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BACKGROUND: With direct-acting antivirals dramatically reshaping the public health response to the hepatitis C virus (HCV), prisons are set to play a critical role in elimination efforts. Despite the theoretical demonstration of HCV treatment-as-prevention in prison in mathematical modeling, limited empirical data exist. The Australian 'Surveillance and Treatment of Prisoners with Hepatitis C' project (SToP-C) is the world's first trial of HCV treatment-as-prevention in prison. Drawing on interviews with HCV expert stakeholders, this paper explores the factors respondents identified as crucial to the success of future scale-up. Accounting for such perspectives matters because of the influence expert discourse has in shaping implementation. METHODS: Semi-structured interviews were conducted with nineteen HCV experts working across key policy, advocacy, research and clinical dimensions of the Australian HCV response. Data were coded using qualitative data management software (NVivo 11). Analysis proceeded via a hybrid deductive and inductive approach. RESULTS: Notwithstanding concerns regarding the lack of primary prevention in Australian prisons, stakeholders reported broad levels of support for the intervention and for the future scale-up of HCV treatment. A number of considerations, both external and internal to the prison system, were identified as key. The principal external factor was an enabling political-cum-policy environment; internal factors included: obtaining support from prisons' executive and custodial staff; promoting health within a security-first institutional culture; allocating time for treatment within prisoners' tightly regulated schedules; ensuring institutional stability during treatment given the routine movement of prisoners between prisons; prioritizing the availability of retreatment given the paucity of primary prevention; and securing sufficient clinical space for treatment. CONCLUSION: The challenges to implementation are considerable, ranging from macrolevel concerns to in-prison logistical matters. Nonetheless, we argue that prisons remain an obvious setting for treatment scale-up, not only for prevention and potential elimination benefit, but for the treatment opportunities they afford a socially disadvantaged and underserved population. While noting widespread concerns among respondents regarding the paucity of primary prevention in Australian prisons, results indicate broad levels of support among expert stakeholders for HCV treatment scale-up in prison.

Background: The importance of engaging people who use drugs in drug policy development is increasingly acknowledged including in recent UN documents. Little scholarly attention has been paid to 'drug user representation' in the global drug policy setting of the UN such as the Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND). This paper examines 'drug user representation' in key UN drug policy processes over three decades. Method: A mapping process was undertaken using a corpus of publicly available documents from the UNGASS on Drugs and associated CND processes to identify relevant policy processes from 1987 to 2019 (n = 15) which were then assess for presence/absence of 'drug user representation'. Those processes with positive evidence of 'drug user representation' (n = 9) were critically interrogated across three co-constitutive domains of the subjects, objects and forms of 'drug user representation'. Results: Our analysis shows that despite calls for greater involvement, dominant UN drug policy discourses and other practices delimit both the political subjectivities available to people who use/have used drugs and their capacity to bring their voices to bear in this context. The analysis also highlights that human rights-based discourses, employed by 'drug user representatives', have emerged as an important practice of resistance against the problematic and delimiting power effects of existing UN discourses, governing practices and modes of engagement. Conclusions: In addition to the practices of resistance being undertaken by 'drug user representatives', we suggest there is a need to improve how 'drug user representation' is being made possible and done in the sites of UN drug policy deliberation and, that these sites should be opened for questioning. This we argue will not only have a positive impact on political legitimacy for 'drug user representation', but on the health and human rights of people who use/have used drugs.

BACKGROUND: With direct-acting antivirals dramatically reshaping the public health response to the hepatitis C virus (HCV), prisons are set to play a critical role in elimination efforts. Despite the theoretical demonstration of HCV treatment-as-prevention in prison in mathematical modeling, limited empirical data exist. The Australian 'Surveillance and Treatment of Prisoners with Hepatitis C' project (SToP-C) is the world's first trial of HCV treatment-as-prevention in prison. Drawing on interviews with HCV expert stakeholders, this paper explores the factors respondents identified as crucial to the success of future scale-up. Accounting for such perspectives matters because of the influence expert discourse has in shaping implementation. METHODS: Semi-structured interviews were conducted with nineteen HCV experts working across key policy, advocacy, research and clinical dimensions of the Australian HCV response. Data were coded using qualitative data management software (NVivo 11). Analysis proceeded via a hybrid deductive and inductive approach. RESULTS: Notwithstanding concerns regarding the lack of primary prevention in Australian prisons, stakeholders reported broad levels of support for the intervention and for the future scale-up of HCV treatment. A number of considerations, both external and internal to the prison system, were identified as key. The principal external factor was an enabling political-cum-policy environment; internal factors included: obtaining support from prisons' executive and custodial staff; promoting health within a security-first institutional culture; allocating time for treatment within prisoners' tightly regulated schedules; ensuring institutional stability during treatment given the routine movement of prisoners between prisons; prioritizing the availability of retreatment given the paucity of primary prevention; and securing sufficient clinical space for treatment. CONCLUSION: The challenges to implementation are considerable, ranging from macrolevel concerns to in-prison ...

ABSTRACT / INTRODUCTION The Research Data Alliance (RDA) [1], a community-driven initiative with the goal of building the social and technical infrastructure to enable open sharing and re-use of data, currently has over 11,000 members - including data scientists, librarians, researchers, funders, policy makers - from more than 140 countries [2]. RDA members come together through focused Working Groups and Interest Groups, formed by international experts from academia, the private sector and government, to collaborate on tackling global data challenges. To date, RDA Working and Interest Groups have produced about 50 Outputs, which have been adopted in over 100 settings [2]. RDA holds biannual Plenaries, highly interactive work meetings where members meet and network, advance the work of their groups, and propose or establish new groups. Due mainly (but not exclusively) to the COVID-19 pandemic, RDA Plenaries have moved from mainly physical meetings with some remote access to mainly virtual meetings with no, or very small, face-to-face components. This provides an opportunity, in particular for people for whom travel to Plenaries is difficult, to engage with RDA and participate in the RDA Plenaries, and in RDA more generally. In this poster, we will present an overview of the outcomes, activities, and opportunities for engaging with and benefitting from RDA, including RDA outputs, adoption stories, and current data challenges being tackled by RDA groups. We will also outline different pathways to engaging with RDA, and will also look forward to the RDA Plenary 17, to be held from 20-22 April 2021, and a series of regional events associated with the Plenary, which should be beneficial to the New Zealand eResearch community. ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S) Dr Stefanie Kethers is the Director of Operations of the Research Data Alliance and has been a member of the RDA Secretariat since before the RDA's launch in 2013. She has a strong interest in supporting cooperation and collaboration in the workplace, and has previously worked as a researcher on a variety of related projects, including investigating archival services for Koorie communities, researchers' data management practices and needs, and improving handover processes in hospitals Dr Andrew Treloar is the Director Platforms and Software for the Australian Research Data Commons. He was co-chair of the Research Data Alliance (http://rd-alliance.org/) Technical Advisory Board from 2013-2020. His twitter bio describes him as "Data-tragic, urban-greenie, homegardener, cycling-commuter, BodyPump-addict, lapsed-linguist", which probably isn't a bad summary. He never seems to be able to make enough time for practising his 'cello or reading, but does try to prioritise talking to his chickens and working in his vegetable garden and orchard. Further details at http://andrew.treloar.net/ or follow him on Twitter as @atreloar.

The Australian National Data Service (ANDS) has been funded by the Australian Government since 2009, with a goal to increase the value of data to researchers, research institutions and the nation. To achieve this goal, ANDS has funded more than 200 projects under seven programs. This paper provides an overview of one of these programs, the Applications Program, which focused on funding software infrastructure to enable data reuse to demonstrate the value of making data available to researchers. The paper also presents some representative projects, a summary of what the program has achieved, and lessons learned.

In Western countries, people who inject drugs experience a disproportionate burden of hepatitis C as a result of effective transmission of the virus via the sharing of used injection equipment. With a hepatitis C prevalence of 60% and higher in many areas, previous and current prevention efforts focusing on the availability of sterile injecting equipment along with education, have had only limited effect on incidence rate. Little attention has been paid to the broader social and political positions that drug use and people who use drugs hold in these societies. Insights from social research provide opportunities to broaden the possibilities for prevention efforts. We will review the social inclusion literature to provide some examples of how hepatitis C prevention may be approached in innovative ways.