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@pacespaceou.bsky.social
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Professional Academic Communication in English (PACE) Doctoral Academic Literacies @ougradsch.bsky.social #PACEspace www.open.edu/openlearncreate/mod/pa… Posts by profiles.open.ac.uk/julia-molinari {JM}

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The Open University Library @oulibrary.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Having a technical issue with a library resource? Not sure how to reference an unusual source? Or struggling to find a particular journal article? Don't forget the Library Helpdesk is here to support you 24/7. Contact us by email, webchat or phone: 👉 ow.ly/chrq50ZQ9TJ
An orange lifebuoy hangs inside a green shelter.
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Drew Schreiner @schreinerdrew.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
It was requested by reviewer 2 that this quote post be written in the passive voice
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PACE Graduate School Open University @pacespaceou.bsky.social · 06/08/2026
Podcast: Generative AI in EAP – Where Are We Now? Ayanna Prevatt-Goldstein (UCL), Mike Groves (Lingnan University), Klaus Mundt (University of Nottingham), Julia Molinari (The Open University) discuss: 🌶️🌶️Is generative AI inevitable?🥵🥵 #tleap #AcWri youtu.be/ony86PmoWuY (or wherever you listen)
rss.com
All Things EAP | Podcast on RSS.com
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Dr Julia Molinari PhD SFHEA - INTIFADA against all #Colonialism @serenissimaj.bsky.social · 28/07/2026
On being damned if you do, damned if you don't: "Democratisation requires more than access to a tool. It requires dismantling the structures that make the tool necessary in the first place" blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsoci... #AcademicWriting #WhatMakesWritingAcademic #AcademicPublishing #AcWri #AI
blogs.lse.ac.uk
AI promised to democratise academic publishing – the evidence says otherwise - LSE Impact
It was thought AI would level the playing field in academic publishing for non-native English speakers. A growing body of evidence to reveals the opposite.
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Dr Julia Molinari PhD SFHEA - INTIFADA against all #Colonialism @serenissimaj.bsky.social · 14/05/2026
"The politics and practices of writing development in UK higher education" @uclpress.bsky.social 978-1-80655-074-6 (#OpenAccess) 978-1-80655-072-2 (HB) 978-1-80655-073-9 (PB) 978-1-80655-075-3 (ePub) • DOI: 10.14324/111.9781806550746 #WhatMakesWritingAcademic #WhatMakesAcademicWritingPolitical
uclpress.co.uk
Critical Perspectives on Academic Writing
Critical Perspectives on Academic Writing offers a timely, theoretically grounded examination of the often marginalised yet foundational role of academic writing in UK higher education. Based on the U...
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PACE Graduate School Open University @pacespaceou.bsky.social · 04/05/2026
😄
Alt text

Cartoon with six boxes, titled "some grammatical voices for use in scientific writing". Active voice: Our team collected samples and then we tested them. Passive voice: samples were collected and tested. Passive-agressive voice: we did all the collecting and testing. No need to thank us. Just doing our job. Clickbait voice: We collected some samples... you won't belive what happened next! Haiku voice:  Quiet science lab. Workers arrive with samples. The testing begins. Conspiracy voice: Mysterious "samples" were harvested and "tested" by so-called scientists.
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PACE Graduate School Open University @pacespaceou.bsky.social · 17/03/2026
"are you open to being changed by the encounter with the reader? Are you genuinely ready for the reader’s response? [...] When a piece of writing fails to convince despite its technical competence, the problem is often [...] in how the writer sounds". #DoctoralWriting patthomson.net/2026/03/15/w...
patthomson.net
what’s Habermas got to do with academic writing?
Jürgen Habermas died on Saturday 14 March, 2026 in Starnberg, near Munich. He was 96. The news has been moving through academic social media in the way these things do, with people sharing half-rem…
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Dr Julia Molinari PhD SFHEA - INTIFADA against all #Colonialism @serenissimaj.bsky.social · 12/02/2026
My thoughts on "What Makes Academic Writing Human(e): A Critical Realist Response" in: Bouchard & Zotzmann, eds. #CriticalRealism in #AppliedLinguistics #CambridgeUniversityPress 2026 #AcademicWriting #WhatMakesWritingAcademic #WhatMakesAcademicWritingHumane #GenAI www.cambridge.org/core/books/a...
Summary
Drawing from critical realism and building on previous academic studies and writing theories and practices, the author advances approaches to academic writing that are both human and humane, by situating academic writing within the broader critical realist project of furthering human flourishing and emancipation; of what it means to be human; and of why things matter to people. Addressing what counts as human(e) in academic writing has become pressing, as concerns about machine-generated texts, such as Large Language Models like ChatGPT challenge understandings of truth, knowledge, and justice. Underlying the argument in this chapter is the assumption that writing in the academy is a social practice (specifically, a method of enquiry) that should be oriented towards epistemic virtues including commitment to truth and socially just standards of excellence. For academic writing to fulfil such commitments, the author argues that it needs to be human(e). For it to be human(e), it requires a writer–agent–knower to rationally judge between educative and harmful academic writing theories and practices, in the interests of human flourishing and emancipation.

Keywords
academic writing
being human
dharma
emancipation
explanatory critique
flourishing
knowledge
truth
ubuntu
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Taylor & Francis Research @tandfresearch.bsky.social · 17/12/2025
Your academic voice is unique. Don't sacrifice clarity for complexity or personality for formality. The best academic writing is distinctly yours.
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Pat Thomson @patthomson.bsky.social · 08/12/2025
Following on from last week I have a few pointers for writing about your researcher positionality patthomson.net/2025/12/07/w...
patthomson.net
Writing About Your Researcher Positioning
So you know what researcher positioning is and why it matters. Now comes the practical question: how do you actually write about it in your thesis? This is where many doctoral researchers get a bit…
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Stephen Heard @stephenbheard.bsky.social · 12/11/2025
Scientific writing and writing for the public are very different. As I do both, is that difference eroding for me? And if it is, is that good or bad?
scientistseessquirrel.wordpress.com
Are my academic and non-academic writing styles converging? And would that be good?
I spent the first 25 years of my academic career writing scientific papers (and the grant proposals to fund them, of course). I never found that easy – although it got easier through time (and it c…
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Times Higher Education (THE) @timeshighered.bsky.social · 29/10/2025
The Shadow Scholars: Academic who travelled to Kenya to meet those ghostwriting university work says practice is ‘completely reshaping our future’. Juliette Rowsell reports #edusky www.timeshighereducation.com/news/s…
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Jelena Brankovic @jelena3121.bsky.social · 29/10/2025
Interested in the history of scientific journals? Or curious why journals became more similar in format over time? We're starting in about 2 hours 👇
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Nick Sousanis @nsousanis.bsky.social · 24/08/2025
My statement on Ai from the mini-comic as syllabus i made for new class I'm teaching that starts tomorrow! It robs you of your decisions & struggles - and the joy of being surprised. We won’t to be robbed of our learning - this is essential. This & the full mini at post: bsky.app/profile/nsou...
a snippet of a mini-comic, at top - straight line stretches from point A to B. Immediately below, same dot at A, then becomes a curving, meandering line that winds through the page and ends at a point with rays and a question mark emanating from it. Text reads: "Nothing can do this for you - for that robs you of experience and conflates answers with learning. Rather, it's all the decisions you make along the way, the mistakes, struggles, and surprises! These pathways you create - this is learning.
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Tina Loo @lootina.bsky.social · 24/10/2025
"“You can only critically assess the output of an AI chatbot if you have the skills to do so, and you don’t develop these skills by using AI. Before you can be critical of an AI summary, you have to learn to understand a text without having it summarized by an AI tool.”
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PACE Graduate School Open University @pacespaceou.bsky.social · 23/10/2025
So sorry, Sandra 🖤 {JM}
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PACE Graduate School Open University @pacespaceou.bsky.social · 22/10/2025
I've been really enjoying our start to #PACEspace 2025-26. I'm now really looking forward to how your #DoctoralWriting shapes up ✍️✍️✍️✍️✍️ The Future is in the Now! {JM}
Photo of Julia Molinari smiling Photo of several books on academic writing, academic literacies, multimodal, creative, and sociological scholarship on writing as a critical practice and language as power. The books are laid out on a table for display and browsing during our first in-person and hybrid lesson.Photo of several books on academic writing, academic literacies, multimodal, creative, and sociological scholarship on writing as a critical practice and language as power. The books are laid out on a table for display and browsing during our first in-person and hybrid lesson.Photo of several books on academic writing, academic literacies, multimodal, creative, and sociological scholarship on writing as a critical practice and language as power. The books are laid out on a table for display and browsing during our first in-person and hybrid lesson.
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Jude Taylor @m1cr0-judetaylor.bsky.social · 30/09/2025
Welcome to all our postgraduate researchers! You are what makes us a University.
Welcome 2025 PGR Adventure Begins You are the OU
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Ella @ellatasm.bsky.social · 23/06/2025
When @fadiadk.bsky.social presented some of her research on slow reading in higher education, especailly doctoral education at @srhe.bsky.social conference in december last year, it met with furious approval srheblog.com/2025/06/20/r... Intense head-nodding. Lovely to hear more about it.
srheblog.com
Reading time: discovery, meaning-making and resistance in the accelerated academy
by Fadia Dakka The increasing exposure of higher education sectors worldwide to market mechanisms (eg privatisation in and of higher education, platformisation and assetization) generates market-ma…
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PACE Graduate School Open University @pacespaceou.bsky.social · 23/08/2025
Is anybody who is involved in #DoctoralEducation able to point me towards a similar report or study on the UK knowledge society, maybe by #UKCGE or similar? #DoctoralWriting #PhD #GraduateSchool #DoctoralPedagogy This one is on the European context👇🏼 {JM pace@open.ac.uk} www.eua.eu/publications...
eua.eu
Doctoral education in Europe today: enhanced structures and practices for the European knowledge society
EUA - European University Association
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PACE Graduate School Open University @pacespaceou.bsky.social · 28/07/2025
"for students like me, writing is more than a skill. It’s a form of resistance. It’s how we carve out space in institutions that weren’t built for us. And anyone who helps us do that — respectfully, ethically, collaboratively — is part of that resistance too." #PACEspace {JM}
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PACE Graduate School Open University @pacespaceou.bsky.social · 28/07/2025
#PACEspace exists to help with exactly this: "There’s often a stigma attached to seeking support [...]. There’s nothing more authentic than wanting to do your best work. Asking for help isn’t a failure of ability — it’s a refusal to be isolated" www.thecanary.co/discovery/fe...
thecanary.co
Reclaiming My Voice: The Role of Paper Writers in a Student's Resistance to Silence
University was supposed to be a place of liberation. But almost immediately, I learned that academic writing came with its own constraints
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PACE Graduate School Open University @pacespaceou.bsky.social · 25/07/2025
Recordings & slides relating to the 'Future of Doctoral Writing' are under 'Content'. This page is subject to edits but there's enough there for those interested to get a sense of what was discussed. Thank you to those who managed to attend {JM} #PACEspace #PACExtra www.open.edu/openlearncre...
Webpage of the event with 'Material - PACE EXTRA Guest Speaker Series (Graduate School)

Description
Content
Reviews

Material content
Below is the material content. You can click on any section here and it will take you through to this section of the material. The Future of Doctoral Writing: Critical Dialogues towards a Manifesto'
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PACE Graduate School Open University @pacespaceou.bsky.social · 25/07/2025
A pdf of my slides on 'AI and multiliteracies' is now available on the EATAW conference website and can be cited via doi.org/10.5281/zeno... Thank you to Jennifer Sizer (orcid.org/0000-0002-27...) for alerting me to #Zenodo (which lets you share presentations via #Orcid with a doi) #PACEspace {JM}
Snip tool of 2 of my slides on why archives matter discussed in the context of whose archives and how the AI bots are trained
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PACE Graduate School Open University @pacespaceou.bsky.social · 24/07/2025
V. relevant to our recent discussions: "Explicit conversations about the nature of the doctorate should enable consideration of how context matters in the conceptualization of doctoral purposes and practices" 'Defining the Doctorate in Africa: Aligning Purpose with Context' doi.org/10.6017/895b...
Some countries are making deliberate efforts to match the doctoral curriculum to the prevailing job market. While this is largely a positive move, positioning skills-based training for industry as the key purpose of doctoral education has the potential for the doctorate to be conceptualized primarily as a commodity. The consequences of constructing the doctorate—and by extension knowledge—as a product are numerous: time to completion becomes the focus instead of quality; production is foregrounded over the nurturing of a researcher; and the product is accompanied by a requirement to produce journal articles, which has led to the proliferation of predatory publications.

What Is Needed?

What is needed for doctoral education in postindependence universities across Africa are spaces to discuss the purposes of the doctorate with a greater reflection on unchallenged assumptions across countries, national policies, and within institutions. Such discussions should not attempt to pin down the doctorate to a narrow, shared purpose—rather they should open spaces for reflection on taken-for-granted and often problematic assumptions. They should allow for far-
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PACE Graduate School Open University @pacespaceou.bsky.social · 23/07/2025
Recordings & other resources on the #FutureOfDoctoralWriting sponsored by @ougradsch.bsky.social & #BAAL will be shared ASAP. > 60 people across at least 10 countries/continents & disciplines attended in-person in #MiltonKeynes & online. Not easy to organise, but we managed. #OpenUniversity {JM}
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PACE Graduate School Open University @pacespaceou.bsky.social · 11/07/2025
www.timeshighereducation.com/news/elsevie...
timeshighereducation.com
Elsevier journal under fire over ‘AI-generated’ review comments
Researcher who waited nearly two years for rejection claims ‘nonsensical’ criticisms of his paper must have been chatbot-generated
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Dr Julia Molinari PhD SFHEA - INTIFADA against all #Colonialism @serenissimaj.bsky.social · 05/07/2025
Winding my way back to the UK by train from Braga (Pt) having made my point: the real politik of #GenAI needs embedding in ALL academic writing pedagogies. It's not enough to teach what-how. It's imperative to teach why this is happening to develop agentic reflexivity and flourish. #CriticalRealism
Slides with aims and content of my talk which will be made available on the EATAW website in due course.Slides with aims and content of my talk which will be made available on the EATAW website in due course.Slides with aims and content of my talk which will be made available on the EATAW website in due course.
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PACE Graduate School Open University @pacespaceou.bsky.social · 30/06/2025
blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsoci... #FutureOfDoctoralWriting
blogs.lse.ac.uk
How students should write a thesis in the AI age - Impact of Social Sciences
AI tools help students produce polished theses without deep understanding. Thorsten Fröhlich argues rigid assessment formats stifle critical thinking, and calls for a rethink of how research is taught...
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PACE Graduate School Open University @pacespaceou.bsky.social · 27/06/2025
⏳️Registration closes on Monday June 30th⏳️ We've increased ticket capacity so there's still a chance to join (ideally in person, if you can). Pre-seminar discussions are already taking place asynchronously online & are heating up🌡 #DoctoralWriting #AcWri {JM} www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-future...
eventbrite.co.uk
The Future of Doctoral Writing: Critical Dialogues towards a Manifesto
Join our online discussions and agenda-setting 1-day hybrid seminar to collectively author a 'Manifesto on the Future of Doctoral Writing'
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PACE Graduate School Open University @pacespaceou.bsky.social · 19/06/2025
📢Registration for our event is open until 30 June✅ We warmly welcome in-person attendance on 09 July to ensure discussions are critical & spontaneous♨️ But online places are still available {JM}. #DoctoralWriting #AcademicLiteracies #tleap #AcWri #OpenUniversity www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-future...
eventbrite.co.uk
The Future of Doctoral Writing: Critical Dialogues towards a Manifesto
Join our online discussions and agenda-setting 1-day hybrid seminar to collectively author a 'Manifesto on the Future of Doctoral Writing'
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Per Engzell @pengzell.bsky.social · 13/06/2025
They say your contribution should "fill a gap" but is it ok if it mostly just widens existing ones
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Philip Ball @philipcball.bsky.social · 05/06/2025
This is totally what we need right now. So many necessary new emotion words in here.
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PACE Graduate School Open University @pacespaceou.bsky.social · 05/06/2025
I'll be giving this year's keynote at #EATAW25 - alongside Suresh Canagarajah & Federico Navarro - on: 'AI Realism: Reclaiming the Human in AI-enhanced Academic Literacies' (cf abstract) {JM} 🤞 #PACEspace #AcWri #AcademicLiteracies #GenAI #CriticalRealism #OpenUniversity www.eataw2025.com/keynote
AI Realism: Reclaiming the Human in AI-enhanced Academic Literacies
Julia Molinari

​

Language technologies (LTs) are not new and a life without them means many things to many people: unimaginable, impractical, unavoidable, undesirable, undemocratic, maybe even a welcome relief. LTs include the familiar (dictionaries, machine translators, spellcheckers) and now the unfamiliar, which is rapidly becoming the new normal: LLMs (Large Language Models) powered by GenAI (GenerativeAI) and, apparently, AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) are automating writing in unprecedented ways. 

I wish to use this talk to press pause, just for a moment, to catch our collective breaths.

I would like to halt the dizzying speed at which these technologies are affecting our professional and personal existence by sharing a critical realist perspective (Archer & Maccarini, 2023) on LTs and what it means to be human (Molinari, 2025). This includes reflecting on LTs’ implications for academic literacies broadly understood as multisemiotic modes of communication, which include multilingualism (Lillis & Tuck, 2025). AI Realism entails neither techno-determinism nor techno-enthusiasm nor luddism. Rather, it provides a critical space in which to interrogate why AI has so abruptly irrupted into everyday life and how we might want to respond as educators. For example, it’s no coincidence that ChatGPT was released in the wake of the COVID19 pandemic (Hussain et al., 2024), with significant implications for the development of proctoring and surveillance technologies (McKenna, 2022). It’s also no coincidence that AI is associated with fascist ideologies (McQuillan, 2022). That it remains a black box in terms of how it is trained and by whom also raises concerns for academic writing (Gallagher, 2020). All this presents ideological challenges and opportunities for academic literacies that include, for example, re-visiting what we mean by criticality and agency if these foundational tenets of academi…
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PACE Graduate School Open University @pacespaceou.bsky.social · 05/06/2025
What I love about #PACEspace is the privilege of discussing research writing in progress. Achieving #flow, dealing with #feedback, finding #voice are what we discuss most. But trusting an Other with your writing is hard. PACE provides a safe & brave space to do this {JM}. #DoctoralWriting #PhDLife
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Stephen Heard @stephenbheard.bsky.social · 03/06/2025
For scientific writers: Three things your Methods section shouldn't be - but three things Methods sections often end up being. You can avoid these mistakes! scientistseessquirre...
scientistseessquirrel.wordpress.com
What your Methods section isn’t
If you’re a scientist like me, you read a lot of papers – and a lot of submitted manuscripts, drafts, and other larval stages of papers.* This is extremely helpful when it’s time to write your own …
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Pat Thomson @patthomson.bsky.social · 03/06/2025
Taming your perfectionist inner critic patthomson.net/2025/06/03/d...
patthomson.net
dealing with perfectionism
Some academic writers are crippled by the desire to write perfect prose from the very start. Even though they know that the first draft is always rough, they find writing rough difficult. They have…
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PACE Graduate School Open University @pacespaceou.bsky.social · 27/05/2025
The @ougradsch.bsky.social 'Position Statement and Guidance on Generative AI and Doctoral Education' is now available: www5.open.ac.uk/students/res... The advice is in the context of a fast-paced changing landscape. It emphasises openness re. #GenAI at all stages of the #thesis. #OpenUniversity
www5.open.ac.uk
The Open University
Authors: Julia Molinari (Graduate School); Daniel Gooch (Computing); Nicoleta Tipi (FBL) Critical readers: Inma Alvarez (WELS) Approved by: Clare Warren (Director of the Graduate School); Michel Werme...
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PACE Graduate School Open University @pacespaceou.bsky.social · 16/05/2025
Ciao Angelo, supervisors, ECRs, doctoral writers, postgraduate policy staff, academic & critical literacies scholars. I've also just coauthored the graduate school's AI policy (soon to be published for OU research PGRs & staff), so that will feature in the event. It's been a nightmare to organise.
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PACE Graduate School Open University @pacespaceou.bsky.social · 16/05/2025
Please email me {JM} for more details. This is a very focused & niche event on the Future of Doctoral Writing given #GenAI but also broader concerns of #EDI in #HigherEducation. It will soon be advertised as a fee ticketed event so please email pace@open.ac.uk if you have a professional interest.
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Leverhulme Trust @leverhulme.ac.uk · 15/05/2025
The Trust continues to support researchers at risk who have come to the UK from across the globe through a grant scheme delivered by @britishacademy.bsky.social and @cara1933.bsky.social. Apply now: www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/funding/brit...
White writing against a black background with gold swirls: British Academy/Cara/Leverhulme Researchers at Risk Research Support Grants. Deadline: 28 May 2025, 5pm. Leverhulme Trust logo
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Philip Seargeant @philipseargeant.bsky.social · 06/05/2025
To accompany the @openuniversity.bsky.social's collaboration with Radio 4's Word of Mouth with @michaelrosenyes.bsky.social, here's a short quiz about the bewildering world of idioms connect.open.ac.uk/education-de...
connect.open.ac.uk
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PACE Graduate School Open University @pacespaceou.bsky.social · 09/05/2025
"PhDs are awarded individually, but scholarship is [not] alone. Students need people around them to share tips and hunches support and console [...] a PhD remains a unique opportunity to write [...] what you care about most" by @academicdiary.bsky.social www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/too-...
timeshighereducation.com
Too much talk about our PhD scars does current students a disservice
Better to remind candidates that a doctorate is an opportunity to find and articulate their own thoughts on what they care about most, says Les Back
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PACE Graduate School Open University @pacespaceou.bsky.social · 08/05/2025
The guidance indirectly draws on 3 #OpenUniversity short courses, which I moderate & recommend to all (learners & educators) in our collective efforts to make sense of #AI in #HigherEducation: - www.open.ac.uk/courses/shor... - www.open.ac.uk/courses/shor... - www.open.ac.uk/courses/shor... [2/2]
open.ac.uk
An Introduction to Artificial Intelligence | Open University | LG003
This CPD course critically examines historical, ethical and social issues around AI technology, with views from experts in technology corporations and government.
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PACE Graduate School Open University @pacespaceou.bsky.social · 08/05/2025
The @ougradsch.bsky.social will soon be sharing its 'Position Statement & Guidance' on #AI in #DoctoralWriting, co-authored by me {JM} & aimed at doctoral researchers, supervisors, and examiners. The guidance will inform our #PACEspace Workshops, Writing Circles, and 1-1 Consultations #AcWri [1/2]
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Dr Julia Molinari PhD SFHEA - INTIFADA against all #Colonialism @serenissimaj.bsky.social · 28/04/2025
Interested in answers to this: "A friend contacted me about their supervisor possibly using AI to give feedback on their dissertation (feedback shows 100% AI generated on checks + makes very little sense in context)" sciences.social/@kavana@scho... @academic-chatter.bsky.social #AcademicChatter
sciences.social
sciences.social
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PACE Graduate School Open University @pacespaceou.bsky.social · 28/04/2025
*Shifting Power in Language Learning & Applied Linguistics with GenAI* The conference is inspired by the Shifting Power project (shiftingpower.kmi.open.ac.uk) and the Radical AI Network (www.nature.com/articles/d41...) #GenAI #EuroCall #CallForProposals #CfP eurocall-languages.org/events/genai...
eurocall-languages.org
GenAI Conference @ The Open University UK - Eurocall
Shifting Power in Language Learning and Applied Linguistics with GenAI A conference at The Open University UK, School of Languages and Applied Linguistics, in Milton Keynes and online November 13t...
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PACE Graduate School Open University @pacespaceou.bsky.social · 16/04/2025
"AI applications are, for the most part, designed to be used by a human who has professional training, and not a substitute for that human" (p. 5 Dijkstra P, et al. BMJMED 2025;4. doi:10.1136/bmjmed-2025-001394) Important insights for doctoral research writers: how to be accountable for #GenAI use.
Use of AI applications requires human qualities,
such as humility and circumspection. In a recent
review, Messeri and Crockett discussed four visions
of AI: AI as oracle, AI as arbiter, AI as quant, and
AI as surrogate.24 The authors warned that these
various roles are cognitive traps that can produce
various illusions: the illusion of explanatory depth
(assuming that the explanation produced by AI is
more profound than it actually is); the illusion of
exploratory breadth (assuming that the AI model
has covered all possible hypotheses relevant to the
question when it has actually covered only a limited
number); and the illusion of objectivity (assuming
that the AI model has produced an unbiased view
from nowhere when in reality it reflects, and might
even magnify, the various biases inherent in the
published literature on a topic).BOX 4 | WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION'S (WHO) SIX ETHICAL
PRINCIPLES FOR USE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IN HEALTHCARE
Summarised from WHO guidance on ethics and governance of Al in healthcare25
1. Protecting human autonomy. Humans should remain in control of medical
decisions, and people should understand how artificial intelligence (Al)
is used in their care (including how their privacy and confidentiality are
protected).
2. Promoting human wellbeing and safety, and the public interest. Al should no
harm people. The designers of Al technology should comply with regulatory
requirements for safety, accuracy, and efficacy.
3. Ensuring transparency, explainability, and intelligibility. Al technology
should be understandable to developers, healthcare professionals, patients
users, and regulators "according to the capacity of those to whom they are
explained".
Fostering responsibility and accountability. Patients and clinicians should
evaluate the development and deployment of Al technologies. This approach
should include mechanisms for questioning and redress for individuals and
groups that are adversely affected by decisions based on algorithms.
Ensuring inclusiveness and equity. Al for health should be designed "to
encourage the widest possible appropriate, equitable use and access,
irrespective of age, sex, gender, income, race, ethnic group, sexual
orientation, ability, or other characteristics protected under human rights
codes". Al technologies should not encode biases to the disadvantage of
identifiable groups (especially already minoritised groups; ie, fairness,
box 3).
6. Promoting Al that is responsive and sustainable. All Al role players
(designers, developers, and users) should "continuously, systematically,
and transparently" assess Al applications during actual use. Two aspects
are important for sustainable Al systems: firstly, their environmental
consequences should be minimal; and secondly, their effect on the
workplace, including workplace disruptions, trai…BOX 5 | TEN QUESTIONS TO ASK ABOUT A PAPER THAT REPORTS AN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI) BASED DECISION
SUPPORT SYSTEM
1. What was the study design and (excluding the Al) aspects for now) does it meet established criteria for methodological rigour?
As with all research, studies of Al systems should be conducted with systematic methods, on samples that are large enough and
representative enough to produce trustworthy findings. For example, If a randomised controlled trial was appropriate to the research
question, was a randomised controlled trial done (and if not, what were the limitations of the non-randomised design)? Did the sample of
patlent participants reflect the wider population with the disease? If an intervention and a control arm were Included, were participants In
both arms comparable at baseline In terms of, for example, age distribution, gender balance, and disease severity? Were assessors blinded
to the allocation arms? Al studies typically have two key groups of participants: the patients on which the Al algorithm was tralned and the
users of the Al system (consider their baseline characteristics and how they were familiarised with the Al system). This scenario Is similar to
surgical Innovation studies where both patient and operator characteristics are Important and should be reported."9
2. What was the intended clinical use of the Al system (ie, what decisions is it intended to support, by whom, and with what purpose)?
Be clear about the purpose of the technology. The Al system might, for example, be targeted for use in patients with suspected breast cancer
and used by radiologists, with the goal of Increasing detection rates of breast cancer and reducing false positive screens.
3. What type of computational task was the Al system designed to support?
The computational task is likely to be one or more of the following: prediction (eg, estimating the risk of a person developing a specific
health outcome), classification (eg, estimating the presence or…
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PACE Graduate School Open University @pacespaceou.bsky.social · 16/04/2025
How to read a paper involving artificial intelligence (AI) Key messages: 1. [...] 2. [...] 3. A preliminary framework and set of questions for appraising a paper [...] are described Insightful for #DoctoralWriting #CriticalReading #AcWri {JM} #PACEspace bmjmedicine.bmj.com/content/4/1/...
bmjmedicine.bmj.com
How to read a paper involving artificial intelligence (AI)
This paper guides readers through the critical appraisal of a paper that includes the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in clinical settings for healthcare delivery. A brief introduction to the diff...
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PACE Graduate School Open University @pacespaceou.bsky.social · 27/03/2025
The 'Politics of Difference' as it relates to #AcademicWriting by Dr A. French: > Is 'failure to meet academic writing conventions often treated as a personal failure rather than the result of wider systemic inequalities'? #AcWri #UCL #IoE mediacentral.ucl.ac.uk/Play/120494 listen from 1'30" of 60'
See relevant slide available here: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ioe/departments-and-centres/academic-writing-centre/academic-writing-seminar-seriesSee relvant slide available here: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ioe/departments-and-centres/academic-writing-centre/academic-writing-seminar-seriesSee relvant slide available here: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ioe/departments-and-centres/academic-writing-centre/academic-writing-seminar-seriesSee relvant slide available here: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ioe/departments-and-centres/academic-writing-centre/academic-writing-seminar-series
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