[Wikimedia-l] Radiological images

[Andrew Gray]

It was certainly my understanding that most major medical journals
have much better ethical clearance for publication of patient images
than they did ten or twenty years ago. This isn't my field, so quite
likely I've got the wrong end of the stick, but is it that only a few
journals are sufficiently rigorous, or that their form of rigour
doesn't match what we'd need?

On the second point - these discussions seem to me to be saying "it's
a very complicated environment" - ethically, legally, perhaps
practically, all these things are making it difficult for us to know
how we can say something is "safe". If we have the opportunity to hand
the problem to someone else who makes the material available to us,
that seems pretty beneficial to me.

It's not perfect, but there already contexts where Commons is
primarily full of professionally published material - the ones where
we cannot easily get non-professional stuff. (Most of our pictures of
military operations are taken from professionally published resources,
for example, because the many issues surrounding going into warzones
tends to discourage most people not paid to do so.)

If it turns out, once the lawyers have chewed it over, that the
copyright/ethical clearance/whatever situation around these images can
be made clear and unencumbered, great. Everyone wins, and I think we'd
all be happy if there was a clear and convincing "just go for it". But
if it turns out to be sufficiently complicated that it's going to be
very difficult for Commons to do suitable levels of due diligence,
then it might well be that we're faced with a choice of externally -
professionally - cleared, or almost nothing.

Andrew.

On 18 September 2013 02:29, James Heilman <jmh649 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Per "c) most reputable journals now have robust ethics &
> subject-consent policies
> and so we can work on the basis that images published in them will be
> ethically usable"
>
> If this were true, which it isn't by the way, than that would mean that
> commons is only a repository for professionally published material. Sort of
> defeats the purpose of commons in a way.
>
> --
> James Heilman
> MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian
>
> The Wikipedia Open Textbook of Medicine
> www.opentextbookofmedicine.com
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-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk