This article examines a widely publicized corporate accountability and human rights case filed by Burmese plaintiffs and human rights litigators in 1996 under the Alien Tort Claims Act in U.S. courts, Doe v. Unocal, in conjunction with the three main theoretical approaches to analyzing how law may matter for broader social change efforts: (1) legal realism, (2) Critical Legal Studies (CLS), and (3) legal mobilization. The article discusses interactions between Doe v. Unocal and grassroots Burmese human rights activism in the San Francisco Bay Area, including intersections with corporate accountability activism. It argues that a transnationally attuned legal mobilization framework, rather than legal realist or CLS approaches, is most appropriate to analyze the political opportunities and indirect effects of Doe v. Unocal and similar litigation in the context of neoliberal globalization. Further, this article argues that human rights discourse may serve as a common vocabulary and counterhegemonic resource for activists and litigators in cases such as Doe v. Unocal, contrary to overarching critiques of such discourse that emphasize only its hegemonic potentials in global governance regimes.

This paper reflects on proliferating AI for Social Good (AI4SG) initiatives, with an eye to public health and health equity. It notes that many AI4SG initiatives are shaped by the same corporate entities that incubate AI technologies, beyond democratic control, and stand to profit monetarily from their deployment. Such initiatives often pre-frame systemic social and environmental problems in tech-centric ways, while suggesting that addressing such problems hinges on more or better data. They thereby perpetuate incomplete, distorted models of social change that claim to be 'datadriven'. In the process, AI4SG initiatives may obscure or 'ethics wash' all the other uses of big data analytics and AI that more routinely serve private interests and exacerbate social inequalities. As a case in point, it discusses the prominence of health-related applications in AI and big data fields, alongside the politics of more 'upstream' versus 'downstream' health interventions.

IntroductionThrough funding agency and publisher policies, an increasing proportion of the health sciences literature is being made open access. Such an increase in access raises questions about the awareness and potential utilization of this literature by those working in health fields.MethodsA sample of physicians (N=336) and public health non-governmental organization (NGO) staff (N=92) were provided with relatively complete access to the research literature indexed in PubMed, as well as access to the point-of-care service UpToDate, for up to one year, with their usage monitored through the tracking of web-log data. The physicians also participated in a one-month trial of relatively complete or limited access.ResultsThe study found that participants' research interests were not satisfied by article abstracts alone nor, in the case of the physicians, by a clinical summary service such as UpToDate. On average, a third of the physicians viewed research a little more frequently than once a week, while two-thirds of the public health NGO staff viewed more than three articles a week. Those articles were published since the 2008 adoption of the NIH Public Access Policy, as well as prior to 2008 and during the maximum 12-month embargo period. A portion of the articles in each period was already open access, but complete access encouraged a viewing of more research articles.ConclusionThose working in health fields will utilize more research in the course of their work as a result of (a) increasing open access to research, (b) improving awareness of and preparation for this access, and (c) adjusting public and open access policies to maximize the extent of potential access, through reduction in embargo periods and access to pre-policy literature.

While academic open access, open data and open science initiatives have proliferated in recent years, facilitating new research resources for health promotion, open initiatives are not one-size-fits-all. Health research particularly illustrates how open initiatives may serve various interests and ends. Open initiatives not only foster new pathways of research access; they also discipline research in new ways, especially when associated with new regimes of research use and peer review, while participating in innovation ecosystems that often perpetuate existing systemic biases toward commercial biomedicine. Currently, many open initiatives are more oriented toward biomedical research paradigms than paradigms associated with public health promotion, such as social determinants of health research. Moreover, open initiatives too often dovetail with, rather than challenge, neoliberal policy paradigms. Such initiatives are unlikely to transform existing health research landscapes and redress health inequities. In this context, attunement to social determinants of health research and community-based local knowledge is vital to orient open initiatives toward public health promotion and health equity. Such an approach calls for discourses, norms and innovation ecosystems that contest neoliberal policy frameworks and foster upstream interventions to promote health, beyond biomedical paradigms. This analysis highlights challenges and possibilities for leveraging open initiatives on behalf of a wider range of health research stakeholders, while emphasizing public health promotion, health equity and social justice as benchmarks of transformation.

This article examines research uses and knowledge stakeholder politics that emerged in an exploratory study of the relevance of open access policies to a spectrum of U.S.-based public health non-governmental organizations (NGOs). This study demonstrated the clear relevance to public health NGOs of open access to peer-reviewed articles, as one form of community informatics. Though not always visible to those oriented toward academic knowledge ecosystems, public health NGOs utilize and conduct a wide range of research, both peer-reviewed and otherwise. Hence, findings indicate that public health NGOs should be more fully recognized, by researchers and policymakers in other contexts, as key stakeholders in knowledge, research, and open access ecosystems. These findings contribute to examination of community information seeking and use in the public health field, with an eye to leveraging community informatics on behalf of health equity.