human agents to whom we can attribute value-judgements that are reflected in decisions. Drawing on recent philosophical literature on responsibility and its various facets, I argue that this is primarily a problem of attributability rather than of accountability. This particular responsibility problem comes in different forms and degrees, most obviously when an AI provides direct recommendations for actions, but also, less obviously, when it provides mere descriptive information on the basis of which a decision is made.

It is incumbent on dental educators to prepare students for careers in various practice settings and modalities. As the dental practice market continues to evolve away from a predominantly solo private practice model, schools are tasked with training future providers to deliver quality care to diverse patient populations in diverse settings. While no single health delivery model will solve access to care, exposing dental students to various practice environments prepares them to better understand and navigate nontraditional postgraduate practice opportunities. The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Dentistry established a community-based clinical education (CBCE) program that has grown to include dental support organizations. By partnering with a more diverse portfolio of practice types, including large corporate entities, the UCLA CBCE program has strengthened its financial accountability while also delivering on the goal of enhancing dental education and improving access to care for vulnerable populations.

Charter school policy represents two simultaneous forms of accountability, in which schools are accountable to both parents and authorizers. This study of a K-8 charter renewal decision interrogates these accountability relationships and the role of race and power in privileging the interests of particular stakeholders over others. Using counternarrative methodology and qualitative interviews and observations, we draw on critical race theory and new managerialism to make sense of the competing accounts surrounding a non-renewal process. We find four areas of tension, in which district officials subscribe to new managerialist authorizing styles that leave little room for participation from the Black and low-income school community. We conclude with recommendations for how districts can partner with communities to work toward frameworks of accountability that value the goals of multiple stakeholder groups.

Worldwide interest in teaching medical professionalism has increased drastically over the past two decades and is recognized as an important core competency. It is also essential in pharmacy education. However, there is no single definition of medical professionalism owing to its multifaceted nature, leading to difficulty in understanding it. The foundational concept of professionalism are the social contract and accountability, which describe the relationship between the profession and the society which it serves. Profession must understand expectations from the society, which is trustworthy, assures competence, and devoted to the public good for the contract based on their mutual trust. In \"teaching,\" three basic educational actions (\"setting expectations,\" \"providing experiences,\" and \"evaluating outcomes\") are required. There are two learning goals of professionalism education: the minimum goal of not doing unprofessional acts and the aspirational goal of pursuing a higher level of interiorized professionalism which leads to the professional identity formation. The true professionals are \"reflective practitioners,\" who have the ability to manage ambiguous problems using their interiorized professionalism in complicated situations. Therefore, reflection is one of the central concepts of professionalism education. The Professionalism Mini-Evaluation Exercise (P-MEX), an observational tool to evaluate medical professionalism, has some favorable aspects; the Japanese version is available and is a guide to specific actions for professionalism through its items, although some cautions must be exercised when using it. Considering that teaching professionalism includes not only formal but informal and hidden curricula, all of the staff in the educational environments should consider professionalism education by understanding professionalism.

From 2021 to 2023, 7978 graduates of pharmacy programs failed the North American Pharmacist Licensure Examination on the first attempt. Presently, the Accreditation Council for Pharmacy Education monitors programs with a passage rate of ≥ 2 SDs below the national mean pass rate. In 2023, this should lead to monitoring 7 programs that produced 140 failures out of the total of 2472 failures (5.7 %). In our view, this is neither equitable nor demonstrative of sufficient accountability. Analysis of failure counts among the 144 programs reported by the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy demonstrates a distribution curve highly skewed to the right. The evaluation of average failure counts across all programs suggests that schools with absolute failures ≥ 2 SDs higher than the average number of failures should be identified for monitoring, in addition to those falling ≥ 2 SDs below the national mean pass rate. Based on the 2023 data, this additional criterion corresponds to ≥ 35 failures/program. This threshold would prompt monitoring of 18 programs and 36.5 % of the total failures. Of the 7 programs that will be monitored based on the current Accreditation Council for Pharmacy Education criteria, only 1 would be captured by the ≥ 35 failure method of selection; the remaining 6 contribute 85 total failures to the pool. Thus, if both criteria were to be applied, ie, ≥ 35 failures and ≥ 2 SDs below the national mean pass rate, a total of 24 programs would be monitored (16.6 % of the 144 programs) that contribute 987 of the total failures (39.9 %).

Over the past quarter century, product development partnerships (PDPs) have importantly brought health technologies, particularly for neglected diseases, to market for low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). With public sector financing, PDPs de-risk the gulf between where the global burden of disease falls and where paying markets exist. From fighting COVID-19 to developing novel antibiotics, the work of PDPs now extends beyond these traditional bounds. As PDPs have shepherded more health technologies to market, they are also confronting new access challenges. This article lays out 5 areas to strategically leverage the PDP model for better access to new health technologies. Making the case for enhanced support of the PDP approach will require greater transparency, as well as recognition of the contributions made by both public and private sector partners. The governance and funding of PDPs must be accountable to meeting the needs and building capacity of target beneficiaries in LMICs. To take an end-to-end approach, PDPs must work in tandem with other public sector institutions as well as local manufacturers as part of a larger innovation ecosystem. PDPs will need to keep pace with both the dynamics of diseases and markets in delivering the next generation of much needed health technologies.
Product development partnerships (PDPs) play an important role in bringing new and needed health technologies to market, particularly in low- and middle-income countries. As these products emerge from the R&D pipeline, new access challenges in paying for and delivering them in the health care system have emerged. The COVID-19 pandemic has also both stretched and tapped into this work. These developments provide a window of opportunity, both to take stock of lessons learned and of strategic opportunities to leverage the PDP model beyond its traditional bounds of neglected diseases. Greater transparency and recognition of the contributions of PDPs, accountability of governance and surety of financing, and coordination with pooled procurement and local manufacturing initiatives can build a foundation for even more impactful contributions in the future.