JMIR Publications formally launches news & perspectives section with in-depth analysis of US research oversight

JMIR Publications

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JMIR Publications Formally Launches News & Perspectives Section with In-Depth Analysis of US Research Oversight

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(Toronto, September 22, 2025) JMIR Publications, a leading open access publisher of digital health research, today announced the publication of a scientific news article that marks the formal launch of its "News & Perspectives" section. The article, "Research Implications of Increased Political Oversight in the US," was written by Scientific News Editor, Kayleigh-Ann Clegg, PhD, who will be coordinating the development of JMIR Publications’ digital health news service.

Dr. Clegg's debut article provides a critical analysis of the "Improving Oversight of Federal Grantmaking" Executive Order (EO 14332), which formalizes a pattern of increasing political oversight into US research and funding. The article draws on recent news and research to highlight the immediate and long-term implications of this order, including the human impact on researchers and the potential for a chilling effect on creativity and innovation within the digital health community. It also discusses the global ramifications of these changes and calls for a renewed commitment to collaboration, advocacy, and scientific values.

The article is featured in the "News & Perspectives" section of the Journal of Medical Internet Research, which aims  to bring the rigor and integrity of academic publishing to science communication. The platform features well-researched, intellectually responsible content, including investigative pieces, expert commentary, and trend analyses to keep researchers, industry experts, policymakers, and health professionals informed and ahead of the curve. 

“With our 'News & Perspectives' section, we're building on JMIR’s foundation of academic excellence to bring the same level of integrity and depth to digital health news,” said Dennis O’Brien, VP Communications and Partnerships at JMIR Publications. “We believe that by providing well-researched and timely commentary, we can empower our entire community—including researchers, clinicians, patients, and policymakers—to stay ahead of the curve and ultimately drive the future of digital health. This isn't just for academics; it's for everyone who relies on or is impacted by this critical field.”

A clinical psychologist and researcher with a passion for knowledge translation, Dr. Clegg brings a unique perspective to her new role. Along with the rest of the talented and dedicated team at JMIR Publications, she hopes to continue to build and expand JMIR’s news service in a way that fosters creativity, innovation, and collaboration in the digital health community and beyond. 

 

Read the full article here:

Clegg K. Research Implications of Increased Political Oversight in the United States. J Med Internet Res 2025;27:e83499

URL: https://www.jmir.org/2025/1/e83499

DOI: 10.2196/83499

About JMIR Publications

JMIR Publications is a leading open access publisher of digital health research and a champion of open science. With a focus on author advocacy and research amplification, JMIR Publications partners with researchers to advance their careers and maximize the impact of their work. As a technology organization with publishing at its core, we provide innovative tools and resources that go beyond traditional publishing, supporting researchers at every step of the dissemination process. Our portfolio features a range of peer-reviewed journals, including the renowned Journal of Medical Internet Research. To find out more about JMIR Publications, visit jmirpublications.com or connect with them on Bluesky, X, LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram.

Media Contact:

Dennis O’Brien, Vice President, Communications & Partnerships

JMIR Publications

communications@jmir.org

+1 416-583-2040

The content of this communication is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work, published by JMIR Publications, is properly cited.

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DOI

10.2196/83499 

Method of Research

News article

Subject of Research

Not applicable

 

Hostile hoots make robins eat less at night

Lund University

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At night, the little robin needs to be extra alert to avoid bloodthirsty tawny owls

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Credit: Johan Nilsson

The sound of tawny owls makes young European robins eat less during their southward migration. A new study from Lund University in Sweden shows how the threat from nocturnal predators affects the birds’ behaviour – and by extension their survival.

When young robins embark on their first southward migration in the autumn, they make regular stops along the way to rest and replenish their energy reserves. However, each stop entails a risk – predators may be lurking nearby. 

In an article in the Journal of Animal Ecology, a research team has established that migrating birds are not only aware of threats around them, but also adapt their behaviour based on which predator calls they hear.

“For the first time it has been possible to show that the calls of nocturnal predators affect how birds obtain energy during their migration,” says Susanne Åkesson, professor of biology at Lund University.

In the research project, young robins were exposed to calls from two different birds of prey: the tawny owl and sparrowhawk. The results were clear. The call of the diurnal sparrowhawk did not significantly affect the birds’ behaviour, whereas they reacted strongly to the call of the nocturnal tawny owl. They became more cautious, reduced their night-time activity and ate less. This in turn led to a slower build-up of fat reserves and poorer physical condition.

“There is a clear compromise involved: to dare to eat and build up fuel reserves or steer clear to avoid being eaten,” says Susanne Åkesson.

Eating less also entails that the birds have to stay longer at their stopovers in order to sufficiently replenish energy reserves. Longer stays increase the risk that they will arrive late at their wintering grounds – where there is tough competition for the best territories. A late arrival may have consequences for both survival and future reproduction.

“By understanding how migratory birds respond to different threats, we can improve how we plan the design of stopover sites and peri-urban environments. If birds have access to calm and protective surroundings during their stopovers, it increases their chances of surviving the long journey,” concludes Susanne Åkesson.

Tawny owls cause robins to eat less.

Credit

Johan Nilsson

Journal

Journal of Animal Ecology

DOI

10.1111/1365-2656.70059 

Article Title

Nocturnal but not diurnal threats shape stopover strategy in a migrating songbird

 

Hebrew SeniorLife Researchers honored for study on room temperature and cognitive function

THIS IS ALSO TRUE FOR HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS TAKING FINAL EXAMS

The Innovative Research on Aging Awards recognize applied research with practical takeaways for the senior living industry.

Hebrew SeniorLife Hinda and Arthur Marcus Institute for Aging Research

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Hebrew SeniorLife researchers have received the Mather Institute Bronze Award in its 2025 Innovative Research on Aging Awards competition for their study on the impact of home temperature on cognitive function in older adults.

The Mather Institute created the awards to inspire evidence-based practices that can improve the lives of older adults.

Amir Baniassadi, PhD, assistant scientist at the Hinda and Arthur Marcus Institute for Aging Research, and his colleagues conducted an observational study involving 47 community-dwelling older adults in Boston with an average age of 79. The study participants completed surveys twice daily for up to 12 months, reporting their perceived attention and thermal comfort. Simultaneously, the researchers continuously monitored their home’s ambient temperature and humidity using smart sensors.

The findings revealed a U-shaped relationship between home ambient temperature and older adults’ self-reported difficulty maintaining attention. Specifically, attention was optimal at temperatures between 20°C (68°F) and 24°C (75.2°F) and worsened significantly outside this range, with the odds of attention difficulty doubling with just a 4°C shift in either direction.

The longitudinal observational study, entitled “Home Ambient Temperature and Self-reported Attention in Community-Dwelling Older Adults,” was published in the Journal of Gerontology: Medical Sciences.

“This Innovative Research on Aging Award honors Harvard Medical School and Dr. Amir Baniassadi for their study on how home ambient temperature affects the ability of older adults to maintain attention during daily activities,” said Jennifer L. Smith, PhD, assistant vice president and director, Mather Institute. “These awards recognize applied research with practical takeaways for the senior living industry. We aim for these findings to inspire innovations within senior living organizations around the country and the world.”

As an internationally recognized resource for research and information about wellness, aging, and trends in senior living, Mather Institute invited submissions by researchers from universities and organizations around the world for this year’s awards. The awards cover a variety of categories, from Aging in Place to Technological Advancements for Older Adults and beyond.

The report on all the award recipients, 2025 Innovative Research on Aging Awards, is available for download at Innovative Research on Aging Awards | Mather Institute.

About Hebrew SeniorLife
Hebrew SeniorLife, an affiliate of Harvard Medical School, is a national senior services leader uniquely dedicated to rethinking, researching, and redefining the possibilities of aging. Hebrew SeniorLife cares for more than 4,500 seniors a day across seven campuses throughout Greater Boston. Locations include: Hebrew Rehabilitation Center-Boston and Hebrew Rehabilitation Center-NewBridge in Dedham; NewBridge on the Charles, Dedham; Orchard Cove, Canton; Simon C. Fireman Community, Randolph; Center Communities of Brookline, Brookline; Jack Satter House, Revere; and Leyland Community, Dorchester. Founded in 1903, Hebrew SeniorLife also conducts influential research into aging at the Hinda and Arthur Marcus Institute for Aging Research, which has a portfolio of more than $98 million, making it one of the largest gerontological research facilities in the U.S. in a clinical setting. It also trains more than 500 geriatric care providers each year. For more information about Hebrew SeniorLife, follow us on our blog, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and LinkedIn.

About the Hinda and Arthur Marcus Institute for Aging Research
Scientists at the Marcus Institute seek to transform the human experience of aging by conducting research that will ensure a life of health, dignity, and productivity into advanced age. The Marcus Institute carries out rigorous studies that discover the mechanisms of age-related disease and disability; lead to the prevention, treatment, and cure of disease; advance the standard of care for older people; and inform public decision-making.

About Mather
Founded in 1941, Mather is a nondenominational not-for-profit organization based in Evanston, Illinois, that creates Ways to Age Well Mather Institute is its research area of service, and serves as an award-winning resource for research and information about wellness, aging, trends in senior living, and successful aging service innovations. To learn more, find your way to matherinstitute.com.

 

Taking the guesswork out of concussion assessments

The Mizzou Point-of-Care Assessment System is a portable device that uses machine learning to spot possible concussions through walking, balance and reaction-time tests.

University of Missouri-Columbia

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Mizzou Point-of-Care Assessment System

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Credit: University of Missouri

Spotting a concussion can be tricky. After a potential head injury, you can ask if the person feels dizzy or has a headache — but that relies on self-reporting, which isn’t always accurate.

What if there were a way to take the guesswork out of it?

That’s the problem Trent Guess, an associate professor at the University of Missouri College of Health Sciences, and Jacob Thomas, a Mizzou doctoral student, have set out to solve. They’ve developed a portable system that uses machine learning to track body motion and detect possible signs of a concussion — offering a more objective way to identify injuries in real time. While most concussion-testing machines are expensive and only available in specialized labs, the Mizzou Point-of-Care Assessment System is affordable and portable, making it more accessible to the general public in a variety of settings.

In a recent study, the portable system — which combines a force plate, a depth camera and an interface board — was used to test the movement, balance and reaction times of 40 college athletes, 20 of whom had recently been diagnosed with a concussion.

 

The system’s portability allows it to be useful in a variety of clinical settings.

By using machine learning — a process where a computer looks for patterns in data to make better-informed decisions — the portable system was able to quickly learn the difference between someone who is healthy and someone who has a concussion.

For example, those with a concussion were more likely to have slower reaction times, walk slower and struggle more with maintaining their balance, particularly when asked to complete tasks with eyes closed or while counting backwards from 100 in intervals of seven.

“Going forward, we can have individuals take the assessment when they are healthy to establish a baseline. This is where the machine learning comes into play,” Guess said. “Then, if they sustain a possible concussion in the future, taking the same assessment again and comparing the results with the baseline data helps us know if the individual’s movement and motor control were impacted by possible cognitive damage.”

Guess, whose background is in engineering and biomechanics, is the director of the Mizzou Motion Analysis Center, a state-of-the-art gait lab in the College of Health Sciences.

“Mizzou is a great place for this research because of the opportunities I have to collaborate with clinicians who have expertise in orthopedics, physical therapy, sports rehabilitation and exercise science,” Guess said. “In their clinical settings, they often work with a variety of patients and see the need for a better way to assess potential concussions, and with my engineering background, I knew I could help develop a portable system to help meet the demand.”

While college athletes were the subjects of this particular study, the Mizzou Point-of-Care Assessment System could also help assess potential concussions for individuals working as first responders, military personnel or in other professions with a higher likelihood of head injuries.

“This portable system can also be a helpful tool in measuring an individual’s recovery after a concussion,” Guess said. “The last thing you want is to send someone back out on the field or into a work environment when they are not ready. Hopefully, our efforts can help people stay as safe as possible.”

While a small number of these portable systems are currently being tested for research purposes, Guess hopes they can one day be manufactured at a larger scale before being used in a variety of clinical and athletic settings.

“A machine learning approach to concussive group classification using discrete outcome measures from a low-cost movement-based assessment system” was published in Medical Engineering and Physics.

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Journal

Medical Engineering & Physics

DOI

10.1016/j.medengphy.2025.104402 

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

A machine learning approach to concussive group classification using discrete outcome measures from a low-cost movement-based assessment system

 

European cisco – genetic adaptation to variation in salinity and spawning time

Uppsala University

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Professor Leif Andersson, Professor at Department of Medical Biochemistry and Microbiology at Uppsala University, Sweden

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Credit: Mikael Wallerstedt/Uppsala University

European cisco roe is know as a Swedish delicacy. A new study has shown that there are different types of European cisco in Swedish waters that are each genetically adapted to fresh, saline or brackish water. Genetics also steers when European cisco spawn. The new knowledge from this study can be used in sustainable management of the species, and for investigating whether the spawning environment affects the quality of the roe. The study was conducted by researchers at Uppsala University, the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU), the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm (KTH), Stockholm University, and the Museum of Natural History, and was recently published in the journal Molecular Ecology.

The European cisco is a small salmonid that has three different variants. As a purely freshwater fish, it is found in Lake Vänern and Lake Mälaren, among other freshwater bodies. As an anadromous fish, it lives in the Gulf of Bothnia and some other parts of the Baltic Sea from where it migrates up rivers and spawns in freshwater just like salmon. The third variant both lives and spawns in the somewhat brackish waters of the Gulf of Bothnia. It is the latter variant of European cisco that produces the most sought-after roe.

“We have developed a reference atlas describing all the genes found in the genome of the European cisco. This work is part of a larger international collaborative project aiming to map the genome of all species,” explains Kerstin Lindblad-Toh, professor at Uppsala University.

“Having a map of different species’ genomes is a useful tool for studying the biology of a species as well as how the species is divided up into different sub-populations within the species’ range of habitats. This information is particularly important for species that we humans use for food production, for example. It gives us the opportunity to monitor how a species is affected by our exploitation of it,” says Leif Andersson, Uppsala University, who led the study.

The study shows that there are two main groups of European cisco in Swedish waters. One main group occurs in some lakes in the southern Swedish highlands and there is another group that occurs in the rest of Sweden. It is very likely that these two types represent European cisco that were separated during the last Ice Age and subsequently colonised different areas of Sweden.

“Our results show clear genetic differences between European cisco that spawn in freshwater and those that spawn in the brackish waters of the Gulf of Bothnia. There are also genetic differences between spring-spawning and autumn-spawning European cisco. The vast majority of European cisco spawn in the autumn, but in Lake Fegen, which is located on the border between the Swedish provinces of Västergötland and Småland, there are both spring-spawning and autumn-spawning populations,” says Bo Delling of the Museum of Natural History in Stockholm.

A number of the genetic differences between the populations that spawn in freshwater and those that spawn in brackish water have previously been identified as important for salinity tolerance in other species, while genes with a known function related to the regulation of circadian rhythm were significantly overrepresented in the genetic differences between spring-spawning and autumn-spawning populations.

“We saw clear genetic differences between the anadromous European cisco that spawn in the Kalix River compared to those that spawn in the brackish waters of the Gulf of Bothnia. It would be interesting to explore whether there is a connection between the quality of the roe and the spawning environment. This could also affect how European cisco in the Gulf of Bothnia are managed in the future,” says Leif Andersson.

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Journal

Molecular Ecology

DOI

10.1111/mec.70094 

Method of Research

Observational study

Subject of Research

Animals

Article Title

Genetic Adaptation to Brackish Water and Spawning Season in European Cisco

Article Publication Date

23-Sep-2025

Banks that identify fraudsters increase loyalty, retain more defrauded customers than others who never were compromised

University of Notre Dame

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Financial institutions are constantly fighting off fraudsters who steal money from customer accounts. Banks spend millions each year to figure out who was responsible and keep customers from leaving; however, in most cases it’s nearly impossible to figure out who committed the fraud.

Should banks continue pouring resources into investigations that don’t lead to accountability? The short answer is yes, according to Vamsi Kanuri, the Viola D. Hank Associate Professor of Marketing at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business. In a new research study, Kanuri found that if a bank can’t tell a customer who was responsible for a fraudulent transaction, that customer loses trust, closes their account and leaves the bank.

In “Mitigating Churn After Online Financial Fraud: The Value of Blame Attribution,” published in the forthcoming issue of the Production and Operations Management journal, Kanuri examined data from a major U.S. bank covering 422,953 customers over five years. The study showed that a lack of clear answers from the bank resulted in a big increase in people who had experienced fraud leaving — 40 percent more than those who were never defrauded in the first place.

Kanuri, along with Mendoza’s Sriram Somanchi and Rahul Telang from Carnegie Mellon University, showed that, surprisingly, when the bank catches the real fraudster, not only do customers feel more secure, but also 62 percent fewer leave compared with customers who never experienced fraud at all.

“Intuitively, we might expect that any instance of fraud would harm the relationship between a customer and their bank, even if the case was resolved,” Kanuri said. “After all, fraud is a serious violation of trust, and you would think it would automatically push customers closer to the exit. Yet we show the opposite in cases of correct attribution: Not only do customers stay, but they also display higher levels of loyalty than those untouched by fraud. This is a real-world demonstration of the service recovery paradox, where effective handling of a failure can make customers more loyal than if no problem had occurred.”

Financial institutions are increasingly faced with sophisticated phishing scams where perpetrators create mass email campaigns that redirect users to a fake bank login page to collect their login credentials. Fraudsters can even circumvent state-of-the-art two-factor authentication checks by taking control of users’ phones through SIM jacking and inheriting the users’ geographic identity using geo-spoofing techniques.

A bank that fails to catch fraudsters creates an immediate, lasting impression of unreliability, though it fades over time. On the other hand, a bank that successfully catches fraud and protects its customers earns a stronger, more permanent reputation for competence. Kanuri said this demonstrated that “how fraud is resolved shapes not only immediate reactions, but also the long-term relationship between banks and their customers.”

Not all customers react the same way.

The data revealed that factors such as tenure and how often customers interact with their bank influence their responses. Customers with shorter relationships and fewer touchpoints are more likely to leave a bank if a fraudster goes unidentified, since they don’t have a long history of trust to rely on. Longer-tenured customers or those who engage more frequently with the bank are more forgiving.

“Interestingly, when the bank successfully identifies a fraudster, these differences largely disappear,” Kanuri said, “since the act of identifying the culprit provides enough reassurance to restore trust across the board.”

The data, which included customer demographics, account activity, tenure, balances, interactions with the bank and instances of fraud, as well as a follow-up experiment confirmed that what really drives customer behavior after fraud is how much they believe in the bank’s ability to safeguard their accounts. When fraudsters are not identified, this undermines trust, prompting people to withdraw money, move funds elsewhere and eventually close their accounts. When they are identified, the opposite happens. It restores confidence, encourages loyalty and sometimes even strengthens the customer-bank relationship.

The results provide evidence in support of reforms proposed by the U.S. Treasury Department to increase transparency in ACH transactions and require money-transfer apps to report them. Such changes would make it easier for banks to trace perpetrators, assign blame and reduce customer defection. Beyond the financial upside, these reforms could also reinforce trust in financial institutions by making service recovery more effective.

“The payoff of fraud investigations comes in the form of loyalty, not direct financial recovery, which is not the way most people in the industry are accustomed to thinking about it,” Kanuri said.

Contact: Vamsi Kanuri, 574-631-2399, vkanuri@nd.edu

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Journal

Production and Operations Management

Article Publication Date

21-Sep-2025