This article makes a case for why ethnomusicologists—not just those with specialised interests in archives, information management, and intellectual property law—need a serious conversation about open research. Drawing on examples of ethical, regulatory, and infrastructure challenges encountered in the UK-based Access Folk project, I suggest the necessity of dialogue that crosses fault lines about data ownership and control. Articulating a coherent disciplinary-level stance about what open research means in ethnomusicology is an essential step toward a more ethical research praxis, positioning us to confront twenty-first-century technical and regulatory challenges.

While international humanitarian law (IHL) serves as the legal framework regulating the conduct of hostilities in order to limit civilian harm in armed conflict, it does not necessarily prescribe how parties to conflict should implement their obligations in practice. Militaries must create frameworks and tools suitable to avoiding, or in any event minimizing, harm in their operations so that those making decisions about the use of lethal force can do so on the basis of informed judgements in a good-faith effort to comply with their legal obligations.

Informed by operational lessons and detailed studies illuminating repeating patterns of civilian harm, US civilian harm mitigation and response (CHMR) policy entails a significant effort to develop upstream capabilities and procedures to better mitigate civilian harm in military operations. Civilian harm risk in armed conflict cannot be reduced to zero, and there will never be a perfect information environment leading up to and during an armed conflict. However, the premise of CHMR is that patterns of harm are often knowable and foreseeable, as are the factors contributing to harm, and therefore some civilian harm can be avoided or at least minimized.

This article examines the key elements of CHMR, particularly how increasing and improving information on the civilian environment, projected risks to civilians and the impact of operations on civilians stands to aid in command decision-making and risk management. It also reflects on fundamental gaps in the formulation and implementation of the CHMR policy framework – notably, the lack of measures of performance and the failure to specifically connect CHMR capabilities to the fulfilment of IHL obligations in the conduct of hostilities. It closes with a discussion on tailoring CHMR to match the challenges of large-scale combat and multinational operations and offers potential approaches for national militaries to develop their own capabilities and procedures for effective CHMR.

A period of prolonged, stable economic inflation across much of the developed world arguably reduced the relative significance of inflation assumptions in the reserving process. This stability leant validity to one of the inherent assumptions of the Chain Ladder reserving method – that inflation in future years would mirror that observed historically. The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on global supply chains resulted in a state of persistently high economic inflation hitherto unexperienced since the 1980s. This spike in turn sparked concerns around the adequacy of general insurance claim provisions (loss reserves) and the methods for their assessment amongst insurance boards and their regulators. In this paper, we explore a variety of methods for attempting to incorporate a more volatile and variable state of claims inflation in reserving. These methods are largely those discussed by regulators in response to the 2021 inflation spike. The key findings are the importance of explicitly considering the inflation inherent in a claim cohort; how it compares with views of future inflation; and revising both our views of the future and actual inflation, as observations become available. We further consider the impact of “imperfect knowledge” or parameter uncertainty with regard these inflation assumptions, when setting reserves.

Critical infrastructures are complex, interdependent systems on which our societies are reliant. A better understanding of these interdependencies is vital to improving their functioning and resilience. While various studies and surveys have been conducted, we aim to cast a new perspective by focusing on what Rinaldi et al. introduced in 2001, as “logical interdependencies” and their modeling and simulation considering the human factor, and by adopting a cross-area approach to guide future works through the identification of research directions and common design challenges, good practices.

This paper presents a design support framework that focuses on linking product design with risk management within the pharmaceutical packaging industry. The framework is intended for use by packaging designers and adopts a multi-user perspective to identify design requirements and integrate them into risk mitigation activities. It promotes safe and effective packaging through proactive design, reducing costly redesign measures. A preliminary version is presented which has been developed through studies with key industry stakeholders, including pharmaceutical packaging designers.

This article integrates Triple-helix and institutional logics perspectives to diagnose how professional, market and state logics generate risks in university research, and how hybrid governance can mitigate them. Conceptually, it advances a cross-level risk analysis (individual, organizational, system) and a triple-temporal mitigation design that aligns short-term relational routines, mid-term interface infrastructures and long-term institutional and policy change. The synthesis extends existing work on selective coupling and institutional complexity by linking specific risk mechanisms to sequenced interventions. It further refines research on boundary organizations and intermediaries by positioning interface roles within system-level coordination, and clarifies how openness, sovereignty and mission pressures map across logics within responsible research and innovation and open-science agendas. Overall, the study offers a parsimonious and actionable framework for steering collaborative research under conditions of institutional plurality.

The governance of Artificial Intelligence (AI) fundamentally depends on the implementation of risk management standards. Article 9 of the EU AI Act exemplifies this challenge, as it relies on indeterminate terms, such as “reasonably foreseeable risks” and “acceptability of risk”, to define the scope of the provision. This paper argues that such open risk management provisions require an economic framework in order to establish a coherent and innovation-friendly standard of care.

Drawing on the theoretical parallels between risk management and tort law, the analysis demonstrates the importance of cost-benefit and risk-utility models in transforming ambiguous legal standards into actionable ones. However, a purely quantitative approach proves insufficient for several reasons, including the risk of “metrics shopping” and the protection of fundamental rights. Consequently, the paper proposes a hybrid approach to risk management that integrates quantitative metrics with qualitative safeguards. Furthermore, in addressing the challenge of hindsight and outcome biases in ex-post enforcement, the analysis recommends applying the Business Judgment Rule (BJR) logic from corporate law. By limiting the standard of review to the quality of ex ante decision-making, this framework can be applied more widely to the management of AI risks.

This study investigates a hybrid variable annuity (VA) contract that combines guaranteed minimum accumulation benefit (GMAB) and guaranteed minimum death benefit (GMDB) riders, with the added flexibility for policyholders to surrender prior to maturity. The contract guarantees the return of premiums or a greater rolled-up value at either maturity or death. We propose a novel two-account structure: an investment account tied to the underlying fund, from which management fees are deducted, and a separate cash account for the deduction of insurance fees for funding the GMAB and GMDB riders. This design generalizes the conventional single-account model by decoupling fee sources. From the policyholder’s perspective, we derive actuarially fair insurance charges and show that the two-account framework delivers substantially lower guarantee fees compared to the classical design, improves contract characteristics by reducing the effective moneyness of embedded guarantees, thereby discouraging early surrenders and mitigating mortality risk mispricing. Furthermore, we show that bundling survival and death benefits results in higher fair fees than the sum of standalone riders, thereby enhancing the product’s appeal to insurers. The analysis also incorporates taxation considerations up to a predefined preservation age, reflecting regulatory and practical product design constraints.