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Infodemiology and Infoveillance: What Are They? and How Might They Change the World?
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Infodemiology and Infoveillance: What Are They? and How Might They Change the World?
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Upload Date:
2024-02-02T00:00:00.0000000
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Language: EN.
Segment:0 .
SACHA NOUKHOVITCH: Hello.
JACKLYN LORD: Hello. I'm just going to go ahead and say this. Remember, don't press Start Webinar. I know we've talked about it a lot, but just in case. I'll do that at 2 o'clock when we're ready to begin.
ADRIAN STANLEY: Hi, Lisa.
LISA CUEVAS SHAW: Hi, how are you?
ADRIAN STANLEY: Hi, Sacha.
SACHA NOUKHOVITCH: Hello?
ADRIAN STANLEY: Hi, Tina.
TINA PURNAT: Hello, Hello. Can you hear me?
ADRIAN STANLEY: We can.
TINA PURNAT: Good. Let me see. I have my [INAUDIBLE] family, things happening in the back. So I'm going to put a background. [INTERPOSING VOICES]
ADRIAN STANLEY: Good. I just got a quick question for Gunther, who's going to present his own slides when he's going, I think.
LISA CUEVAS SHAW: What is your button, Adrian? Which one is that? Is it Brickett?
ADRIAN STANLEY: Oh, it's the original orchid, yes. I was ambassador a long, long time ago. They stopped making them.
LISA CUEVAS SHAW: Wow.
ADRIAN STANLEY: It's a collector's Item.
LISA CUEVAS SHAW: Oh my goodness. Yeah, we'll have to find out how much that goes for.
ADRIAN STANLEY: Oh, are we doing all the virtual backgrounds? I did download one, actually, I think. Although, perhaps not. I saw SSP had a meeting background.
TINA PURNAT: You mentioned it in the email, but I didn't find it.
ADRIAN STANLEY: Yeah, how are you, Sacha? I know it's holiday in Canada, right?
SACHA NOUKHOVITCH: Yes. Yes, we are celebrating, practically, the founder of-- well, not officially-- but the person who influenced and creation of the whole-- the [INAUDIBLE] of this story.
LISA CUEVAS SHAW: Yeah.
SACHA NOUKHOVITCH: You know what, I think that I will step out for a sec. I will go change for a different shirt, because it will be probably better.
ADRIAN STANLEY: You look very Canadian in that one How you doing, Becky?
JACKLYN LORD: Good. How are you guys?
ADRIAN STANLEY: Is everything going OK?
JACKLYN LORD: Oh it's going really well. I'm sad that this is my first meeting in this format. But I'm also really excited to finally get to do it. Plus, I'm actually really excited that Melanie and I swapped. I was really looking forward to your session, so I'm glad to catch it live.
ADRIAN STANLEY: Good, good. And then what was the final attendee list, then? Do we got a number?
JACKLYN LORD: We're at, last check, because people are registering today, 760, somewhere in there.
ADRIAN STANLEY: OK, that's good.
JACKLYN LORD: So just a reminder, when we start at 2:00, I'm going to play a sponsor spot. I think it's about 30 seconds. We don't say anything, I'm just going to start webinar and press play on the file. And then when that's done, I'll stop screen sharing, and Adrian, you'll take over.
ADRIAN STANLEY: Yeah. Actually, Gunther, were you going to do yours-- are you using the link we had, or have you got a separate presentation. Because you could have the first slide open. I can talk to that. And then you could go straight in. Or if you've got yours separately, I couldn't just hand it over. That's OK.
GUNTHER EYSENBACH: [INAUDIBLE] I'm not sure what you mean. But yes, I do want to present my own slides. [INAUDIBLE]
ADRIAN STANLEY: The shared Google Doc, are you using off that, which has got all the slides together, or are you just using your separate deck?
GUNTHER EYSENBACH: I have both. I don't know if I can control the shared one. Either way, I'm sharing my screen, right? And then I can either protect [INAUDIBLE]
ADRIAN STANLEY: Well, I've just got the intro, if we got that initial slide up. We're going to use the one online. If not, we'll just change it over, that's all. But it may be one less handover. But is everything in that--
GUNTHER EYSENBACH: But isn't it that I get control of the screen? Am I not sharing my screen?
ADRIAN STANLEY: You can, we can all do it. I was just trying to avoid an awkward handover. I'm going to start and do an intro. And just go through all the speakers and then this first speaker.
GUNTHER EYSENBACH: Yeah, and then I click on Share Screen, right? Or is somebody sharing my screen automatically?
ADRIAN STANLEY: Shall we practice this? Let's take a look, right? (CHUCKLING) I'm sharing now. So we've got this here. They're going to talk through this. That was in this document. Are you planning to talk on that in the keynote, Gunther?
GUNTHER EYSENBACH: No, I thought about this as your introduction slide, but you don't have to speak to that at all.
ADRIAN STANLEY: I'll reference it. So, all right. But that one, you're OK me talking about that one?
GUNTHER EYSENBACH: Me? No, that's not mine.
ADRIAN STANLEY: Yeah, right. I've got one slide, and then I'll just stop sharing and hand over to you, if that's OK
GUNTHER EYSENBACH: Yeah, do you have moderator rights? Can you share--
ADRIAN STANLEY: Well, I think if I stop share there, you should be able to share there.
JACKLYN LORD: You all should have host or co-host. And if you look at yourself as the, panelist you'll see host, and then 500, that's all of us. So everybody should be able to share and have just as much control as everybody else.
GUNTHER EYSENBACH: Well, when I click on Share Screen, it just says, who can share? Only host or panelist. Who can start sharing when someone else is sharing? Only hosts.
JACKLYN LORD: So if I'm not mistaken, you're clicking the little green arrow next to the big green square? Because that menu that you're describing is Advanced Sharing Options.
GUNTHER EYSENBACH: Oh, OK. OK, I got it. OK, and then I share mine.
JACKLYN LORD: There you go. And then I [INAUDIBLE] over in through those slides. And then I hand [INAUDIBLE].
ADRIAN STANLEY: Press Stop Share. And I've got everything flowing down.
TINA PURNAT: I don't mind letting you know when to move next, if you want to be the clicker.
ADRIAN STANLEY: I'll do that. And then I've got Tina, and then we've got Bushra, and then we have Sacha, and then we have Lisa with wrap. But what do we want to do on wrap, Hope? Do we want to just stop share and go to gallery review, right? Because that's when we'll do the discussion then.
LISA CUEVAS SHAW: Yes, I thought we'll moderate. So you'll say something, Adrian, about participants being able to ask questions, is that right? And so we'll look at those to see if there are any that we can pull out and pose to either specific members-- we'll be on the fly, kind of moderating that-- or to the group. And then if we, for some reason, don't have any questions, I have some questions, in case.
LISA CUEVAS SHAW: And a couple of them, just so that this group is aware-- Tina, I had one queued up for you, again, in case and if there's time-- which is, how can the scholarly communications community directly support infodemic management principles? So I thought that was a good--
TINA PURNAT: I have lots to say there.
LISA CUEVAS SHAW: Perfect. I thought you might, and because we had discussed it too. So I think that one's good. I might also reference-- again, if there's time and if we don't have questions-- just the fact that, by design, we discussed a range of stakeholders and domains. So again, kind of what role should the scholarly communications community play in supporting, if not leading, a more cohesive and systemic approach to infodemic management.
LISA CUEVAS SHAW: That might be just slightly tweaked from the first question. And I could pose it also to you, Bushra, because you're taking that system's approach, as well, alongside Tina. And then, I've got a couple of other questions around-- I suspect you'll touch on it, Tina, but kind of the paradox that we witnessed last year with the scholarly communications community of being built for speed and volume but not necessarily adjusting on the gatekeeping and curating components, right?
LISA CUEVAS SHAW: So if there's time, we can go deeper into what that could look like. And then I've got some wrap up stuff, assuming kind of where we'll end, I'll tie it together for everybody. Yeah, it should be good. I don't know if all of you looked at-- we have a range in the audience of folks.
LISA CUEVAS SHAW: So we've got a couple of more on the technology, technologist side, some librarians, some publishers. Who else was in there, Adrian?
ADRIAN STANLEY: Yeah, there was a mix. There's a mix from the IEEEs, and [INAUDIBLE],, and librarians, the conference organizers. SSP's usually a broad mix of sort of everybody. That's the sort of strength of it, yeah.
LISA CUEVAS SHAW: There were a few societies who have publishing programs, as well, like the American Chemical Society, Society For Microbiology, which is a really good progressive group as well.
ADRIAN STANLEY: I keep getting game points for signing up for people's sessions or people saying hello. Keeps popping up as a--
LISA CUEVAS SHAW: I just got the Grubhub certificate. That was nice. That was a nice touch. [LAUGHING]
ADRIAN STANLEY: Yeah.
JACKLYN LORD: Just a reminder to everybody, we will be doing chat on Pathable. So if there's chat on Zoom that's just amongst us, keep that just here. And then everything for attendees, like attendee questions and everything, we'll direct them over to Pathable so that that can remain persistent throughout the meeting.
JACKLYN LORD: So what I would recommend, if you don't already have this, is you've got Zoom open in one window, and you've got the Pathable page for your session open in the other. So you can keep an eye on what the attendees are seeing
ADRIAN STANLEY: Yeah, that's good. Yeah, actually, Lisa, if I'm going through the presentations, and you like to, if you don't mind, keep an eye on the talk until we stop the presenting at the end, as well. And then we can alternate, right?
LISA CUEVAS SHAW: OK, that sounds good. Yeah, it's the one day I did just one screen. I should have done two. But that's OK. I can adjust, yeah.
ADRIAN STANLEY: And Jackie, one question we'd had was-- and this perhaps is for later-- but making this available in the open, possibly earlier. I know SSP has a sort of policy you make them open a few months after the meeting. But we can cover that later, too. But some of our speakers were certainly keen to have of this be shared more broadly and be helpful.
JACKLYN LORD: OK. I'm going to try playing something. Can you all let me know if-- one second. OK. So can you let me know that you see when I share, and that you can hear what I'm playing, OK? OK, can you see-- [VIDEO PLAYBACK] - In academic publishing, fake often assumes the form of predatory.
JACKLYN LORD: [END PLAYBACK]
JACKLYN LORD: Can you see, can you hear?
TINA PURNAT: Yes.
ADRIAN STANLEY: Yeah.
JACKLYN LORD: Awesome. [CLEARING THROAT] I
ADRIAN STANLEY: I think Cabells are the sponsor, then.
JACKLYN LORD: Yes. So right when I press Start Webinar and we go live, I'm going to click Play, and that'll play. And then I'll stop sharing. And so Adrian, are you going to speak first then? OK. I'm going to drop off. I'm actually going to turn off my camera before we start. But I will be here. Chat me in Zoom if anything comes up, if you have any questions, I'm right here to try to troubleshoot.
JACKLYN LORD: I'll also be putting in some reminders, like how attendees can see the transcripts, how they can see your slides, if you've shared anything in the File section. I think I saw you have a poll, is that right?
ADRIAN STANLEY: I don't think we did anything with that, in the end, did we? It seemed like it might have been a good idea, but we didn't.
JACKLYN LORD: Oh, it's OK. OK.
LISA CUEVAS SHAW: Unless Lisa's feeling spontaneous. [LAUGHING]
JACKLYN LORD: It'll be good.
LISA CUEVAS SHAW: We'll see about that.
JACKLYN LORD: OK, so we've got four minutes, just a heads up to wrap up anything, test anything you need to do, refresher your beverage of choice.
SACHA NOUKHOVITCH: So to join, should we leave this, or it will be automatically transferred to the main session?
ADRIAN STANLEY: This is the main session, Sacha. Just once we press Start Webinar, others join us.
SACHA NOUKHOVITCH: So we don't need to leave and rejoin. So we are already there the way we're supposed to.
ADRIAN STANLEY: Yeah
JACKLYN LORD: Mm-hmm.
SACHA NOUKHOVITCH: Good.
ADRIAN STANLEY: And reminder of the order, we got Gunther, Tina, Bushra, Sacha, Lisa, and hopefully, some time for discussion. I know Gunther sneaked in a couple more slides. But he said he's promised to run through them very quickly. So we're all good. They're the ones, they're quick visuals.
ADRIAN STANLEY: And by the way, thank you, Bushra. I didn't get to mention, but I know it's a holiday in Canada. I mentioned it to Sacha and Gunther too. So we appreciate you spending time on the holiday.
BUSHRA EBADI: No problem. We're stuck at home anyway.
ADRIAN STANLEY: Yeah.
JACKLYN LORD: 1 minute reminder.
JACKLYN LORD: All right, it's 2 o'clock. I'm going to start the webinar, start our 30 second promo, relinquish screen control, and you guys will be on. [VIDEO PLAYBACK] - In academic publishing, fake often assumes the form of predatory. Cabells is the gateway to ethical publishing. The Cabells, Journalytics, and Predatory Reports help the academic navigate the world of publishing .
JACKLYN LORD: The Cabells' Journalytics is an expert-curated list of over 11,000 journals, spanning 18 disciplines. The Cabells' Predatory Reports provides unbiased evaluations of journals and their credentials. [MUSIC PLAYING] [END PLAYBACK]
ADRIAN STANLEY: Hello, everybody. Welcome to this SSP session on Infodemiology and Infoveillance, What Are They? And How Might They Change the World? My name's Adrian Stanley, and it's great to be back at SSP, albeit in a virtual format, just to see everybody. I'm sure there's many old friends and new friends. And I hope you're making the most of this virtual meeting. I'm here to sort of moderate and just do a quick introduction on this session and this topic.
ADRIAN STANLEY: I'm going to very briefly just go through the speakers, but the bios are in the meeting app and session. Please feel free to put your questions in there. We will be monitoring those. We really encourage you to ask questions and make comments. Our aim in this session is to do a brief introduction from a number of different perspectives, and then have more of a discussion on the topic afterwards.
ADRIAN STANLEY: So to sort of introduce the different perspectives we have in this session, starting up is my boss, Gunther Eysenbach, who's the CEO and executive editor at JMR Publications. And really was one of the people who coined the term infodemiology over 15 years ago. Second, we have Tina Purnat, who currently works for the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control, and has also spent a lot of time working at the WHO, and really an expert in e-health, digital health, and public health.
ADRIAN STANLEY: Tina's recently done some amazing webinars in support with the WHO, really going into detail about what infodemiology is, and from how it's been used as a sort of tool around the world to support during this pandemic. Then we have Bushra Ebadi, who is a social innovator, co-founder of the Alliance for Canadian Commission for Health Literacy, and also the Canadian commission for UNESCO.
ADRIAN STANLEY: Bushra's going to look at things through a policy lens here. So we have public health, researcher, and publication policy. And then finally, we have Doctor Sacha Noukhovitch, who's an educator and founder from the STEM Fellowship group. And then playing sort of cleanup hitter at the end is my other colleague here, Lisa Cuevas Shaw, who's really going to sort of bring this discussion together, and you'll see how everything flows together.
ADRIAN STANLEY: But just first-- as a sort of an intro, and then Gunther's going to go into this in a lot more detail-- but infodemiology's an area of research focused on the scanning of the internet for user-contributed health research content, with the ultimate goal of improving public health. So think of ways how you can see trends and analyzing where rumors start, where misinformation comes out.
ADRIAN STANLEY: You heard the keynote this morning, talking all about misinformation. Infodemiology and this session here hopes to show to you a set of tools in a way that you can manage both misinformation and trusted information from all the different groups from the influencers, the policy, the public health, all around the globe. So I've sort of teed this up with a very big session that we really hope you're going to take a lot away from different perspectives.
ADRIAN STANLEY: How are you in scholarly communications? Librarians can better understand this field. How technologists can see what some of the latest technology is that sees these trends and helps people manage these pandemics and really improve public health. So I'm going to stop sharing now and hand over to my colleague, Gunther, to sort of start his introductions and talk. And then we'll go on.
ADRIAN STANLEY: But do put your questions in the chat, please.
GUNTHER EYSENBACH: Thanks, Adrian, for the introduction. Can you hear me?
ADRIAN STANLEY: Yes. Yes.
GUNTHER EYSENBACH: Thank you. So I'm going to comment on this from a perspective of a novel publisher. But formerly, I was often a very active researcher in this whole field of health information or health infomatics, and to a certain degree though, it's still my field, because being a publisher is [INAUDIBLE] has a lot to do with disseminating health information, and even assessing health information. So I think every publisher, to a certain degree, is also an infodemiologist.
GUNTHER EYSENBACH: But I refer to myself as an infodemiologist, not since today. This was actually on my LinkedIn profile for the past couple of years. But infodemiology has gained a lot of attention last year with COVID, and misinformation on the internet being front and center. But it is something that a lot of us have been concerned about and written about for a long time.
GUNTHER EYSENBACH: And that goes back all the way to the mid 90s when the web emerged and a lot of health information was published on the web. And there was a lot of concern back then on the quality of the information and questions like, should we extrapolate that information to a certain degree. And I was actually leading a project that was funded by the European Union.
GUNTHER EYSENBACH: It was called Met Certain, and later, Met Circle. And we published this paper, here on the right, in the BMJ about this approach. And it had to do with-- basically, what we wanted to do is create some sort of an immune system against misinformation outbreaks. And that immune system was based on the idea of metadata. It didn't talk about tools.
GUNTHER EYSENBACH: And I think metadata is still a tool that is around. If you want to look at schema.org, that idea that people use machine processible metadata and data about information. And that can then be aggregated and automatically analyzed. And that paper in the BMJ was accompanied by an editorial by Enrico Honiara, who talked about information epidemics, economics, and immunity on the internet.
GUNTHER EYSENBACH: And it was, basically, also a call to arms in terms of studying what all this information and misinformation has, and what the effects on public health are, and what are the potential tools? So as part of this product, we also did a huge, systematic review, where we looked at all the studies where people have assessed misinformation or information on the internet.
GUNTHER EYSENBACH: That paper was published in Jama in 2002. And I also was actively peer-reviewing a lot of information, a lot of papers that came out, on the quality of information. And in my mind, this new discipline started to emerge. And I wrote this editorial here in the American Journal of Medicine. And I called the field, infodemiology. And very much an analogy to epidemiology, I said that this research discipline and methodology is the study of the determinants and distribution of health information And I called this infodemiology.
GUNTHER EYSENBACH: And then later, refined this and said, basically, that infodemiology is a science of distribution and determinants of information in an electronic medium, specifically the internet, or in a population, with an ultimate aim to inform public health and public policy. And I also tried to coin the term infoveillance, which is the tools that allow us to constantly listen to what the public says on the internet.
GUNTHER EYSENBACH: So today, it's also called social listening. And it also occurred to me that there are, basically, two data sources, which we can tap into. One is what information people publish online. So that's the supply side of things. But also, what people are looking for, that's the demand side of it. And back then, there were very few tools available to study the demand side, because it was not possible to directly tap into search engines and monitor what people are searching for.
GUNTHER EYSENBACH: Now we have all those Google Trends, and all those other tools, and even social media. And social media you can also track what people are asking. But it also occurred to me that infodemiology goes far beyond studying misinformation. And part of this is also that in medicine in particular, it is often very hard to say what is misinformation. And we saw this very clearly in the pandemic last year when information was also constantly changing, and the evidence never was changing, and so on.
GUNTHER EYSENBACH: So it is really hard to find a gold standard here. And I thought maybe the biggest impact of infodemiology is just to create the science which allows us to understand those big data which are out there, and what people are posting and searching for. And that reflects, to a certain degree, public knowledge, behavior, and attitudes of people. And that is useful information for public health. So that was basically the framework.
GUNTHER EYSENBACH: And in addition to epidemiology, we have infodemiology that keeps a pulse on what the public says, and writes, and searches for. And we also did this very early work on the correlation of internet searches with influenza outbreaks. That's on the left side. I published it in 2006. Three years later, Google creates Google Trends, and was also validating this in the bigger data set.
GUNTHER EYSENBACH: It's also important to understand that COVID was actually not the first pandemic where social media played a role. We had another pandemic in 2010. And we actually used some of those tools. There was one tool which we developed, Infovigil. It was funded by the Canadian Health Institute for Health Research, which is, basically, an infoveillance tool, or social listening tool.
GUNTHER EYSENBACH: And we analyzed what people were Tweeting during H1N1. We developed some early methods on how to automatically classify this. And some of this work now has been, I guess, rediscovered, or is at the front and center of the public attention. And I'm sorry, I forgot this one. There was also an attempt, by the way, of the WHO to secure the top-level domain, .health, for trustworthy organizations.
GUNTHER EYSENBACH: That was an initiative we supported with our Journal of Medical internet research. I was one of the experts at that meeting in Geneva. And we tried a lobbying approach. We brought [INAUDIBLE] to [INAUDIBLE],, and said, there should be kind of a protected space on the internet, the top-level domain, .health, should be protected for trustworthy information. And we lost that fight.
GUNTHER EYSENBACH: So fast-forward to 2020, WHO has declared an infodemic. And we're going to hear more about this later. One of the frameworks, in my mind, on how to fight an infodemic are these four pillars, or four pieces. One pillar is the infoveillance aspect, that we need to keep an eye on what people are posting and where the misinformation outbreaks are, and also what the information demand is.
GUNTHER EYSENBACH: Second pillar is e-health literacy to empower people to actually discriminate between good information, bad information, and so on. The third pillar are those fact checking and information refinement processes. In science, it would be peer review, journalism, it would be fact checking. So each level has their own quality assurance processes. And the fourth level is the knowledge translation piece to make sure that knowledge translation from one level into the other-- for example, from the science level to the public level-- that these knowledge translation processes are free of commercial influences, political influences.
GUNTHER EYSENBACH: Or that, at least, it is always clear where the information's coming from and what the context of that information is. As a publisher, we also started this new journal. We have an e-collection on infodemiology. And in academia, we also have our own small infodemic, which is the emergence of the preprint. And yet we also created an overlay terminal to rapidly peer-review treatments as a way to combat the infodemic on that level.
GUNTHER EYSENBACH: With that whirlwind presentation, I'm going to hand over back to Adrian.
ADRIAN STANLEY: Thank you, Gunther. And Lisa, do let us know if any comments or questions are coming through while I just bring up Tina's presentation here.
LISA CUEVAS SHAW: That's great. Nothing so far, but I will just encourage all of the attendees, feel free to put your questions in the chat, if you like.
ADRIAN STANLEY: Comments too. And over to you now, Tina.
TINA PURNAT: Thank you. Can you hear me?
ADRIAN STANLEY: Yep.
TINA PURNAT: OK. Great, thank you so much. It's going to be an interesting discussion today. So I will try to keep to the seven minutes as promised. I will be speaking today from the public health perspective, emergency response, but actually, a bit broadly as well. And as Gunther already mentioned, early, early last year, in February, the WHO Director General, Doctor Tedros, he warned that we're not just battling a pandemic and that we're also facing an infodemic.
TINA PURNAT: And this word has definitely become more known this past year. Now, some think that the infodemic is only a problem of the online world and of online misinformation. But experience from other outbreaks since a long time has shown us that in times of an epidemic, we experience a surge of information and rumors. And this includes, also, misinformation, or plainly just outdated information as the outbreak evolves.
TINA PURNAT: And this happens both online and offline. And when you combine this surge of information with an emergency and an uncertainty, it's then harder for people to find reliable information that could then help them make informed decisions to protect their health and their communities. And we've seen real harm over the last year, from people ingesting bleach because they thought it would help their bodies get rid of the virus.
TINA PURNAT: Or in many places around the world, people have used herbal remedies, or even medications, that were unproven to treat COVID-19. And you also may remember even news stories of telephone 5G towers being destroyed in the UK. Because some people believed the 5G technology is involved in COVID-19 transmission. But even from outbreaks before COVID-19, we also learned that the infodemic doesn't only have a direct impact on health or cause confusion.
TINA PURNAT: Really importantly, it also exacerbates mistrust in science, and health authorities, and public health measures. Or it even reduces acceptance of vaccines and treatments. And it has a wider societal impact, also, such as stigma or loosening of social cohesion. Now, all of this makes it harder for health authorities to manage the pandemic and also manage the epidemic risk. So next slide, please, yes.
TINA PURNAT: What makes the COVID-19 infodemic different is that the pandemic is taking place in a globalized digital society. And the challenge is really a large one. Just last year, over 200,000 preprints were published online on COVID-19. The science has evolved and the pandemic response has evolved with it. And rumor and information traveled across borders very quickly.
TINA PURNAT: And this has put a strain, not just on how to communicate the evolving scientific knowledge, but it's also challenged how to respond, based on the needs and concerns of communities, so that everyone is empowered to protect themselves. And infodemic is a global phenomenon. But then to reduce its harmful effect, we need everyone involved. And this is not just a job for the health authorities.
TINA PURNAT: We've seen, also, a role for media journalists, science community, civil society, fact checkers. And ultimately, communities and individuals are the ones who enact health behaviors to protect themselves. So we need not only to listen to their concerns, but also involve them in finding solutions. Next slide, please. So I'd like to touch on the area of practice, that WHO and global health partners advanced over the past year.
TINA PURNAT: We worked on applying multidisciplinary science and evidence to managing the infodemic. And we've learned, really, during the past year that epidemic management interventions are only effective to a certain point if we don't actively manage acceptance and demand for the interventions that are introduced in countries and communities. So epidemic management needs to be complemented with infodemic management to work for behavior change and to mitigate epidemic risk.
TINA PURNAT: Now, health authorities, especially during the emergency response, they must act as quickly as possible with best available information and evidence. So the science of infodemiology really underpins this commitment to evaluation and delivery of impact of the practice. And it will help us to better manage this pandemic, but also, more quickly tackle new and resurgent health threats in the future, or even beyond infectious disease.
TINA PURNAT: Yes, to the next slide, please. So last year, under the leadership of WHO, over 140 scientists from across a variety of disciplines came together to review the existing scientific knowledge that can inform how to manage infodemics. And they talked about managing the effect of information overload on people and their list perception during health emergencies. They also talked about effective interventions to counter health misinformation.
TINA PURNAT: And what is more important longer term, they also looked at how to promote resilience of individuals and communities to the infodemic. Next slide, please. Now, WHO challenged the infodemiology to expand it and link in more disciplines. We learned that many disciplines have worked on questions relevant to infodemic response, but that they don't normally publish together or exchange perspectives.
TINA PURNAT: So infodemic is not just a matter of communication, or messaging, or social media. It's affected by the way that online information ecosystem works across platforms into offline world, and how it promotes emotive and divisive content, instead of factual information. It's also a matter of cultural and historical inequities and distrust that are deeply rooted in communities, that may have had really bad experience with health systems and authorities in the past.
TINA PURNAT: And it's also a matter of what bridges that gap from intent to act. We don't yet know the determinants of why people enact risk behaviors, despite reporting that they understand and showing that they understand and know that they are risky. It's also a matter of cognitive processes in people. I want go into the detail, but you see here all of the different disciplines that we felt needed to feed into understanding how we deal with this issue.
TINA PURNAT: So really, it's a truly multidisciplinary look that we need on how to look at infodemic and how to address it. And WHO published the first public health research agenda for managing the infodemic, earlier this year, and plans to keep it under preprint review. Next slide, please. But in addition to being multidisciplinary in nature, infodemic response during emergencies must also be extremely practical and pragmatic.
TINA PURNAT: And just to remind us of the slide I showed before, the research agenda that I mentioned was built also with the awareness that it's urgent to point the research towards building interventions and systems. For emergency response, and emergency responders, you need practical and easy, usable tools that are based on scientific evidence. So that means that we need to work for public health impacts, evaluate interventions, and at the same time, we need to do this across many levels, from societal all the way down to community and individual level.
TINA PURNAT: And I mention this urgency to make this connection between science and practice. Because the current challenges we face as a society require quick response. And infodemiology, as a transdisciplinary science, must be applied to solve these practical challenges. And I think, actually, it can even be applied to other areas of public health where health promotion and social listening are key.
TINA PURNAT: So I think it's important that the scientific community and research journals listen to the needs of public health practitioners. On the whole, practitioners have less time and opportunity to interact with the scientific communities through conferences or original research articles. So we need to find a way to bring the science and practice closer in dialogue. And last slide, please.
TINA PURNAT: Just in conclusion, I do want to remind us that we all have a role to play in the infodemic response. Poor information, nowadays, is responsible for morbidity and mortality from diseases in the world. And in the past, scientists didn't really have incentives to promote public understanding or to learn how to communicate and promote science other than in peer-reviewed publications. And the pandemic has really shown that we must change this, especially to maintain trust in science.
TINA PURNAT: So in addition to needing an evidence base and having a heavy bias towards practical solutions, we also need to be inclusive and committed to equity in everything that we do. So I spoke today from the perspective of public health and the commitment to everyone's human right to health and well-being and the rights to health information. But this really is a challenge for all of society.
TINA PURNAT: And it's important to be inclusive in working together to address it. Thank you.
ADRIAN STANLEY: Thank you, Tina. And now on to Bushra. And I should just say we've had some really wonderful speaker chats when we were preparing for this session, too. But over to you, Bushra.
BUSHRA EBADI: Thank you. Yeah, so I will be speaking about applying a systems approach. And I think this links quite closely with what Tina was presenting with that whole-of-system approach to addressing infodemics. and so when I speak about a systems approach, what I really mean is to work across sectors, disciplines, geographies, generations, and actors. And oftentimes, what I've observed is that there's a very siloed approach to addressing these issues, which has caused us more harm and challenges than are necessary.
BUSHRA EBADI: And that the rise in misinformation and disinformation itself is more prevalent during crises. And that's not just limited to public health crises, but also to political crises, human rights crises, humanitarian crises. And so I'll be speaking to some of the lessons I've learned working across these different fields, especially development humanitarian space. So one of the key factors to consider is governance.
BUSHRA EBADI: And there are different types of governance systems that impact and intersect with infodemics. There are, for example, political governance systems, digital governance systems. And I think where we're seeing more of a discussion around the digital governance systems. And some of Gunther's work also touched on this, about the digital presence of misinformation or disinformation and how that's impacting people's ability to assess health information.
BUSHRA EBADI: But looking at platformed governance in particular, there's been increasing conversations about the role that social media plays in our understanding of information of each other, not just looking at data as an object, but also the relational aspect of it, how it's related to people, to the environment, and what that actually says about those relations, at the end of the day. And how do we hold these platforms accountable?
BUSHRA EBADI: You can actually go back to the previous slide.
ADRIAN STANLEY: Sorry.
BUSHRA EBADI: Yep, thank you. It's OK. Yeah, so in terms of the governance systems-- so I spoke about political needing to be factored in digital governance, but also institutional. So how are organizations being governed themselves, how are they being held accountable, and who is taking part in decision making? What sometimes gets lost in discussions about governance is that systems are comprised of actors that make decisions.
BUSHRA EBADI: And it can be easy to speak in binaries. But who or what is responsible when we're considering interventions or policies to put forward but we're not actually considering the individual and collective agency? Agency as a really important factor, I found, whether we're talking about infodemiology or other systemic challenges. And the narrative that is predominant in the fields of development and humanitarian affairs, as well as peacebuilding, tend to be ones of empowerment.
BUSHRA EBADI: And you actually see this a lot in the non-for-profit sector. We see this a lot in the publishing field, as well. Where we talk about empowerment and not really critically assess what empowerment means and how it can reinforce inequitable power dynamics. And so instead of looking at who is taking part in systems of oppression or preventing people from exercising their inherent power in decision making capacities, the empowerment narrative shifts the focus away from where we should be really focusing our interventions.
BUSHRA EBADI: And then the other aspect is trust. And Tina already spoke to this, but there's, I think, an illusion of trust versus the practice of trust. Sometimes, technologies, especially with the use of AI technology, has been trying to maybe mimic trusting relationships but is not actually reflective of practices of trust. And trust is actually built through relationships. So focusing, again, in recentering relationships as part of the policies that we develop is really critical.
BUSHRA EBADI: And trust is built over time. It is not just something that, during a crisis, that we can start to manage and build. But it has to happen far before the crisis hits. And in many ways, investing in those relationships can also be a tool for crisis prevention in the first place. And then the third aspect for governance is accountability. So while we have some laws and protections in place, do they actually mean anything if they're not being implemented or put into practice?
BUSHRA EBADI: And who is actually able to leverage these policies? For example, when it comes to hate speech or just information about a certain population or community, we saw the rise in anti-Asian racism during the pandemic. But who is being held accountable for that. And so that also needs to be discussed and factored in when we're developing these policies, to make sure that they're not, again, just being prioritized for privileged populations, but those who are being most affected and most harmed.
BUSHRA EBADI: Next slide, please. And so a lot of the work that I also do focuses on media and information literacy. And I think it's important for us to redefine what we mean by media and information literacy, or literacy itself, and moving beyond reading and writing. When we focus too much on reading and writing as a core signifier of literacy, it actually ends up doing harm to communities who transmit or share information through oral traditions or from languages that are not commonly represented.
BUSHRA EBADI: For example, official UN languages, but indigenous languages that are increasingly under attack, and what that means. Because language is also an aspect of people being able to survive and exist, and to continue that existence moving forward. So it's really important for us to decolonize knowledge systems. And when we talk about that, we have to ask ourselves whose knowledge is being valued, who is being presented as an expert in a space and acknowledge that there are systems of oppression that have historically and contemporarily marginalized certain communities.
BUSHRA EBADI: And that's reflected in the work that we also see published. Predominantly, we have a certain select group of languages that make up most of what's available through open access publishing. And then there are other communities whose knowledges are not represented meaningfully. And that can also lead to distrust, then, when you don't see yourself represented in being the knowledge keepers and generators.
BUSHRA EBADI: And then understanding and critically engaging with information as being another core part of literacy. So it's not just about being able to, again, read and write, but being able to analyze the information and assess it, and then investing in community and education as a key tool to be able to advance literacy and to tackle infodemics. And a key part of that is, as I said previously, that transmitting knowledge across generations is a key practice within indigenous communities.
BUSHRA EBADI: And that also needs to be invested and looked at when we're developing interventions and policies. And that we see a divide when it comes to people from an older generation and a younger generation. I find myself uniquely positioned because I feel like I exist between two generations. Where the older generation has not been online or is not accustomed to being online. And then a younger generation that has only ever known being in digital spaces, from their birth.
BUSHRA EBADI: And so being able to help people bridge those realities and to not think that everything needs to be completely online. Or alternatively, that there are individuals who just don't have the digital literacy to be able to navigate online spaces and why that is the case. It's not just about giving somebody a device and saying, here, you have a smartphone, so you can now access information, without understanding that there's a whole host of other factors that need to be considered as we develop those programs.
BUSHRA EBADI: For example, are there native languages being incorporated? Do they have meaningful access to the internet? It's not just about the actual physical infrastructure, but all the other infrastructure that needs to be invested in. Next slide, please. And then a key part of that is avoiding false equivalencies in media. So there's a lot of both sides narratives that have emerged and giving equal airtime to verified and unverified information.
BUSHRA EBADI: And this is actually very dangerous. And we've seen the dangers that it presents, not just in the public health space, but also seeing politically how it's contributed to acts of political violence, violence towards protesters, who are fighting for their civil rights in various parts of the world. And how fake news legislation has also emerged during the pandemic.
BUSHRA EBADI: And in autocratic regimes, this can actually be quite dangerous. So it's not as simple as saying, we can ban fake news. But who gets to define what is fake news? And what are the repercussions of being labeled as being a person who's disseminating fake news. And there are examples where that has actually been used to silence dissent across different regions around the world, especially during the pandemic.
BUSHRA EBADI: So in a healthy ecosystem, neither a drought or flood are desirable. So both an absence and abundance of information can harm people. And yet, we don't necessarily think about this. Sometimes people think about access to information as being inherently good. But it's the quality of that information. That's how people have the skills to be able to understand that information that are also important.
BUSHRA EBADI: And then navigating who's getting to produce that information and getting to decide what information is being shared at what time and in which places is also really important. And there are certain actors who are able to more freely exercise their power, and therefore, able to control that narrative and able to control the dissemination of information. And this can be quite dangerous, especially when we look at those power inequities in exacerbating injustice.
BUSHRA EBADI: Next slide, please. So just to wrap up, infodemiology or infodemics are not just something that's occurred during the COVID-pandemic and not just during public health crises. They apply to situations with climate change. We've seen a lot of climate denial, infodemics, misinformation, disinformation, have played a key role in allowing that to be perpetuated, again, reflective of certain power interests.
BUSHRA EBADI: Looking at how this impacts context of conflict, we see this happening where there are situations of apartheid and genocide, ethnic cleansing. The spread of disinformation, especially about a marginalized or targeted population, is quite rampant. And the active monitoring media, for example, has been a core practice in this area as a way to prevent conflicts. So taking some lessons learned from that space and applying it to the public health space, I think, would be relevant.
BUSHRA EBADI: And then another part of the [INAUDIBLE] for example, responsible consumption and production, also needs to consider the responsible consumption and production of information, not just physical goods and services. So looking beyond, I think the way that we see things may be in binaries or in siloed approaches. And taking that more systems approach is critical for us to have a sustained and more equitable approach, and also think beyond inclusion.
BUSHRA EBADI: Because when we think about including people in inherently unjust systems, it can perpetuate greater harm towards them. And so focusing and centering justice is a really key part of any of the policies that we develop or the interventions we develop, and co-developing them with communities, as opposed to having so-called experts come in and tell them how things ought to be done, without actually understanding the information ecosystem or the other aspects of the system that are critical.
BUSHRA EBADI:
ADRIAN STANLEY: Is that it, Bushra? That was a lot of great insights and information to take in. And we're going to move on to Sacha, now, to run through this. And then hopefully we have time for Lisa to give us a sort of an overall summary and some questions. And I did forget just to mention that Sacha recently won the Canadian Prime Minister's Award for STEM and Education. So he's done some really good work around this since STEM.
ADRIAN STANLEY: So take it away, Sacha. We're at just before 2:40.
SACHA NOUKHOVITCH: Thank you. So I would like to invite everybody to look at the infodemic as a learning opportunity, or actually, new learning environment. Infodemics present more than abundance of information. It creates an urgency to understand. Interpretation of scientific and health-related information became an everyday necessity for the [INAUDIBLE].. It has also created unprecedented participation of the masses in scientific, or pseudo-scientific, discourse.
SACHA NOUKHOVITCH: We are witnessing a new phenomenon of uncurated teaching, that could be compared with the chain reaction of health and science information spreading. This pseudo-science crowd discourse could be muffling or distracting from [INAUDIBLE] science communication. The general public and news and policymakers could be misled by scientific terminology or infodemic players, and fall for misinformation or [INAUDIBLE]..
SACHA NOUKHOVITCH: If possible, next slide. I believe it was my second year in University when I and my friend came across a carpenter's school booklet, where we found a number five [INAUDIBLE].. There was nothing wrong in the first three digits. But the fact of separate existence of five [INAUDIBLE] was really a lot of fun and we had plenty of jokes around it as friends.
SACHA NOUKHOVITCH: Quite frequently, infodemic facts and materials are like by for wood, giving a cut up version of facts and findings. It would not stand a peer review, of course, but it has an attractiveness of practical application. Right or wrong, it is a different question. Traditional education puts students in an observer position to teach a theory or give a few examples to consolidate the knowledge.
SACHA NOUKHOVITCH: Infodemiologic creates an atmosphere where crowds of learners are rushed to find the answers, to the point where they feel that it is matter of the immediate well-being or health. Infodemics created unhealthy learning psychology, where only few can maintain the [INAUDIBLE] rest pushed forward.
SACHA NOUKHOVITCH: And kind of life hacks, these, as you see, I picked up this picture, which I actually like. Because I think that this example of life hack with a mask is the perfect demonstration of how infodemics can be substituting real issue. So can we move to the next slide?
SACHA NOUKHOVITCH: This whole infodemiological sedation is definitely a challenge, but also an opportunity to develop a totally new post-secondary and adult education that will be built around Open Access science publication. It would require the development of new type of pedagogy and curriculum, contrary to traditional education. And that is teaching theory.
SACHA NOUKHOVITCH: These new Open Access research-based program should rely on experiential learning and theory integration into practice. Another critical difference of this new curriculum would be the age and prior knowledge diversity of the target audience, which is totally different compared to the current way of teaching today.
SACHA NOUKHOVITCH: Yeah, and if we can move to the next slide. Further on diversification of scholaric communication into the field of practical for secondary and adult education. analysis of infodemic [INAUDIBLE] new subjects of study. So we use infodemics to identify new subjects of study.
SACHA NOUKHOVITCH: These subjects allow adequately educate students, preparing them for their real demands of business and society. From the pedagogical point of view, it leads to the development of dynamic curriculums and flexible composition of courses that would bring about a new type of professional certification. Further analysis of infodemic and actually players has also the potential to identify instructional talent that could be invited for Open Science training and instructor qualification.
SACHA NOUKHOVITCH: So, practically, recruiting from within. And it is an opportunity for scholar republishers to capitalize on the wealth of resources, and practically create new brands of schools and universities. And now to the last slide. With the limited abilities, STEM fellowship, an organization I'm involved with, is piloting at the moment.
SACHA NOUKHOVITCH: Infodemiology for the future of digital and public health, big data challenge for University students. So we invited University students from across Canada, and actually beyond, to brainstorm and identify patterns, not only of infodemics itself, and tools which are best to measure the impact. But actually, our goal is to identify the groups which capable of working.
SACHA NOUKHOVITCH: And we're also looking at the educational perspective. Because like it was mentioned before, it is new interdisciplinary subject, infodemics. It requires a better understanding of it from various perspectives. Thank you.
ADRIAN STANLEY: Thank you, Sacha. Lisa, any thoughts to pull all these pieces together? I know as the sort of editorial board has developed the merge for our new journal, we really factored in people from very different disciplines and backgrounds. And I'll hand it off to you and stop sharing.
LISA CUEVAS SHAW: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I'm not going to yet take the task of pulling all that together, because that was a lot of information. But what I did want to do is just point out that there was a really, really nice discussion string happening in the chat. And I think what the back and forth really gets to is this question. So I'll ask it for the panelists.
LISA CUEVAS SHAW: It might be appropriate, Tina, for you to start. But I know all of you will have some responses to that. And to a certain degree, you've touched on an answer to this, but I want to ask it more directly. Which is, how can the scholarly communications community directly support infodemic management principles that are developing in both existing and novel ways? So in other words, how should we consider changing or adapting how we curate and disseminate new research?
LISA CUEVAS SHAW: So Tina, or Gunther, Bushra, who wants to take that one on?
TINA PURNAT: I can start, perhaps. I actually think that there's been three challenges related to this. One is on how research is done. The other one is how to curate it. And the third one is how to communicate it. And the last year, COVID-19's released in an abundance of smaller poorly designed studies and a lot of waste duplication and a lot of imbalance of topics.
TINA PURNAT: And the way that research curates, we really need to be looking at that a bit more closely, both from point of view that I think we should all be mindful of our responsibility to science, but also our accountability to the public. So we really need to embrace transparency and research practice, encourage really proper use of preprints. And also, which may be a bit more provocative towards a more transparent form of post-publication peer review-- and the reason why I'm saying this is because all of that can then help communicate the science and also communicate at what the science, or what evidence, we currently have at any one point in time where the uncertainties are, and how the science has evolved.
TINA PURNAT: I also think that scientists themselves need to be proactive in ensuring that the work they publish is understood as intended. And science communicators really would need to engage with different communities, a bit like what Bushra and also everyone else was saying, empowering them to find their own solutions and emphasizing the importance of partnership and collaboration.
TINA PURNAT: We could go into more detail, but I really think it's actually a whole package. And I do think that scientific community, the research journals, have a really big role to play in shaping this and also by leading by example.
LISA CUEVAS SHAW: That's great. Thank you so much. Gunther, did you-- not put you on the spot-- but did you want to comment at all on the preprints? Because we've had a lot of back and forth on that. And so just to share a little bit of some of the more novel approaches really pushing open science, so to kind of tag on to what Tina offered.
ADRIAN STANLEY: Yeah, we have a overlay journal, which we also call a super journal, that sits on top of preprint servers and that promises a rapid review of preprints. That was actually something we already announced before COVID. So that is not directly, but not directly, related to COVID. But we thought, with the proper funding in place, that would have been a nice tool to rapidly identify at least highly shared preprints and do a rapid peer review.
ADRIAN STANLEY: And MIT Press did something similar. They got some funding from a foundation. Our portal is a little bit different because we actually-- yeah, it was our intention to have the first PubMed-indexed overlay journal in PubMed. That's why we had a very conservative approach in terms of also securing the buy end of the author before we reviewed the preprints. Which was not the case for MIT Press.
ADRIAN STANLEY: And there was actually some strange feedback from academia, who then, when somebody reviewed their preprint and the review is negative, we then thought this was not a good idea to review preprints without their consent. And that's debate, an ongoing debate.
LISA CUEVAS SHAW: That's great. Thank you. And I think that speaks to-- we've touched on the concept of trust-- but that trust has to be shared and felt by everyone in this whole ecosystem, right? So that's one of the core issues, obviously. Anyone else who would respond to how can the scholarly communications community directly support infodemic management principles?
LISA CUEVAS SHAW: Again, just knowing our current system, where are we falling short, where did we do well last year?
BUSHRA EBADI: I think I can add a little bit about the trust, in particular. I think sometimes we focus more on trust after research has been published, but not necessarily considering as the research itself is being done. And then as scholars, and researchers, and then publishers, how are we building the systems in place to make sure that there is that accountability? Because if you are a community that's been over research-- and when I mean over research, like you have external actors coming in, and doing a study on you, and then leaving.
BUSHRA EBADI: And there's no real partnership with the community, and there's no benefit that they see. Then that erodes that trust. And so even if that information may quote unquote be seen as accurate, if that trust doesn't exist with that population, then they're more likely to discard that, or disregard that, information. And so we need to actually build those systems in place and have consideration for, again, co-creating and co-developing solutions and interventions with them, as opposed to just having people come in externally.
BUSHRA EBADI:
ADRIAN STANLEY: I was also drawn, Lisa, just to a point Sacha said, that often the systems can show where the rumors are started and potential key influencers in negative ways. But I think, also, looking at where the positive actors are who are really doing good and finding ways to highlight them and support and build communities around them in a sort of data aspect.
LISA CUEVAS SHAW: Yeah, that's a really good point.
SACHA NOUKHOVITCH: I would like to add here. Because I believe that there is the huge gap between science communication and current majority in masses of people who are making the day-to-day decisions based on, supposedly, scientific information, or at least seek the scientific information. These gaps need to be addressed.
SACHA NOUKHOVITCH: It's important that the scientists, the scholarly publishers, will do everything possible to speak to the wider audiences, but it is beyond their capacity. What is necessary is new bridge, is new educational bridge, which actually-- I don't know. I found kind of an easy idea, which is probably very difficult to implement, about the diversification of scholar republishers into education.
SACHA NOUKHOVITCH: But it would be definitely helpful.
LISA CUEVAS SHAW: That's great. That's a really good point. And I suspect that a number of our attendees, there are publishers who are approaching not just research, but also education. And but sometimes in organizations, there are silos, even within that same organization. So I think you're challenging us to think about that, as well, to break down silos even within our own organizations, right? So it's a great point.
LISA CUEVAS SHAW: All right, so Adrian, did you have any other comments, or are we could talk to-- I've got some closing remarks to make, but I didn't want to-- yeah?
ADRIAN STANLEY: Yeah, no no, go for it. If there's any other questions or anything.
LISA CUEVAS SHAW: Yeah, so we're just about to end the session. Really, the closing remarks-- first of all, thank you to all of our panelists, Gunther, Tina, Bushra, and Sacha. You gave us quite a bit to think about. When we were putting together this panel, we intentionally took a systems approach to addressing the promise of infodemiology as a field, and the need for infodemic management to be a shared responsibility across stakeholders.
LISA CUEVAS SHAW: I think you heard that from every single person. And so the panel really represented research publishing, public health, global governance, policy, and education. And all of those things, and citizens, need to be working together to be able to prevent the next infodemic. Maybe that's not possible, but how we respond to it is something that we can absolutely address together.
LISA CUEVAS SHAW: For the scholarly communications community, it's important for us to think about how we move forward from the experience of rapidly producing new research and disseminating it. We did that pretty well. As a system, we kind of came together. We were strong in aggregating information, getting it out there quickly. So there were benefits, strengths, and then there are real inadequacies of our process that we can learn from and apply not only to the next pandemic but to larger global issues, as Bushra pointed out.
LISA CUEVAS SHAW: So this is not just relegated to pandemics, although those are important, but to other global issues. I think a couple of questions that I'll leave this group with is, can we employ better technologies to reduce waste? So research and results that are unnecessarily replicated. Do we have a different level of curation needed, identifying what is novel and what is complementary or repetitive? Will open and group peer review improve our evaluation and gatekeeping, and especially, if we open it up to different stakeholders, which we haven't necessarily been great at doing in the past?
LISA CUEVAS SHAW: How are we translating the evidence? We've got a number of us who are trying to take knowledge and translate it. But really, who are we serving? Have we really defined that well, and have we taken that responsibility? How are we as a community participating in infoveillance and social listening? Do we have a different kind of responsibility now, not just ensuring high-quality research outputs, but being even more disciplined in that gatekeeping so that we're not contributing unwittingly to the overabundance.
LISA CUEVAS SHAW: How are editorial teams doing more informal social listening to determine what will be the most impactful for potential behavioral change, especially when it's a life or death situation? So our future as a community is not just about openness, or volume of research, or the velocity alone. We need to contribute to that whole of society, its ability to keep track of what we know and how we know it.
LISA CUEVAS SHAW: So I will end there. I think we've got a lot of work to do. I think from a scholarly communications community, again, we learned a ton. And we're going to be having these conversations throughout the conference. But really grateful, again, to collaborate with this fine group of panelists, and also grateful for the interaction from the audience.
LISA CUEVAS SHAW: So thank you so much. Take care, everyone.
ADRIAN STANLEY: Thanks, everybody. Bye bye.
Segment:0 .
SACHA NOUKHOVITCH: Hello.
JACKLYN LORD: Hello. I'm just going to go ahead and say this. Remember, don't press Start Webinar. I know we've talked about it a lot, but just in case. I'll do that at 2 o'clock when we're ready to begin.
ADRIAN STANLEY: Hi, Lisa.
LISA CUEVAS SHAW: Hi, how are you?
ADRIAN STANLEY: Hi, Sacha.
SACHA NOUKHOVITCH: Hello?
ADRIAN STANLEY: Hi, Tina.
TINA PURNAT: Hello, Hello. Can you hear me?
ADRIAN STANLEY: We can.
TINA PURNAT: Good. Let me see. I have my [INAUDIBLE] family, things happening in the back. So I'm going to put a background. [INTERPOSING VOICES]
ADRIAN STANLEY: Good. I just got a quick question for Gunther, who's going to present his own slides when he's going, I think.
LISA CUEVAS SHAW: What is your button, Adrian? Which one is that? Is it Brickett?
ADRIAN STANLEY: Oh, it's the original orchid, yes. I was ambassador a long, long time ago. They stopped making them.
LISA CUEVAS SHAW: Wow.
ADRIAN STANLEY: It's a collector's Item.
LISA CUEVAS SHAW: Oh my goodness. Yeah, we'll have to find out how much that goes for.
ADRIAN STANLEY: Oh, are we doing all the virtual backgrounds? I did download one, actually, I think. Although, perhaps not. I saw SSP had a meeting background.
TINA PURNAT: You mentioned it in the email, but I didn't find it.
ADRIAN STANLEY: Yeah, how are you, Sacha? I know it's holiday in Canada, right?
SACHA NOUKHOVITCH: Yes. Yes, we are celebrating, practically, the founder of-- well, not officially-- but the person who influenced and creation of the whole-- the [INAUDIBLE] of this story.
LISA CUEVAS SHAW: Yeah.
SACHA NOUKHOVITCH: You know what, I think that I will step out for a sec. I will go change for a different shirt, because it will be probably better.
ADRIAN STANLEY: You look very Canadian in that one How you doing, Becky?
JACKLYN LORD: Good. How are you guys?
ADRIAN STANLEY: Is everything going OK?
JACKLYN LORD: Oh it's going really well. I'm sad that this is my first meeting in this format. But I'm also really excited to finally get to do it. Plus, I'm actually really excited that Melanie and I swapped. I was really looking forward to your session, so I'm glad to catch it live.
ADRIAN STANLEY: Good, good. And then what was the final attendee list, then? Do we got a number?
JACKLYN LORD: We're at, last check, because people are registering today, 760, somewhere in there.
ADRIAN STANLEY: OK, that's good.
JACKLYN LORD: So just a reminder, when we start at 2:00, I'm going to play a sponsor spot. I think it's about 30 seconds. We don't say anything, I'm just going to start webinar and press play on the file. And then when that's done, I'll stop screen sharing, and Adrian, you'll take over.
ADRIAN STANLEY: Yeah. Actually, Gunther, were you going to do yours-- are you using the link we had, or have you got a separate presentation. Because you could have the first slide open. I can talk to that. And then you could go straight in. Or if you've got yours separately, I couldn't just hand it over. That's OK.
GUNTHER EYSENBACH: [INAUDIBLE] I'm not sure what you mean. But yes, I do want to present my own slides. [INAUDIBLE]
ADRIAN STANLEY: The shared Google Doc, are you using off that, which has got all the slides together, or are you just using your separate deck?
GUNTHER EYSENBACH: I have both. I don't know if I can control the shared one. Either way, I'm sharing my screen, right? And then I can either protect [INAUDIBLE]
ADRIAN STANLEY: Well, I've just got the intro, if we got that initial slide up. We're going to use the one online. If not, we'll just change it over, that's all. But it may be one less handover. But is everything in that--
GUNTHER EYSENBACH: But isn't it that I get control of the screen? Am I not sharing my screen?
ADRIAN STANLEY: You can, we can all do it. I was just trying to avoid an awkward handover. I'm going to start and do an intro. And just go through all the speakers and then this first speaker.
GUNTHER EYSENBACH: Yeah, and then I click on Share Screen, right? Or is somebody sharing my screen automatically?
ADRIAN STANLEY: Shall we practice this? Let's take a look, right? (CHUCKLING) I'm sharing now. So we've got this here. They're going to talk through this. That was in this document. Are you planning to talk on that in the keynote, Gunther?
GUNTHER EYSENBACH: No, I thought about this as your introduction slide, but you don't have to speak to that at all.
ADRIAN STANLEY: I'll reference it. So, all right. But that one, you're OK me talking about that one?
GUNTHER EYSENBACH: Me? No, that's not mine.
ADRIAN STANLEY: Yeah, right. I've got one slide, and then I'll just stop sharing and hand over to you, if that's OK
GUNTHER EYSENBACH: Yeah, do you have moderator rights? Can you share--
ADRIAN STANLEY: Well, I think if I stop share there, you should be able to share there.
JACKLYN LORD: You all should have host or co-host. And if you look at yourself as the, panelist you'll see host, and then 500, that's all of us. So everybody should be able to share and have just as much control as everybody else.
GUNTHER EYSENBACH: Well, when I click on Share Screen, it just says, who can share? Only host or panelist. Who can start sharing when someone else is sharing? Only hosts.
JACKLYN LORD: So if I'm not mistaken, you're clicking the little green arrow next to the big green square? Because that menu that you're describing is Advanced Sharing Options.
GUNTHER EYSENBACH: Oh, OK. OK, I got it. OK, and then I share mine.
JACKLYN LORD: There you go. And then I [INAUDIBLE] over in through those slides. And then I hand [INAUDIBLE].
ADRIAN STANLEY: Press Stop Share. And I've got everything flowing down.
TINA PURNAT: I don't mind letting you know when to move next, if you want to be the clicker.
ADRIAN STANLEY: I'll do that. And then I've got Tina, and then we've got Bushra, and then we have Sacha, and then we have Lisa with wrap. But what do we want to do on wrap, Hope? Do we want to just stop share and go to gallery review, right? Because that's when we'll do the discussion then.
LISA CUEVAS SHAW: Yes, I thought we'll moderate. So you'll say something, Adrian, about participants being able to ask questions, is that right? And so we'll look at those to see if there are any that we can pull out and pose to either specific members-- we'll be on the fly, kind of moderating that-- or to the group. And then if we, for some reason, don't have any questions, I have some questions, in case.
LISA CUEVAS SHAW: And a couple of them, just so that this group is aware-- Tina, I had one queued up for you, again, in case and if there's time-- which is, how can the scholarly communications community directly support infodemic management principles? So I thought that was a good--
TINA PURNAT: I have lots to say there.
LISA CUEVAS SHAW: Perfect. I thought you might, and because we had discussed it too. So I think that one's good. I might also reference-- again, if there's time and if we don't have questions-- just the fact that, by design, we discussed a range of stakeholders and domains. So again, kind of what role should the scholarly communications community play in supporting, if not leading, a more cohesive and systemic approach to infodemic management.
LISA CUEVAS SHAW: That might be just slightly tweaked from the first question. And I could pose it also to you, Bushra, because you're taking that system's approach, as well, alongside Tina. And then, I've got a couple of other questions around-- I suspect you'll touch on it, Tina, but kind of the paradox that we witnessed last year with the scholarly communications community of being built for speed and volume but not necessarily adjusting on the gatekeeping and curating components, right?
LISA CUEVAS SHAW: So if there's time, we can go deeper into what that could look like. And then I've got some wrap up stuff, assuming kind of where we'll end, I'll tie it together for everybody. Yeah, it should be good. I don't know if all of you looked at-- we have a range in the audience of folks.
LISA CUEVAS SHAW: So we've got a couple of more on the technology, technologist side, some librarians, some publishers. Who else was in there, Adrian?
ADRIAN STANLEY: Yeah, there was a mix. There's a mix from the IEEEs, and [INAUDIBLE],, and librarians, the conference organizers. SSP's usually a broad mix of sort of everybody. That's the sort of strength of it, yeah.
LISA CUEVAS SHAW: There were a few societies who have publishing programs, as well, like the American Chemical Society, Society For Microbiology, which is a really good progressive group as well.
ADRIAN STANLEY: I keep getting game points for signing up for people's sessions or people saying hello. Keeps popping up as a--
LISA CUEVAS SHAW: I just got the Grubhub certificate. That was nice. That was a nice touch. [LAUGHING]
ADRIAN STANLEY: Yeah.
JACKLYN LORD: Just a reminder to everybody, we will be doing chat on Pathable. So if there's chat on Zoom that's just amongst us, keep that just here. And then everything for attendees, like attendee questions and everything, we'll direct them over to Pathable so that that can remain persistent throughout the meeting.
JACKLYN LORD: So what I would recommend, if you don't already have this, is you've got Zoom open in one window, and you've got the Pathable page for your session open in the other. So you can keep an eye on what the attendees are seeing
ADRIAN STANLEY: Yeah, that's good. Yeah, actually, Lisa, if I'm going through the presentations, and you like to, if you don't mind, keep an eye on the talk until we stop the presenting at the end, as well. And then we can alternate, right?
LISA CUEVAS SHAW: OK, that sounds good. Yeah, it's the one day I did just one screen. I should have done two. But that's OK. I can adjust, yeah.
ADRIAN STANLEY: And Jackie, one question we'd had was-- and this perhaps is for later-- but making this available in the open, possibly earlier. I know SSP has a sort of policy you make them open a few months after the meeting. But we can cover that later, too. But some of our speakers were certainly keen to have of this be shared more broadly and be helpful.
JACKLYN LORD: OK. I'm going to try playing something. Can you all let me know if-- one second. OK. So can you let me know that you see when I share, and that you can hear what I'm playing, OK? OK, can you see-- [VIDEO PLAYBACK] - In academic publishing, fake often assumes the form of predatory.
JACKLYN LORD: [END PLAYBACK]
JACKLYN LORD: Can you see, can you hear?
TINA PURNAT: Yes.
ADRIAN STANLEY: Yeah.
JACKLYN LORD: Awesome. [CLEARING THROAT] I
ADRIAN STANLEY: I think Cabells are the sponsor, then.
JACKLYN LORD: Yes. So right when I press Start Webinar and we go live, I'm going to click Play, and that'll play. And then I'll stop sharing. And so Adrian, are you going to speak first then? OK. I'm going to drop off. I'm actually going to turn off my camera before we start. But I will be here. Chat me in Zoom if anything comes up, if you have any questions, I'm right here to try to troubleshoot.
JACKLYN LORD: I'll also be putting in some reminders, like how attendees can see the transcripts, how they can see your slides, if you've shared anything in the File section. I think I saw you have a poll, is that right?
ADRIAN STANLEY: I don't think we did anything with that, in the end, did we? It seemed like it might have been a good idea, but we didn't.
JACKLYN LORD: Oh, it's OK. OK.
LISA CUEVAS SHAW: Unless Lisa's feeling spontaneous. [LAUGHING]
JACKLYN LORD: It'll be good.
LISA CUEVAS SHAW: We'll see about that.
JACKLYN LORD: OK, so we've got four minutes, just a heads up to wrap up anything, test anything you need to do, refresher your beverage of choice.
SACHA NOUKHOVITCH: So to join, should we leave this, or it will be automatically transferred to the main session?
ADRIAN STANLEY: This is the main session, Sacha. Just once we press Start Webinar, others join us.
SACHA NOUKHOVITCH: So we don't need to leave and rejoin. So we are already there the way we're supposed to.
ADRIAN STANLEY: Yeah
JACKLYN LORD: Mm-hmm.
SACHA NOUKHOVITCH: Good.
ADRIAN STANLEY: And reminder of the order, we got Gunther, Tina, Bushra, Sacha, Lisa, and hopefully, some time for discussion. I know Gunther sneaked in a couple more slides. But he said he's promised to run through them very quickly. So we're all good. They're the ones, they're quick visuals.
ADRIAN STANLEY: And by the way, thank you, Bushra. I didn't get to mention, but I know it's a holiday in Canada. I mentioned it to Sacha and Gunther too. So we appreciate you spending time on the holiday.
BUSHRA EBADI: No problem. We're stuck at home anyway.
ADRIAN STANLEY: Yeah.
JACKLYN LORD: 1 minute reminder.
JACKLYN LORD: All right, it's 2 o'clock. I'm going to start the webinar, start our 30 second promo, relinquish screen control, and you guys will be on. [VIDEO PLAYBACK] - In academic publishing, fake often assumes the form of predatory. Cabells is the gateway to ethical publishing. The Cabells, Journalytics, and Predatory Reports help the academic navigate the world of publishing .
JACKLYN LORD: The Cabells' Journalytics is an expert-curated list of over 11,000 journals, spanning 18 disciplines. The Cabells' Predatory Reports provides unbiased evaluations of journals and their credentials. [MUSIC PLAYING] [END PLAYBACK]
ADRIAN STANLEY: Hello, everybody. Welcome to this SSP session on Infodemiology and Infoveillance, What Are They? And How Might They Change the World? My name's Adrian Stanley, and it's great to be back at SSP, albeit in a virtual format, just to see everybody. I'm sure there's many old friends and new friends. And I hope you're making the most of this virtual meeting. I'm here to sort of moderate and just do a quick introduction on this session and this topic.
ADRIAN STANLEY: I'm going to very briefly just go through the speakers, but the bios are in the meeting app and session. Please feel free to put your questions in there. We will be monitoring those. We really encourage you to ask questions and make comments. Our aim in this session is to do a brief introduction from a number of different perspectives, and then have more of a discussion on the topic afterwards.
ADRIAN STANLEY: So to sort of introduce the different perspectives we have in this session, starting up is my boss, Gunther Eysenbach, who's the CEO and executive editor at JMR Publications. And really was one of the people who coined the term infodemiology over 15 years ago. Second, we have Tina Purnat, who currently works for the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control, and has also spent a lot of time working at the WHO, and really an expert in e-health, digital health, and public health.
ADRIAN STANLEY: Tina's recently done some amazing webinars in support with the WHO, really going into detail about what infodemiology is, and from how it's been used as a sort of tool around the world to support during this pandemic. Then we have Bushra Ebadi, who is a social innovator, co-founder of the Alliance for Canadian Commission for Health Literacy, and also the Canadian commission for UNESCO.
ADRIAN STANLEY: Bushra's going to look at things through a policy lens here. So we have public health, researcher, and publication policy. And then finally, we have Doctor Sacha Noukhovitch, who's an educator and founder from the STEM Fellowship group. And then playing sort of cleanup hitter at the end is my other colleague here, Lisa Cuevas Shaw, who's really going to sort of bring this discussion together, and you'll see how everything flows together.
ADRIAN STANLEY: But just first-- as a sort of an intro, and then Gunther's going to go into this in a lot more detail-- but infodemiology's an area of research focused on the scanning of the internet for user-contributed health research content, with the ultimate goal of improving public health. So think of ways how you can see trends and analyzing where rumors start, where misinformation comes out.
ADRIAN STANLEY: You heard the keynote this morning, talking all about misinformation. Infodemiology and this session here hopes to show to you a set of tools in a way that you can manage both misinformation and trusted information from all the different groups from the influencers, the policy, the public health, all around the globe. So I've sort of teed this up with a very big session that we really hope you're going to take a lot away from different perspectives.
ADRIAN STANLEY: How are you in scholarly communications? Librarians can better understand this field. How technologists can see what some of the latest technology is that sees these trends and helps people manage these pandemics and really improve public health. So I'm going to stop sharing now and hand over to my colleague, Gunther, to sort of start his introductions and talk. And then we'll go on.
ADRIAN STANLEY: But do put your questions in the chat, please.
GUNTHER EYSENBACH: Thanks, Adrian, for the introduction. Can you hear me?
ADRIAN STANLEY: Yes. Yes.
GUNTHER EYSENBACH: Thank you. So I'm going to comment on this from a perspective of a novel publisher. But formerly, I was often a very active researcher in this whole field of health information or health infomatics, and to a certain degree though, it's still my field, because being a publisher is [INAUDIBLE] has a lot to do with disseminating health information, and even assessing health information. So I think every publisher, to a certain degree, is also an infodemiologist.
GUNTHER EYSENBACH: But I refer to myself as an infodemiologist, not since today. This was actually on my LinkedIn profile for the past couple of years. But infodemiology has gained a lot of attention last year with COVID, and misinformation on the internet being front and center. But it is something that a lot of us have been concerned about and written about for a long time.
GUNTHER EYSENBACH: And that goes back all the way to the mid 90s when the web emerged and a lot of health information was published on the web. And there was a lot of concern back then on the quality of the information and questions like, should we extrapolate that information to a certain degree. And I was actually leading a project that was funded by the European Union.
GUNTHER EYSENBACH: It was called Met Certain, and later, Met Circle. And we published this paper, here on the right, in the BMJ about this approach. And it had to do with-- basically, what we wanted to do is create some sort of an immune system against misinformation outbreaks. And that immune system was based on the idea of metadata. It didn't talk about tools.
GUNTHER EYSENBACH: And I think metadata is still a tool that is around. If you want to look at schema.org, that idea that people use machine processible metadata and data about information. And that can then be aggregated and automatically analyzed. And that paper in the BMJ was accompanied by an editorial by Enrico Honiara, who talked about information epidemics, economics, and immunity on the internet.
GUNTHER EYSENBACH: And it was, basically, also a call to arms in terms of studying what all this information and misinformation has, and what the effects on public health are, and what are the potential tools? So as part of this product, we also did a huge, systematic review, where we looked at all the studies where people have assessed misinformation or information on the internet.
GUNTHER EYSENBACH: That paper was published in Jama in 2002. And I also was actively peer-reviewing a lot of information, a lot of papers that came out, on the quality of information. And in my mind, this new discipline started to emerge. And I wrote this editorial here in the American Journal of Medicine. And I called the field, infodemiology. And very much an analogy to epidemiology, I said that this research discipline and methodology is the study of the determinants and distribution of health information And I called this infodemiology.
GUNTHER EYSENBACH: And then later, refined this and said, basically, that infodemiology is a science of distribution and determinants of information in an electronic medium, specifically the internet, or in a population, with an ultimate aim to inform public health and public policy. And I also tried to coin the term infoveillance, which is the tools that allow us to constantly listen to what the public says on the internet.
GUNTHER EYSENBACH: So today, it's also called social listening. And it also occurred to me that there are, basically, two data sources, which we can tap into. One is what information people publish online. So that's the supply side of things. But also, what people are looking for, that's the demand side of it. And back then, there were very few tools available to study the demand side, because it was not possible to directly tap into search engines and monitor what people are searching for.
GUNTHER EYSENBACH: Now we have all those Google Trends, and all those other tools, and even social media. And social media you can also track what people are asking. But it also occurred to me that infodemiology goes far beyond studying misinformation. And part of this is also that in medicine in particular, it is often very hard to say what is misinformation. And we saw this very clearly in the pandemic last year when information was also constantly changing, and the evidence never was changing, and so on.
GUNTHER EYSENBACH: So it is really hard to find a gold standard here. And I thought maybe the biggest impact of infodemiology is just to create the science which allows us to understand those big data which are out there, and what people are posting and searching for. And that reflects, to a certain degree, public knowledge, behavior, and attitudes of people. And that is useful information for public health. So that was basically the framework.
GUNTHER EYSENBACH: And in addition to epidemiology, we have infodemiology that keeps a pulse on what the public says, and writes, and searches for. And we also did this very early work on the correlation of internet searches with influenza outbreaks. That's on the left side. I published it in 2006. Three years later, Google creates Google Trends, and was also validating this in the bigger data set.
GUNTHER EYSENBACH: It's also important to understand that COVID was actually not the first pandemic where social media played a role. We had another pandemic in 2010. And we actually used some of those tools. There was one tool which we developed, Infovigil. It was funded by the Canadian Health Institute for Health Research, which is, basically, an infoveillance tool, or social listening tool.
GUNTHER EYSENBACH: And we analyzed what people were Tweeting during H1N1. We developed some early methods on how to automatically classify this. And some of this work now has been, I guess, rediscovered, or is at the front and center of the public attention. And I'm sorry, I forgot this one. There was also an attempt, by the way, of the WHO to secure the top-level domain, .health, for trustworthy organizations.
GUNTHER EYSENBACH: That was an initiative we supported with our Journal of Medical internet research. I was one of the experts at that meeting in Geneva. And we tried a lobbying approach. We brought [INAUDIBLE] to [INAUDIBLE],, and said, there should be kind of a protected space on the internet, the top-level domain, .health, should be protected for trustworthy information. And we lost that fight.
GUNTHER EYSENBACH: So fast-forward to 2020, WHO has declared an infodemic. And we're going to hear more about this later. One of the frameworks, in my mind, on how to fight an infodemic are these four pillars, or four pieces. One pillar is the infoveillance aspect, that we need to keep an eye on what people are posting and where the misinformation outbreaks are, and also what the information demand is.
GUNTHER EYSENBACH: Second pillar is e-health literacy to empower people to actually discriminate between good information, bad information, and so on. The third pillar are those fact checking and information refinement processes. In science, it would be peer review, journalism, it would be fact checking. So each level has their own quality assurance processes. And the fourth level is the knowledge translation piece to make sure that knowledge translation from one level into the other-- for example, from the science level to the public level-- that these knowledge translation processes are free of commercial influences, political influences.
GUNTHER EYSENBACH: Or that, at least, it is always clear where the information's coming from and what the context of that information is. As a publisher, we also started this new journal. We have an e-collection on infodemiology. And in academia, we also have our own small infodemic, which is the emergence of the preprint. And yet we also created an overlay terminal to rapidly peer-review treatments as a way to combat the infodemic on that level.
GUNTHER EYSENBACH: With that whirlwind presentation, I'm going to hand over back to Adrian.
ADRIAN STANLEY: Thank you, Gunther. And Lisa, do let us know if any comments or questions are coming through while I just bring up Tina's presentation here.
LISA CUEVAS SHAW: That's great. Nothing so far, but I will just encourage all of the attendees, feel free to put your questions in the chat, if you like.
ADRIAN STANLEY: Comments too. And over to you now, Tina.
TINA PURNAT: Thank you. Can you hear me?
ADRIAN STANLEY: Yep.
TINA PURNAT: OK. Great, thank you so much. It's going to be an interesting discussion today. So I will try to keep to the seven minutes as promised. I will be speaking today from the public health perspective, emergency response, but actually, a bit broadly as well. And as Gunther already mentioned, early, early last year, in February, the WHO Director General, Doctor Tedros, he warned that we're not just battling a pandemic and that we're also facing an infodemic.
TINA PURNAT: And this word has definitely become more known this past year. Now, some think that the infodemic is only a problem of the online world and of online misinformation. But experience from other outbreaks since a long time has shown us that in times of an epidemic, we experience a surge of information and rumors. And this includes, also, misinformation, or plainly just outdated information as the outbreak evolves.
TINA PURNAT: And this happens both online and offline. And when you combine this surge of information with an emergency and an uncertainty, it's then harder for people to find reliable information that could then help them make informed decisions to protect their health and their communities. And we've seen real harm over the last year, from people ingesting bleach because they thought it would help their bodies get rid of the virus.
TINA PURNAT: Or in many places around the world, people have used herbal remedies, or even medications, that were unproven to treat COVID-19. And you also may remember even news stories of telephone 5G towers being destroyed in the UK. Because some people believed the 5G technology is involved in COVID-19 transmission. But even from outbreaks before COVID-19, we also learned that the infodemic doesn't only have a direct impact on health or cause confusion.
TINA PURNAT: Really importantly, it also exacerbates mistrust in science, and health authorities, and public health measures. Or it even reduces acceptance of vaccines and treatments. And it has a wider societal impact, also, such as stigma or loosening of social cohesion. Now, all of this makes it harder for health authorities to manage the pandemic and also manage the epidemic risk. So next slide, please, yes.
TINA PURNAT: What makes the COVID-19 infodemic different is that the pandemic is taking place in a globalized digital society. And the challenge is really a large one. Just last year, over 200,000 preprints were published online on COVID-19. The science has evolved and the pandemic response has evolved with it. And rumor and information traveled across borders very quickly.
TINA PURNAT: And this has put a strain, not just on how to communicate the evolving scientific knowledge, but it's also challenged how to respond, based on the needs and concerns of communities, so that everyone is empowered to protect themselves. And infodemic is a global phenomenon. But then to reduce its harmful effect, we need everyone involved. And this is not just a job for the health authorities.
TINA PURNAT: We've seen, also, a role for media journalists, science community, civil society, fact checkers. And ultimately, communities and individuals are the ones who enact health behaviors to protect themselves. So we need not only to listen to their concerns, but also involve them in finding solutions. Next slide, please. So I'd like to touch on the area of practice, that WHO and global health partners advanced over the past year.
TINA PURNAT: We worked on applying multidisciplinary science and evidence to managing the infodemic. And we've learned, really, during the past year that epidemic management interventions are only effective to a certain point if we don't actively manage acceptance and demand for the interventions that are introduced in countries and communities. So epidemic management needs to be complemented with infodemic management to work for behavior change and to mitigate epidemic risk.
TINA PURNAT: Now, health authorities, especially during the emergency response, they must act as quickly as possible with best available information and evidence. So the science of infodemiology really underpins this commitment to evaluation and delivery of impact of the practice. And it will help us to better manage this pandemic, but also, more quickly tackle new and resurgent health threats in the future, or even beyond infectious disease.
TINA PURNAT: Yes, to the next slide, please. So last year, under the leadership of WHO, over 140 scientists from across a variety of disciplines came together to review the existing scientific knowledge that can inform how to manage infodemics. And they talked about managing the effect of information overload on people and their list perception during health emergencies. They also talked about effective interventions to counter health misinformation.
TINA PURNAT: And what is more important longer term, they also looked at how to promote resilience of individuals and communities to the infodemic. Next slide, please. Now, WHO challenged the infodemiology to expand it and link in more disciplines. We learned that many disciplines have worked on questions relevant to infodemic response, but that they don't normally publish together or exchange perspectives.
TINA PURNAT: So infodemic is not just a matter of communication, or messaging, or social media. It's affected by the way that online information ecosystem works across platforms into offline world, and how it promotes emotive and divisive content, instead of factual information. It's also a matter of cultural and historical inequities and distrust that are deeply rooted in communities, that may have had really bad experience with health systems and authorities in the past.
TINA PURNAT: And it's also a matter of what bridges that gap from intent to act. We don't yet know the determinants of why people enact risk behaviors, despite reporting that they understand and showing that they understand and know that they are risky. It's also a matter of cognitive processes in people. I want go into the detail, but you see here all of the different disciplines that we felt needed to feed into understanding how we deal with this issue.
TINA PURNAT: So really, it's a truly multidisciplinary look that we need on how to look at infodemic and how to address it. And WHO published the first public health research agenda for managing the infodemic, earlier this year, and plans to keep it under preprint review. Next slide, please. But in addition to being multidisciplinary in nature, infodemic response during emergencies must also be extremely practical and pragmatic.
TINA PURNAT: And just to remind us of the slide I showed before, the research agenda that I mentioned was built also with the awareness that it's urgent to point the research towards building interventions and systems. For emergency response, and emergency responders, you need practical and easy, usable tools that are based on scientific evidence. So that means that we need to work for public health impacts, evaluate interventions, and at the same time, we need to do this across many levels, from societal all the way down to community and individual level.
TINA PURNAT: And I mention this urgency to make this connection between science and practice. Because the current challenges we face as a society require quick response. And infodemiology, as a transdisciplinary science, must be applied to solve these practical challenges. And I think, actually, it can even be applied to other areas of public health where health promotion and social listening are key.
TINA PURNAT: So I think it's important that the scientific community and research journals listen to the needs of public health practitioners. On the whole, practitioners have less time and opportunity to interact with the scientific communities through conferences or original research articles. So we need to find a way to bring the science and practice closer in dialogue. And last slide, please.
TINA PURNAT: Just in conclusion, I do want to remind us that we all have a role to play in the infodemic response. Poor information, nowadays, is responsible for morbidity and mortality from diseases in the world. And in the past, scientists didn't really have incentives to promote public understanding or to learn how to communicate and promote science other than in peer-reviewed publications. And the pandemic has really shown that we must change this, especially to maintain trust in science.
TINA PURNAT: So in addition to needing an evidence base and having a heavy bias towards practical solutions, we also need to be inclusive and committed to equity in everything that we do. So I spoke today from the perspective of public health and the commitment to everyone's human right to health and well-being and the rights to health information. But this really is a challenge for all of society.
TINA PURNAT: And it's important to be inclusive in working together to address it. Thank you.
ADRIAN STANLEY: Thank you, Tina. And now on to Bushra. And I should just say we've had some really wonderful speaker chats when we were preparing for this session, too. But over to you, Bushra.
BUSHRA EBADI: Thank you. Yeah, so I will be speaking about applying a systems approach. And I think this links quite closely with what Tina was presenting with that whole-of-system approach to addressing infodemics. and so when I speak about a systems approach, what I really mean is to work across sectors, disciplines, geographies, generations, and actors. And oftentimes, what I've observed is that there's a very siloed approach to addressing these issues, which has caused us more harm and challenges than are necessary.
BUSHRA EBADI: And that the rise in misinformation and disinformation itself is more prevalent during crises. And that's not just limited to public health crises, but also to political crises, human rights crises, humanitarian crises. And so I'll be speaking to some of the lessons I've learned working across these different fields, especially development humanitarian space. So one of the key factors to consider is governance.
BUSHRA EBADI: And there are different types of governance systems that impact and intersect with infodemics. There are, for example, political governance systems, digital governance systems. And I think where we're seeing more of a discussion around the digital governance systems. And some of Gunther's work also touched on this, about the digital presence of misinformation or disinformation and how that's impacting people's ability to assess health information.
BUSHRA EBADI: But looking at platformed governance in particular, there's been increasing conversations about the role that social media plays in our understanding of information of each other, not just looking at data as an object, but also the relational aspect of it, how it's related to people, to the environment, and what that actually says about those relations, at the end of the day. And how do we hold these platforms accountable?
BUSHRA EBADI: You can actually go back to the previous slide.
ADRIAN STANLEY: Sorry.
BUSHRA EBADI: Yep, thank you. It's OK. Yeah, so in terms of the governance systems-- so I spoke about political needing to be factored in digital governance, but also institutional. So how are organizations being governed themselves, how are they being held accountable, and who is taking part in decision making? What sometimes gets lost in discussions about governance is that systems are comprised of actors that make decisions.
BUSHRA EBADI: And it can be easy to speak in binaries. But who or what is responsible when we're considering interventions or policies to put forward but we're not actually considering the individual and collective agency? Agency as a really important factor, I found, whether we're talking about infodemiology or other systemic challenges. And the narrative that is predominant in the fields of development and humanitarian affairs, as well as peacebuilding, tend to be ones of empowerment.
BUSHRA EBADI: And you actually see this a lot in the non-for-profit sector. We see this a lot in the publishing field, as well. Where we talk about empowerment and not really critically assess what empowerment means and how it can reinforce inequitable power dynamics. And so instead of looking at who is taking part in systems of oppression or preventing people from exercising their inherent power in decision making capacities, the empowerment narrative shifts the focus away from where we should be really focusing our interventions.
BUSHRA EBADI: And then the other aspect is trust. And Tina already spoke to this, but there's, I think, an illusion of trust versus the practice of trust. Sometimes, technologies, especially with the use of AI technology, has been trying to maybe mimic trusting relationships but is not actually reflective of practices of trust. And trust is actually built through relationships. So focusing, again, in recentering relationships as part of the policies that we develop is really critical.
BUSHRA EBADI: And trust is built over time. It is not just something that, during a crisis, that we can start to manage and build. But it has to happen far before the crisis hits. And in many ways, investing in those relationships can also be a tool for crisis prevention in the first place. And then the third aspect for governance is accountability. So while we have some laws and protections in place, do they actually mean anything if they're not being implemented or put into practice?
BUSHRA EBADI: And who is actually able to leverage these policies? For example, when it comes to hate speech or just information about a certain population or community, we saw the rise in anti-Asian racism during the pandemic. But who is being held accountable for that. And so that also needs to be discussed and factored in when we're developing these policies, to make sure that they're not, again, just being prioritized for privileged populations, but those who are being most affected and most harmed.
BUSHRA EBADI: Next slide, please. And so a lot of the work that I also do focuses on media and information literacy. And I think it's important for us to redefine what we mean by media and information literacy, or literacy itself, and moving beyond reading and writing. When we focus too much on reading and writing as a core signifier of literacy, it actually ends up doing harm to communities who transmit or share information through oral traditions or from languages that are not commonly represented.
BUSHRA EBADI: For example, official UN languages, but indigenous languages that are increasingly under attack, and what that means. Because language is also an aspect of people being able to survive and exist, and to continue that existence moving forward. So it's really important for us to decolonize knowledge systems. And when we talk about that, we have to ask ourselves whose knowledge is being valued, who is being presented as an expert in a space and acknowledge that there are systems of oppression that have historically and contemporarily marginalized certain communities.
BUSHRA EBADI: And that's reflected in the work that we also see published. Predominantly, we have a certain select group of languages that make up most of what's available through open access publishing. And then there are other communities whose knowledges are not represented meaningfully. And that can also lead to distrust, then, when you don't see yourself represented in being the knowledge keepers and generators.
BUSHRA EBADI: And then understanding and critically engaging with information as being another core part of literacy. So it's not just about being able to, again, read and write, but being able to analyze the information and assess it, and then investing in community and education as a key tool to be able to advance literacy and to tackle infodemics. And a key part of that is, as I said previously, that transmitting knowledge across generations is a key practice within indigenous communities.
BUSHRA EBADI: And that also needs to be invested and looked at when we're developing interventions and policies. And that we see a divide when it comes to people from an older generation and a younger generation. I find myself uniquely positioned because I feel like I exist between two generations. Where the older generation has not been online or is not accustomed to being online. And then a younger generation that has only ever known being in digital spaces, from their birth.
BUSHRA EBADI: And so being able to help people bridge those realities and to not think that everything needs to be completely online. Or alternatively, that there are individuals who just don't have the digital literacy to be able to navigate online spaces and why that is the case. It's not just about giving somebody a device and saying, here, you have a smartphone, so you can now access information, without understanding that there's a whole host of other factors that need to be considered as we develop those programs.
BUSHRA EBADI: For example, are there native languages being incorporated? Do they have meaningful access to the internet? It's not just about the actual physical infrastructure, but all the other infrastructure that needs to be invested in. Next slide, please. And then a key part of that is avoiding false equivalencies in media. So there's a lot of both sides narratives that have emerged and giving equal airtime to verified and unverified information.
BUSHRA EBADI: And this is actually very dangerous. And we've seen the dangers that it presents, not just in the public health space, but also seeing politically how it's contributed to acts of political violence, violence towards protesters, who are fighting for their civil rights in various parts of the world. And how fake news legislation has also emerged during the pandemic.
BUSHRA EBADI: And in autocratic regimes, this can actually be quite dangerous. So it's not as simple as saying, we can ban fake news. But who gets to define what is fake news? And what are the repercussions of being labeled as being a person who's disseminating fake news. And there are examples where that has actually been used to silence dissent across different regions around the world, especially during the pandemic.
BUSHRA EBADI: So in a healthy ecosystem, neither a drought or flood are desirable. So both an absence and abundance of information can harm people. And yet, we don't necessarily think about this. Sometimes people think about access to information as being inherently good. But it's the quality of that information. That's how people have the skills to be able to understand that information that are also important.
BUSHRA EBADI: And then navigating who's getting to produce that information and getting to decide what information is being shared at what time and in which places is also really important. And there are certain actors who are able to more freely exercise their power, and therefore, able to control that narrative and able to control the dissemination of information. And this can be quite dangerous, especially when we look at those power inequities in exacerbating injustice.
BUSHRA EBADI: Next slide, please. So just to wrap up, infodemiology or infodemics are not just something that's occurred during the COVID-pandemic and not just during public health crises. They apply to situations with climate change. We've seen a lot of climate denial, infodemics, misinformation, disinformation, have played a key role in allowing that to be perpetuated, again, reflective of certain power interests.
BUSHRA EBADI: Looking at how this impacts context of conflict, we see this happening where there are situations of apartheid and genocide, ethnic cleansing. The spread of disinformation, especially about a marginalized or targeted population, is quite rampant. And the active monitoring media, for example, has been a core practice in this area as a way to prevent conflicts. So taking some lessons learned from that space and applying it to the public health space, I think, would be relevant.
BUSHRA EBADI: And then another part of the [INAUDIBLE] for example, responsible consumption and production, also needs to consider the responsible consumption and production of information, not just physical goods and services. So looking beyond, I think the way that we see things may be in binaries or in siloed approaches. And taking that more systems approach is critical for us to have a sustained and more equitable approach, and also think beyond inclusion.
BUSHRA EBADI: Because when we think about including people in inherently unjust systems, it can perpetuate greater harm towards them. And so focusing and centering justice is a really key part of any of the policies that we develop or the interventions we develop, and co-developing them with communities, as opposed to having so-called experts come in and tell them how things ought to be done, without actually understanding the information ecosystem or the other aspects of the system that are critical.
BUSHRA EBADI:
ADRIAN STANLEY: Is that it, Bushra? That was a lot of great insights and information to take in. And we're going to move on to Sacha, now, to run through this. And then hopefully we have time for Lisa to give us a sort of an overall summary and some questions. And I did forget just to mention that Sacha recently won the Canadian Prime Minister's Award for STEM and Education. So he's done some really good work around this since STEM.
ADRIAN STANLEY: So take it away, Sacha. We're at just before 2:40.
SACHA NOUKHOVITCH: Thank you. So I would like to invite everybody to look at the infodemic as a learning opportunity, or actually, new learning environment. Infodemics present more than abundance of information. It creates an urgency to understand. Interpretation of scientific and health-related information became an everyday necessity for the [INAUDIBLE].. It has also created unprecedented participation of the masses in scientific, or pseudo-scientific, discourse.
SACHA NOUKHOVITCH: We are witnessing a new phenomenon of uncurated teaching, that could be compared with the chain reaction of health and science information spreading. This pseudo-science crowd discourse could be muffling or distracting from [INAUDIBLE] science communication. The general public and news and policymakers could be misled by scientific terminology or infodemic players, and fall for misinformation or [INAUDIBLE]..
SACHA NOUKHOVITCH: If possible, next slide. I believe it was my second year in University when I and my friend came across a carpenter's school booklet, where we found a number five [INAUDIBLE].. There was nothing wrong in the first three digits. But the fact of separate existence of five [INAUDIBLE] was really a lot of fun and we had plenty of jokes around it as friends.
SACHA NOUKHOVITCH: Quite frequently, infodemic facts and materials are like by for wood, giving a cut up version of facts and findings. It would not stand a peer review, of course, but it has an attractiveness of practical application. Right or wrong, it is a different question. Traditional education puts students in an observer position to teach a theory or give a few examples to consolidate the knowledge.
SACHA NOUKHOVITCH: Infodemiologic creates an atmosphere where crowds of learners are rushed to find the answers, to the point where they feel that it is matter of the immediate well-being or health. Infodemics created unhealthy learning psychology, where only few can maintain the [INAUDIBLE] rest pushed forward.
SACHA NOUKHOVITCH: And kind of life hacks, these, as you see, I picked up this picture, which I actually like. Because I think that this example of life hack with a mask is the perfect demonstration of how infodemics can be substituting real issue. So can we move to the next slide?
SACHA NOUKHOVITCH: This whole infodemiological sedation is definitely a challenge, but also an opportunity to develop a totally new post-secondary and adult education that will be built around Open Access science publication. It would require the development of new type of pedagogy and curriculum, contrary to traditional education. And that is teaching theory.
SACHA NOUKHOVITCH: These new Open Access research-based program should rely on experiential learning and theory integration into practice. Another critical difference of this new curriculum would be the age and prior knowledge diversity of the target audience, which is totally different compared to the current way of teaching today.
SACHA NOUKHOVITCH: Yeah, and if we can move to the next slide. Further on diversification of scholaric communication into the field of practical for secondary and adult education. analysis of infodemic [INAUDIBLE] new subjects of study. So we use infodemics to identify new subjects of study.
SACHA NOUKHOVITCH: These subjects allow adequately educate students, preparing them for their real demands of business and society. From the pedagogical point of view, it leads to the development of dynamic curriculums and flexible composition of courses that would bring about a new type of professional certification. Further analysis of infodemic and actually players has also the potential to identify instructional talent that could be invited for Open Science training and instructor qualification.
SACHA NOUKHOVITCH: So, practically, recruiting from within. And it is an opportunity for scholar republishers to capitalize on the wealth of resources, and practically create new brands of schools and universities. And now to the last slide. With the limited abilities, STEM fellowship, an organization I'm involved with, is piloting at the moment.
SACHA NOUKHOVITCH: Infodemiology for the future of digital and public health, big data challenge for University students. So we invited University students from across Canada, and actually beyond, to brainstorm and identify patterns, not only of infodemics itself, and tools which are best to measure the impact. But actually, our goal is to identify the groups which capable of working.
SACHA NOUKHOVITCH: And we're also looking at the educational perspective. Because like it was mentioned before, it is new interdisciplinary subject, infodemics. It requires a better understanding of it from various perspectives. Thank you.
ADRIAN STANLEY: Thank you, Sacha. Lisa, any thoughts to pull all these pieces together? I know as the sort of editorial board has developed the merge for our new journal, we really factored in people from very different disciplines and backgrounds. And I'll hand it off to you and stop sharing.
LISA CUEVAS SHAW: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I'm not going to yet take the task of pulling all that together, because that was a lot of information. But what I did want to do is just point out that there was a really, really nice discussion string happening in the chat. And I think what the back and forth really gets to is this question. So I'll ask it for the panelists.
LISA CUEVAS SHAW: It might be appropriate, Tina, for you to start. But I know all of you will have some responses to that. And to a certain degree, you've touched on an answer to this, but I want to ask it more directly. Which is, how can the scholarly communications community directly support infodemic management principles that are developing in both existing and novel ways? So in other words, how should we consider changing or adapting how we curate and disseminate new research?
LISA CUEVAS SHAW: So Tina, or Gunther, Bushra, who wants to take that one on?
TINA PURNAT: I can start, perhaps. I actually think that there's been three challenges related to this. One is on how research is done. The other one is how to curate it. And the third one is how to communicate it. And the last year, COVID-19's released in an abundance of smaller poorly designed studies and a lot of waste duplication and a lot of imbalance of topics.
TINA PURNAT: And the way that research curates, we really need to be looking at that a bit more closely, both from point of view that I think we should all be mindful of our responsibility to science, but also our accountability to the public. So we really need to embrace transparency and research practice, encourage really proper use of preprints. And also, which may be a bit more provocative towards a more transparent form of post-publication peer review-- and the reason why I'm saying this is because all of that can then help communicate the science and also communicate at what the science, or what evidence, we currently have at any one point in time where the uncertainties are, and how the science has evolved.
TINA PURNAT: I also think that scientists themselves need to be proactive in ensuring that the work they publish is understood as intended. And science communicators really would need to engage with different communities, a bit like what Bushra and also everyone else was saying, empowering them to find their own solutions and emphasizing the importance of partnership and collaboration.
TINA PURNAT: We could go into more detail, but I really think it's actually a whole package. And I do think that scientific community, the research journals, have a really big role to play in shaping this and also by leading by example.
LISA CUEVAS SHAW: That's great. Thank you so much. Gunther, did you-- not put you on the spot-- but did you want to comment at all on the preprints? Because we've had a lot of back and forth on that. And so just to share a little bit of some of the more novel approaches really pushing open science, so to kind of tag on to what Tina offered.
ADRIAN STANLEY: Yeah, we have a overlay journal, which we also call a super journal, that sits on top of preprint servers and that promises a rapid review of preprints. That was actually something we already announced before COVID. So that is not directly, but not directly, related to COVID. But we thought, with the proper funding in place, that would have been a nice tool to rapidly identify at least highly shared preprints and do a rapid peer review.
ADRIAN STANLEY: And MIT Press did something similar. They got some funding from a foundation. Our portal is a little bit different because we actually-- yeah, it was our intention to have the first PubMed-indexed overlay journal in PubMed. That's why we had a very conservative approach in terms of also securing the buy end of the author before we reviewed the preprints. Which was not the case for MIT Press.
ADRIAN STANLEY: And there was actually some strange feedback from academia, who then, when somebody reviewed their preprint and the review is negative, we then thought this was not a good idea to review preprints without their consent. And that's debate, an ongoing debate.
LISA CUEVAS SHAW: That's great. Thank you. And I think that speaks to-- we've touched on the concept of trust-- but that trust has to be shared and felt by everyone in this whole ecosystem, right? So that's one of the core issues, obviously. Anyone else who would respond to how can the scholarly communications community directly support infodemic management principles?
LISA CUEVAS SHAW: Again, just knowing our current system, where are we falling short, where did we do well last year?
BUSHRA EBADI: I think I can add a little bit about the trust, in particular. I think sometimes we focus more on trust after research has been published, but not necessarily considering as the research itself is being done. And then as scholars, and researchers, and then publishers, how are we building the systems in place to make sure that there is that accountability? Because if you are a community that's been over research-- and when I mean over research, like you have external actors coming in, and doing a study on you, and then leaving.
BUSHRA EBADI: And there's no real partnership with the community, and there's no benefit that they see. Then that erodes that trust. And so even if that information may quote unquote be seen as accurate, if that trust doesn't exist with that population, then they're more likely to discard that, or disregard that, information. And so we need to actually build those systems in place and have consideration for, again, co-creating and co-developing solutions and interventions with them, as opposed to just having people come in externally.
BUSHRA EBADI:
ADRIAN STANLEY: I was also drawn, Lisa, just to a point Sacha said, that often the systems can show where the rumors are started and potential key influencers in negative ways. But I think, also, looking at where the positive actors are who are really doing good and finding ways to highlight them and support and build communities around them in a sort of data aspect.
LISA CUEVAS SHAW: Yeah, that's a really good point.
SACHA NOUKHOVITCH: I would like to add here. Because I believe that there is the huge gap between science communication and current majority in masses of people who are making the day-to-day decisions based on, supposedly, scientific information, or at least seek the scientific information. These gaps need to be addressed.
SACHA NOUKHOVITCH: It's important that the scientists, the scholarly publishers, will do everything possible to speak to the wider audiences, but it is beyond their capacity. What is necessary is new bridge, is new educational bridge, which actually-- I don't know. I found kind of an easy idea, which is probably very difficult to implement, about the diversification of scholar republishers into education.
SACHA NOUKHOVITCH: But it would be definitely helpful.
LISA CUEVAS SHAW: That's great. That's a really good point. And I suspect that a number of our attendees, there are publishers who are approaching not just research, but also education. And but sometimes in organizations, there are silos, even within that same organization. So I think you're challenging us to think about that, as well, to break down silos even within our own organizations, right? So it's a great point.
LISA CUEVAS SHAW: All right, so Adrian, did you have any other comments, or are we could talk to-- I've got some closing remarks to make, but I didn't want to-- yeah?
ADRIAN STANLEY: Yeah, no no, go for it. If there's any other questions or anything.
LISA CUEVAS SHAW: Yeah, so we're just about to end the session. Really, the closing remarks-- first of all, thank you to all of our panelists, Gunther, Tina, Bushra, and Sacha. You gave us quite a bit to think about. When we were putting together this panel, we intentionally took a systems approach to addressing the promise of infodemiology as a field, and the need for infodemic management to be a shared responsibility across stakeholders.
LISA CUEVAS SHAW: I think you heard that from every single person. And so the panel really represented research publishing, public health, global governance, policy, and education. And all of those things, and citizens, need to be working together to be able to prevent the next infodemic. Maybe that's not possible, but how we respond to it is something that we can absolutely address together.
LISA CUEVAS SHAW: For the scholarly communications community, it's important for us to think about how we move forward from the experience of rapidly producing new research and disseminating it. We did that pretty well. As a system, we kind of came together. We were strong in aggregating information, getting it out there quickly. So there were benefits, strengths, and then there are real inadequacies of our process that we can learn from and apply not only to the next pandemic but to larger global issues, as Bushra pointed out.
LISA CUEVAS SHAW: So this is not just relegated to pandemics, although those are important, but to other global issues. I think a couple of questions that I'll leave this group with is, can we employ better technologies to reduce waste? So research and results that are unnecessarily replicated. Do we have a different level of curation needed, identifying what is novel and what is complementary or repetitive? Will open and group peer review improve our evaluation and gatekeeping, and especially, if we open it up to different stakeholders, which we haven't necessarily been great at doing in the past?
LISA CUEVAS SHAW: How are we translating the evidence? We've got a number of us who are trying to take knowledge and translate it. But really, who are we serving? Have we really defined that well, and have we taken that responsibility? How are we as a community participating in infoveillance and social listening? Do we have a different kind of responsibility now, not just ensuring high-quality research outputs, but being even more disciplined in that gatekeeping so that we're not contributing unwittingly to the overabundance.
LISA CUEVAS SHAW: How are editorial teams doing more informal social listening to determine what will be the most impactful for potential behavioral change, especially when it's a life or death situation? So our future as a community is not just about openness, or volume of research, or the velocity alone. We need to contribute to that whole of society, its ability to keep track of what we know and how we know it.
LISA CUEVAS SHAW: So I will end there. I think we've got a lot of work to do. I think from a scholarly communications community, again, we learned a ton. And we're going to be having these conversations throughout the conference. But really grateful, again, to collaborate with this fine group of panelists, and also grateful for the interaction from the audience.
LISA CUEVAS SHAW: So thank you so much. Take care, everyone.
ADRIAN STANLEY: Thanks, everybody. Bye bye.
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