Scientists who perform major survival surgery on laboratory animals face a dual welfare
and methodological challenge: how to choose surgical anesthetics and post-operative analgesics
that will best control animal suffering, knowing that both pain and the drugs that manage
pain can all affect research outcomes. Scientists who publish full descriptions of animal
procedures allow critical and systematic reviews of data, demonstrate their adherence to
animal welfare norms, and guide other scientists on how to conduct their own studies in the
field. We investigated what information on animal pain management a reasonably diligent
scientist might find in planning for a successful experiment. To explore how scientists in a
range of fields describe their management of this ethical and methodological concern, we
scored 400 scientific articles that included major animal survival surgeries as part of their
experimental methods, for the completeness of information on anesthesia and analgesia.
The 400 articles (250 accepted for publication pre-2011, and 150 in 2014–15, along with
174 articles they reference) included thoracotomies, craniotomies, gonadectomies, organ
transplants, peripheral nerve injuries, spinal laminectomies and orthopedic procedures in
dogs, primates, swine, mice, rats and other rodents. We scored articles for Publication
Completeness (PC), which was any mention of use of anesthetics or analgesics; Analgesia
Use (AU) which was any use of post-surgical analgesics, and Analgesia Completeness (a
composite score comprising intra-operative analgesia, extended post-surgical analgesia,
and use of multimodal analgesia). 338 of 400 articles were PC. 98 of these 338 were AU,
with some mention of analgesia, while 240 of 338 mentioned anesthesia only but not postsurgical
analgesia. Journals’ caliber, as measured by their 2013 Impact Factor, had no
effect on PC or AU. We found no effect of whether a journal instructs authors to consult the
ARRIVE publishing guidelines published in 2010 on PC or AC for the 150 mouse and rat
articles in our 2014–15 dataset. None of the 302 articles that were silent about analgesic
use included an explicit statement that analgesics were withheld, or a discussion of how
pain management or untreated pain might affect results. We conclude that current scientific
literature cannot be trusted to present full detail on use of animal anesthetics and analgesics.
We report that publication guidelines focus more on other potential sources of bias in
experimental results, under-appreciate the potential for pain and pain drugs to skew data,
PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0155001 May 12, 2016 1 / 24
a11111
OPEN ACCESS
Citation: Carbone L, Austin J (2016) Pain and
Laboratory Animals: Publication Practices for Better
Data Reproducibility and Better Animal Welfare.
PLoS ONE 11(5): e0155001. doi:10.1371/journal.
pone.0155001
Editor: Chang-Qing Gao, Central South University,
CHINA
Received: December 29, 2015
Accepted: April 22, 2016
Published: May 12, 2016
Copyright: © 2016 Carbone, Austin. This is an open
access article distributed under the terms of the
Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits
unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any
medium, provided the original author and source are
credited.
Data Availability Statement: All relevant data are
within the paper and its Supporting Information files.
Authors may be contacted for further information.
Funding: This study was funded by the United
States National Science Foundation Division of Social
and Economic Sciences. Award #1455838. The
funder had no role in study design, data collection
and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of
the manuscript.
Competing Interests: The authors have declared
that no competing interests exist.
and thus mostly treat pain management as solely an animal welfare concern, in the jurisdiction
of animal care and use committees. At the same time, animal welfare regulations do not
include guidance on publishing animal data, even though publication is an integral part of
the cycle of research and can affect the welfare of animals in studies building on published
work, leaving it to journals and authors to voluntarily decide what details of animal use to
publish. We suggest that journals, scientists and animal welfare regulators should revise
current guidelines and regulations, on treatment of pain and on transparent reporting of
treatment of pain, to improve this dual welfare and data-quality deficiency.
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Formalizing Human Ingenuity: A Quantitative Framework for Copyright Law’s Substantial Similarity
A central notion in U.S. copyright law is judging the substantial similarity between an original and an (allegedly) derived work. Capturing this notion has proven elusive, and the many approaches offered by case law and legal scholarship are often ill-defined, contradictory, or internally-inconsistent.
This work suggests that key parts of the substantial-similarity puzzle are amendable to modeling inspired by theoretical computer science. Our proposed framework quantitatively evaluates how much "novelty" is needed to produce the derived work with access to the original work, versus reproducing it without access to the copyrighted elements of the original work. "Novelty" is captured by a computational notion of description length, in the spirit of Kolmogorov-Levin complexity, which is robust to mechanical transformations and availability of contextual information.
This results in an actionable framework that could be used by courts as an aid for deciding substantial similarity. We evaluate it on several pivotal cases in copyright law and observe that the results are consistent with the rulings, and are philosophically aligned with the abstraction-filtration-comparison test of Altai.
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- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10358595
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 2nd ACM Symposium on Computer Science and Law
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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